Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bone Loss Induced by Simulated Microgravity, Ionizing Radiation and/or Ultradian Rhythms in the Hindlimbs of Rats.

OBJECTIVE To better understand the pathological causes of bone loss in a space environment, including microgravity, ionizing radiation, and ultradian rhythms. METHODS Sprague Dawley (SD) rats were randomly divided into a baseline group, a control group, a hindlimb suspension group, a radiation group, a ultradian rhythms group and a combined-three-factor group. After four weeks of hindlimb suspension followed by X-ray exposure and/or ultradian rhythms, biomechanical properties, bone mineral density, histological analysis, microstructure parameters, and bone turnover markers were detected to evaluate bone loss in hindlimbs of rats. RESULTS Simulated microgravity or combined-three factors treatment led to a significant decrease in the biomechanical properties of bones, reduction in bone mineral density, and deterioration of trabecular parameters. Ionizing radiation exposure also showed adverse impact while ultradian rhythms had no significant effect on these outcomes. Decrease in the concentration of the turnover markers bone alkaline phosphatase (bALP), osteocalcin (OCN), and tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase-5b (TRAP-5b) in serum was in line with the changes in trabecular parameters. CONCLUSION Simulated microgravity is the main contributor of bone loss. Radiation also results in deleterious effects but ultradian rhythms has no significant effect. Combined-three factors treatment do not exacerbate bone loss when compared to simulated microgravity treatment alone.
Overexpression of xeroderma pigmentosum group C decreases the chemotherapeutic sensitivity of colorectal carcinoma cells to cisplatin

Xeroderma pigmentosum group C (XPC) is a DNA-damage-recognition gene active at the early stage of DNA repair. XPC also participates in regulation of cell-cycle checkpoint and DNA-damage-induced apoptosis. In the present study, the expression levels of genes involved in nucleotide excision repair (NER) were assessed in human colorectal cancer (CRC) tissue. This analysis revealed that expression of XPC mRNA significantly increased in colorectal carcinoma tissues compared with matched normal controls. Expression of XPC gradually increased along with the degree of progression of CRC. In vitro, an XTT assay demonstrated that small interfering RNA (siRNA) targeting XPC significantly increased the sensitivity of CRC SW480 cells to cisplatin, whereas cells transfected with a XPC-overexpression plasmid became more resistant to cisplatin. Furthermore, flow cytometry revealed that the proportion of apoptotic cells significantly increased in XPC-knockdown cells upon cisplatin treatment. However, the overexpression XPC significantly increased the resistance of cells to cisplatin. In vivo, tumor growth was significantly reduced in tumor-bearing mice when the XPC gene was knocked down. Upregulation of the expression of pro-apoptotic Bcl-associated X and downregulation of the anti-apoptotic B-cell lymphoma 2 proteins was observed in the implanted tumor tissue. In conclusion, XPC serves a key role in chemotherapeutic sensitivity of CRC to cisplatin, meaning that it may be a potential target for chemotherapy of CRC.
Scratch Based Technique Quantifies Adhesion Strength at Micro and Nanoscales

Nano-scratch testing can be tailored to quantify the adhesion strength of small-scale surface formations, deposits, and structures on a wide range of materials. This article describes the basic measurement technique and presents examples showing how it has been used to evaluate the bonding characteristics of plasma-sprayed Al2O3 splats on steel, osteoblast cells on hydroxyapatite-based coatings, and carbon nanotubes on copper and silicon substrates.
Significance of detectable HCV RNA below the limit of quantification in patients treated with DAAs using standard and ultrasensitive protocols

Predictive factors of HCV relapse after treatment with DAAs are poorly understood. In this study, we aimed to assess whether the residual viral load positivity observed during or at the end of treatment (EOT) has an impact on viral outcome. Blood samples were collected from 337 patients with genotypes (GT) 1a, 1b, 2, 3, and 4 HCV chronic infection, treated with DAAs to determine HCV RNA load by the Abbott RealTime HCV (ART) assay at treatment week (W) 4, at EOT, and 4, 12, 24 weeks after discontinuation. EOT and other samples with “detected <12/mL” (DNQ) were retested by an ultrasensitive protocol (USP) to confirm the result. Frequency of DNQ was analyzed in subgroups of patients and clinical conditions to assess potential correlations. At W4, 22% and 30.9% of the samples were undetectable and DNQ by ART assay, respectively, but no correlation for achieving SVR was found. In contrast, an HCV RNA cut‐off of ≥50/mL at W4 was a significant predictor of therapy failure (P = 0.036, univariate analysis). At EOT, DNQ was associated to 12W treatment duration (P < 0.001) and GT1a infection (P = 0.036). Overall, 20/41 (48.8%) of DNQ samples at EOT or post‐treatment W4, were confirmed by USP but only in a single case the patient experienced viral relapse. HCV RNA at W4 can predict SVR, irrespective to genotype or DAA regimen. HCV RNA DNQ at EOT is associated to shorter treatment duration and to GT1a, but is not a predictor of therapy failure.
Natural Products Research in China From 2015 to 2016

This review covers the literature published by chemists from China during the 2015–2016 on natural products (NPs), with 1,985 citations referring to 6,944 new compounds isolated from marine or terrestrial microorganisms, plants, and animals. The emphasis is on 730 new compounds with a novel skeleton or/and significant bioactivity, together with their source organism and country of origin.
Thermal Imaging Device using Infrared-to-Visible Converter Made of Temperature Sensitive Phosphor

An infrared thermal imaging device using infrared-to-visible convertor made of Eu(TTA)3 was developed and evaluated. A polymer based structure enabled high thermal isolation with simple structure, which enabled detection of low temperature object such as human. In addition, noise reduction digital methods using averaging filter and Kalman filter were proposed and evaluated. Both digital filters increased signal-to-noise ratio from 8.1 to 18 and 21, respectively, which means both filters had similar noise reduction effect. However, the Kalman filter had faster response compared with the averaging filter, therefore it is suitable for the noise reduction method of the thermal imaging device.
An Information-Theoretic Approach to Time-Series Data Privacy

Access control is central to interfacing with personal data, however most systems today are too coarse and disconnected from the privacy context of the data. Granular access control rarely goes beyond limiting sample rates or enforcing time limits. In this paper, we present a system for tuning a data consumer's access to personal data based on real-time privacy metrics. We first explore the potential definitions of privacy in this context with a focus on information theoretic metrics for defining privacy in sensitive time series data. We then implement and evaluate our system for embedding risk thresholds into bearer token-based access control systems to attenuate access to data of different granularities based on these metrics. Our results show that our system provides privacy gains wihout a significant utility cost, and can run efficiently and scale well on cheap hardware with high-frequncy sensor data.
Tests and analysis on hysteretic behavior of buckling-restrained steel plate shear wall

A new type of lateral force resisting system,the buckling-restrained steel plate shear wall(BR-SPW),proposed by the authors was tested and analyzed in detail.Cyclic tests of seven single story steel shear walls of different configurations,namely the SPSW,composite steel plate shear wall(C-SPW),BR-SPW both type Ⅰand typeⅡ were carried out to determine their shear capacity,ductility,and hysteretic behaviors.Test results demonstrated that the BR-SPW can not only eliminate the buckling sound and large out-of-plane displacement of SPSW,but also protect the RC cover plates from being damaged under the cyclic loading.Comparison and evaluation were made among the four different steel shear walls,and some useful conclusions were presented.
Experimental study on hardening a motorcoach against tire fire penetration

Three full‐scale fire experiments were conducted to assess methods of hardening the motorcoach against penetration of a tire fire. The first method was to replace the combustible fender and exterior side panel above the wheels with stainless steel sheet metal. The second method was to coat the plastic fender and side panel with an intumescent layer. The third method was to install a sheet steel fire plume deflector between the fender and side panel. A special burner was used that imitates the frictional heating of hub and wheel metal caused by failed axle bearings, locked brakes, or dragged blown tires. For each experiment, heating to obtain tire ignition was initiated on the exterior of the passenger side tag axle wheel. Measurements of interior and exterior temperatures, interior heat flux, and heat release rate were performed. Standard and infrared videos and still photographs were recorded. The experimental results were compared with those obtained with no fire hardening. The metal replacement method performed best and prevented fire penetration for over 30 min longer than the nonhardened cases. The intumescent coating extended fire penetration by about 20 min longer than the nonhardened cases. The steel plume deflector had no significant impact on the timing for fire penetration of the windows. Published 2015. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.
Leader-Follower Formation Control for Quadrotors

Quadrotors are gaining an increasing interest in public and extensively explored in recent years. In many situations, a team of quadrotors is desired to operate in a certain shape, which is also called formation. In this paper, a linear PID controller is used to control each single quadrotor and a slide mode controller is adopted to solve the formation flying problem which employs the leader-follower structure. The formation simulations are run in the Matlab/Simulink environment to evaluate the performance of control laws.
A Heterogeneous Parallel Cholesky Block Factorization Algorithm

As an essential part of current mainstream computing systems, GPUs are not only powerful graphics engines but also highly parallel programmable processors. Collaboration between CPUs and GPUs is required to obtain high computing performance in multi-CPU and multi-GPU heterogeneous systems. It is challenging to develop new parallel algorithms on heterogeneous architectures with multiple CPUs and multiple GPUs for such purposes as communication, load balancing, memory spaces, and synchronization We present a parallel Cholesky block factorization algorithm for heterogeneous multi-CPU and multi-GPU architectures. First, a matrix is partitioned into different-sized blocks based on with the performance of the CPU and GPU. Then, a one-dimensional row block-cyclic distribution strategy is used to allocate row block data to every CPU and GPU to minimize communication. The computing task related to the definite row block will then be executed by the corresponding CPU or GPU. Experiments on a system with two CPUs and eight GPUs show good load balancing, parallelism, communication cost, and scalability.
Iterative Learning with Open-set Noisy Labels

Large-scale datasets possessing clean label annotations are crucial for training Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, labeling large-scale data can be very costly and error-prone, and even high-quality datasets are likely to contain noisy (incorrect) labels. Existing works usually employ a closed-set assumption, whereby the samples associated with noisy labels possess a true class contained within the set of known classes in the training data. However, such an assumption is too restrictive for many applications, since samples associated with noisy labels might in fact possess a true class that is not present in the training data. We refer to this more complex scenario as the open-set noisy label problem and show that it is nontrivial in order to make accurate predictions. To address this problem, we propose a novel iterative learning framework for training CNNs on datasets with open-set noisy labels. Our approach detects noisy labels and learns deep discriminative features in an iterative fashion. To benefit from the noisy label detection, we design a Siamese network to encourage clean labels and noisy labels to be dissimilar. A reweighting module is also applied to simultaneously emphasize the learning from clean labels and reduce the effect caused by noisy labels. Experiments on CIFAR-10, ImageNet and real-world noisy (web-search) datasets demonstrate that our proposed model can robustly train CNNs in the presence of a high proportion of open-set as well as closed-set noisy labels.
Performance Improvement of a Boost LED Driver With High Voltage Gain for Edge-Lit LED Backlights

This brief proposes a new method for improving the performance of a dc/dc boost converter used as a light-emitting diode (LED) driver for edge-lit LED backlights. The proposed method uses a passive snubber circuit that consists of two capacitors, two diodes, and an inductor; it improves the power efficiency of the dc/dc boost converter at the high duty ratio of the main switch by providing zero-current switching turn on and charge pumping operations. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, a new boost LED driver with the proposed passive snubber was built and tested at the various output power levels dissipated by LED backlights. The power conversion efficiency of a boost LED driver with an input voltage of 24 V and an output voltage of 114 V was measured as 94.80%, 94.15%, and 92.82% for output power of 40, 70, and 100 W, respectively; these values are 6.08%, 4.47%, and 3.67% higher than conventional values.
FSRNet: End-to-End Learning Face Super-Resolution with Facial Priors

Face Super-Resolution (SR) is a domain-specific superresolution problem. The facial prior knowledge can be leveraged to better super-resolve face images. We present a novel deep end-to-end trainable Face Super-Resolution Network (FSRNet), which makes use of the geometry prior, i.e., facial landmark heatmaps and parsing maps, to super-resolve very low-resolution (LR) face images without well-aligned requirement. Specifically, we first construct a coarse SR network to recover a coarse high-resolution (HR) image. Then, the coarse HR image is sent to two branches: a fine SR encoder and a prior information estimation network, which extracts the image features, and estimates landmark heatmaps/parsing maps respectively. Both image features and prior information are sent to a fine SR decoder to recover the HR image. To generate realistic faces, we also propose the Face Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (FSRGAN) to incorporate the adversarial loss into FSRNet. Further, we introduce two related tasks, face alignment and parsing, as the new evaluation metrics for face SR, which address the inconsistency of classic metrics w.r. t. visual perception. Extensive experiments show that FSRNet and FSRGAN significantly outperforms state of the arts for very LR face SR, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Signal peptide of HIV envelope protein impacts glycosylation and antigenicity of gp120

Significance Significant heterogeneity exists in the structure and antigenicity of HIV-1 envelope protein (Env) gp120 due, in part, to various posttranslational modifications. Using glycan and antigenic analysis, we show that the signal peptide (SP) of HIV Env can impact the glycan profile of gp120, which in turn impacts antigenicity of the mature protein. Thus, although the SP is not present in the mature gp120 protein, it is likely subject to immune pressure. Moreover, to the extent that glycan content impacts transmission fitness, variation in the SP may influence transmission. These observations potentially help us better understand both the early events in HIV transmission as well as the mechanisms whereby HIV evades humoral immune responses, providing additional information for HIV vaccine design. The HIV-1 envelope protein (Env) of early-replicating viruses encodes several distinct transmission signatures. One such signature involves a reduced number of potential N-linked glycosylation sites (PNGs). This transmission signature underscores the importance of posttranslational modifications in the fitness of early-replicating isolates. An additional signature in Env involves the overrepresentation of basic amino acid residues at a specific position in the Env signal peptide (SP). In this report, we investigated the potential impact of this SP signature on gp120 glycosylation and antigenicity. Two recombinant gp120s were constructed, one derived from an isolate that lacks this signature and a second from an early-replicating isolate that includes this signature. Chimeric gp120s were also constructed in which the two SPs were swapped between the isolates. All four gp120s were probed with glycan-, structure- and receptor- specific probes in a surface plasmon resonance binding assay. We found that the SP of Env influences qualitative aspects of Env glycosylation that in turn affect the antigenicity of Env in a major way. The SP impacts the affinity of Env for DC-SIGN, a lectin receptor expressed on dendritic cells that is believed to play a role in mucosal transmission. Additionally, affinity for the monoclonal antibodies 17b and A32, which recognize a CD4-induced, open conformation of Env is also altered. These results demonstrate that natural variation in the SP of HIV Env can significantly impact the antigenicity of mature gp120. Thus, the SP is likely subject to antibody-mediated immune pressure.
Polymer ferroelectret based on polypropylene foam: Piezoelectric properties improvement using post‐processing thermomechanical treatment

In this work, the effect of post-processing parameters (time, temperature, and pressure) on the morphology as well as mechanical and piezoelectric properties of foamed polypropylene (PP) films were studied. Two different post-processing methods, based on the saturation of a foamed film with supercritical nitrogen (N2), were used to obtain an optimized eye-like cellular structure with a high cell aspect ratio (AR). The results showed that, when the PP-foamed films were exposed to a gradual temperature and pressure increase, an appropriate cellular structure with high AR value (about 6.6) was obtained. This structure led to a high quasi-static piezoelectric d33 coefficient of 800 pC/N (45% higher than for untreated ones) indicating the importance of the post-processing treatment on the piezoelectric behavior of these films. On the other hand, when the treatment was performed in steps, cell morphology changed from an eye-like to a less elongated shape, resulting in lower d33 values. The tensile characterization showed that higher cell aspect ratio led to lower Young's modulus, which is suitable to achieve higher piezoelectric properties. Finally, dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) was used as a simple method to correlate mechanical and piezoelectric properties of cellular PP. This was done via the ratio of the storage moduli in the longitudinal and transverse directions, which is directly related to film anisotropy (AR value) and thus to the piezoelectric behavior. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2016, 133, 44577.
BFRP Bars as an Alternative Reinforcement of Concrete Structures - Compatibility and Adhesion Issues

One of the most common causes of damage to concrete structures is the corrosion of the reinforcement. Reinforcement made from Fiber Reinforced Polymers (FRP) is considered as an attractive substitution of traditional steel reinforcement. A different technical characteristic of fiber reinforced polymer makes designing structures with FRP reinforcement differs from conventional reinforced concrete design. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the differences and limitations of their use in the concrete structures, taking into account their material and geometrical features. Basalt Fiber Reinforced Polymer (BFRP) is a relatively new material for reinforcing bars. On the basis of the ACI 440.1R-06 guidelines as well as experimental results for selected BFRP reinforced beams a model of compatibility in a system: BFRP bar - concrete was proposed. Additionally, based on the results of FEM simulations, the effect of BFRP bars ribbing on their adhesion to concrete was discussed.
4D VMAT planning and verification technique for dynamic tracking using a direct aperture deformation (DAD) method

&NA; We developed a four‐dimensional volumetric modulated arc therapy (4D VMAT) planning technique for moving targets using a direct aperture deformation (DAD) method and investigated its feasibility for clinical use. A 3D VMAT plan was generated on a reference phase of a 4D CT dataset. The plan was composed of a set of control points including the beam angle, MLC apertures and weights. To generate the 4D VMAT plan, these control points were assigned to the closest respiratory phases using the temporal information of the gantry angle and respiratory curve. Then, a DAD algorithm was used to deform the beam apertures at each control point to the corresponding phase to compensate for the tumor motion and shape changes. Plans for a phantom and five lung cases were included in this study to evaluate the proposed technique. Dosimetric comparisons were performed between 4D and 3D VMAT plans. Plan verification was implemented by delivering the 4D VMAT plans on a moving QUASAR™ phantom driven with patient‐specific respiratory curves. The phantom study showed that the 4D VMAT plan generated with the DAD method was comparable to the ideal 3D VMAT plan. DVH comparisons indicated that the planning target volume (PTV) coverages and minimum doses were nearly invariant, and no significant difference in lung dosimetry was observed. Patient studies revealed that the GTV coverage was nearly the same; although the PTV coverage dropped from 98.8% to 94.7%, and the mean dose decreased from 64.3 to 63.8 Gy on average. For the verification measurements, the average gamma index pass rate was 98.6% and 96.5% for phantom 3D and 4D VMAT plans with 3%/3 mm criteria. For patient plans, the average gamma pass rate was 96.5% (range 94.5–98.5%) and 95.2% (range 94.1–96.1%) for 3D and 4D VMAT plans. The proposed 4D VMAT planning technique using the DAD method is feasible to incorporate the intra‐fraction organ motion and shape change into a 4D VMAT planning. It has great potential to provide high plan quality and delivery efficiency for moving targets.