Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Particulate Adenylate Cyclase Plays a Key Role in Human Sperm Olfactory Receptor-mediated Chemotaxis*

Human sperm chemotaxis is a critical component of the fertilization process, but the molecular basis for this behavior remains unclear. Recent evidence shows that chemotactic responses depend on activation of the sperm olfactory receptor, hOR17-4. Certain floral scents, including bourgeonal, activate hOR17-4, trigger pronounced Ca2+ fluxes, and evoke chemotaxis. Here, we provide evidence that hOR17-4 activation is coupled to a cAMP-mediated signaling cascade. Multidimensional protein identification technology was used to identify potential components of a G-protein-coupled cAMP transduction pathway in human sperm. These products included various membrane-associated adenylate cyclase (mAC) isoforms and the Golf-subunit. Using immunocytochemistry, specific mAC isoforms were localized to particular cell regions. Whereas mAC III occurred in the sperm head and midpiece, mAC VIII was distributed predominantly in the flagellum. In contrast, Golf was found mostly in the flagellum and midpiece. The observed spatial distribution patterns largely correspond to the spatiotemporal character of hOR17-4-induced Ca2+ changes. Behavioral and Ca2+ signaling responses of human sperm to bourgeonal were bioassayed in the presence, or absence, of the adenylate cyclase antagonist SQ22536. This specific agent inhibits particulate AC, but not soluble AC, activation. Upon incubation with SQ22536, cells ceased to exhibit Ca2+ signaling, chemotaxis, and hyperactivation (faster swim speed and flagellar beat rate) in response to bourgeonal. Particulate AC is therefore required for induction of hOR17-4-mediated human sperm behavior and represents a promising target for future design of contraceptive drugs.
Enhanced Chaotic Stream Cipher for WSNs

This paper presents a stream cipher named eLoBa - ''enhanced Lorenz Based'', for Wireless Sensor Networks. eLoBa presents considerable improvements to a recently proposed PRNG based on Chaos, that increases its performance and security namely against algebraic attacks. We describe the eLoBa architecture and evaluate its security and performance comparing eLoBa with AES in counter mode. We show that eLoBa requires less computing power being 40% faster then AES in counter mode. eLoBa also decreases the protocol overhead in the transport of IP packets in Wireless Sensor Networks.
Comparison of Two Rapid Strip Tests Based on IGFBP-1 and PAMG-1 for the Detection of Amniotic Fluid

Our objective was to compare two rapid strip tests for the detection of amniotic fluid, based on the detection of insulin-like growth factor-binding protein-1 (IGFBP-1) and of placental alpha-microglobulin-1 (PAMG-1). Samples of amniotic fluid were taken in 20 pregnant women between 31 3/7 and 41 2/7 gestational weeks at elective cesarean section before delivery of the newborn. These samples were diluted with 0.9% saline solution in a dilution series down to concentrations of 1:320. Immunoassay strip tests were then compared in their ability to detect remaining concentrations of amniotic fluid. In 5 cases, both test methods showed the same results. In all remaining 15 cases, the test based on PAMG-1 proved to be superior by detecting amniotic fluid at least at one descending concentration below the test based on IGFBP-1. Thus, the rapid strip test based on PAMG-1 seems to be a more sensitive bedside test compared with the test based on IGFBP-1 for the detection of amniotic fluid.
Direct observation of alumina nanowire formation from porous anodic alumina membrane via the droplet etching method

We report the first direct observation of the formation process of an alumina nanowire (ANW) array from a porous anodic alumina (PAA) membrane employing a simple droplet etching method, not a general immersion etching method, using field emission scanning electron spectroscopy (FESEM). The PAA membrane is prepared by the two-step anodization method and subsequent lift-off process. The surface view SEM images of the PAA membrane show an array of highly ordered hexagonal pore distribution within the domains of 1–2 µm size, which are separated from neighbouring domains with different orientations of the pore lattice by grain boundaries. The FESEM analysis of the formation process of the alumina nanowire reveals that the formation process consists of three critical steps. The first step involves an image revealing that the outer parts of pore walls are dissolved. The image can be described by the different etching rates of oxide layers in the PAA membrane. Differences in the etching rate can be explained in terms of the different anion impurity concentration in the oxide layer of the PAA membrane. The second step produces an image of the PAA membrane with triangular triple points, surrounded by three adjacent pores. This image can be interpreted as the combined effects of the thickness difference of pore walls and the thermal annealing of the PAA membrane. The last step shows images where the triangular cross section ANWs transform into circular cross section ones as further etching occurs. This can result from the crystallization of the triple points during the annealing process.
Effect of carbon black on electrical property of graphite nanoplatelets/epoxy resin composites

Epoxy/graphite nanoplatelets (GNPs)/carbon black (CB) composites were prepared by liquid mixing method. The morphologies and microstructures of the composites were examined by scanning electron microscope and X-ray diffraction. The results indicated that CB can improve effectively the dispersion of GNPs and form excellent conductive network in the matrix. When the weight ratio of GNPs to CB was 9:1 (total filler content was 1 wt%), the conductivity of the composite was three orders of magnitude higher than that of composites with GNPs alone (1 wt%). The percolation threshold of GNPs0.9CB0. 1/epoxy resin composites was 0.5 wt. %, which was lower than that of composites with GNPs alone (1 wt%). The mechanism for the effect of CB on electrical property of GNPs/epoxy resin composites was also investigated. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 2009. © 2009 Society of Plastics Engineers.
Radiative transfer problem in dusty galaxies: iteration scaling approximation

We investigate the applicability and accuracy of the iteration scaling approximation, proposed by Kylafis and Bahcall (1987). It is shown, that while this method provides results sufficiently close to the exact solution of radiative transfer problem, care must be taken in cases when the distribution of interstellar dust significantly differs from that of light sources. The problem is successfully circumvented by using the ratio of scattered light distributions obtained in the first two iterations.
The Impact of Functional Affordances and Symbolic Expressions on the Formation of Beliefs

Research on IS success and IT adoption has shown that object-based beliefs about IT systems have a profound impact on subsequent IT usage. However, we still lack knowledge on and need to identify antecedents and determinants of object-based beliefs in order to understand how the belief formation process works and how it can be influenced. Our research builds on and extends Markus and Silver’s (2008) concepts of functional affordance and symbolic expression to examine how IT-related factors influence the formation of beliefs. To test our research model, we surveyed 183 users of a student information system. The proposed model was supported, offering evidence that values, meaning, and functional affordances provided by an IT system positively affect information quality and system quality.
Investigating existing medical CT segmentation techniques within automated baggage and package inspection

3D Computed Tomography (CT) image segmentation is already well established tool in medical research and in routine daily clinical practice. However, such techniques have not been used in the context of 3D CT image segmentation for baggage and package security screening using CT imagery. CT systems are increasingly used in airports for security baggage examination. We propose in this contribution an investigation of the current 3D CT medical image segmentation methods for use in this new domain. Experimental results of 3D segmentation on real CT baggage security imagery using a range of techniques are presented and discussed.
Erk signaling and chromatin remodeling in MMTV promoter activation by progestins

Transcription from the mouse mammary tumor virus (MMTV) promoter can be induced by progestins. The progesterone receptor (PR) binds to a cluster of five hormone responsive elements (HREs) and activates the promoter by synergistic interactions with the ubiquitous transcription factor, nuclear factor 1 (NF1). Progesterone treatment of cells in culture leads to activation of the Src/Ras/Erk/Msk1 cascade. Selective inhibition of Erk, or its target kinase Msk1, interferes with chromatin remodeling and blocks MMTV activation. A complex of activated PR, Erk and Msk1 is recruited to promoter after 5 min of hormone treatment and phosphorylates histone H3 at serine 10. This modification promotes the displacement of HP1γ and subsequent chromatin remodeling. Progestin treatment leads to the recruitment of the BAF complex, which selectively displaces histones H2A and H2B from the nucleosome containing the HREs. The acetyltransferase PCAF is also required for induction of progesterone target genes and acetylates histone H3 at K14, an epigenetic mark, which interacts with Brg1 and Brm, anchoring the BAF complex to chromatin. In nucleosomes assembled on either MMTV or mouse rDNA promoter sequences, SWI/SNF displaces histones H2A and H2B from MMTV, but not from the rDNA nucleosome. Thus, the outcome of nucleosome remodeling by purified SWI/SNF depends on DNA sequence. The resultant H3/H4 tetramer particle is then the substrate for subsequent events in induction. Thus, initial activation of the MMTV promoter requires activation of several kinases and PCAF leading to phosphoacetylation of H3, and recruitment of BAF with subsequent removal of H2A/H2B.
A Simple and Fast Hypervolume Indicator-Based Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm

To find diversified solutions converging to true Pareto fronts (PFs), hypervolume (HV) indicator-based algorithms have been established as effective approaches in multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs). However, the bottleneck of HV indicator-based MOEAs is the high time complexity for measuring the exact HV contributions of different solutions. To cope with this problem, in this paper, a simple and fast hypervolume indicator-based MOEA (FV-MOEA) is proposed to quickly update the exact HV contributions of different solutions. The core idea of FV-MOEA is that the HV contribution of a solution is only associated with partial solutions rather than the whole solution set. Thus, the time cost of FV-MOEA can be greatly reduced by deleting irrelevant solutions. Experimental studies on 44 benchmark multiobjective optimization problems with 2-5 objectives in platform jMetal demonstrate that FV-MOEA not only reports higher hypervolumes than the five classical MOEAs (nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGAII), strength Pareto evolutionary algorithm 2 (SPEA2), multiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D), indicator-based evolutionary algorithm, and S-metric selection based evolutionary multiobjective optimization algorithm (SMS-EMOA)), but also obtains significant speedup compared to other HV indicator-based MOEAs.
Multimodal Dynamic Networks for Gesture Recognition

Multimodal input is a real-world situation in gesture recognition applications such as sign language recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel bi-modal (audio and skeleton joints) dynamic network for gesture recognition. First, state-of-the-art dynamic Deep Belief Networks are deployed to extract high level audio and skeletal joints representations. Then, instead of traditional late fusion, we adopt another layer of perceptron for cross modality learning taking the input from each individual net's penultimate layer. Finally, to account for temporal dynamics, the learned shared representations are used for estimating the emission probability to infer action sequences. In particular, we demonstrate that multimodal feature learning will extract semantically meaningful shared representations, outperforming individual modalities, and the early fusion scheme's efficacy against the traditional method of late fusion.
Characterization and Application of Xylene Monooxygenase for Multistep Biocatalysis

ABSTRACT Xylene monooxygenase of Pseudomonas putida mt-2 catalyzes multistep oxidations of one methyl group of toluene and xylenes. Recombinant Escherichia coli expressing the monooxygenase genes xylM and xylA catalyzes the oxygenation of toluene, pseudocumene, the corresponding alcohols, and the corresponding aldehydes, all by a monooxygenation type of reaction (B. Bühler, A. Schmid, B. Hauer, and B. Witholt, J. Biol. Chem. 275:10085-10092, 2000). Using E. coli expressing xylMA, we investigated the kinetics of this one-enzyme three-step biotransformation. We found that unoxidized substrates like toluene and pseudocumene inhibit the second and third oxygenation steps and that the corresponding alcohols inhibit the third oxygenation step. These inhibitions might promote the energetically more favorable alcohol and aldehyde dehydrogenations in the wild type. Growth of E. coli was strongly affected by low concentrations of pseudocumene and its products. Toxicity and solubility problems were overcome by the use of a two-liquid-phase system with bis(2-ethylhexyl)phthalate as the carrier solvent, allowing high overall substrate and product concentrations. In a fed-batch-based two-liquid-phase process with pseudocumene as the substrate, we observed the consecutive accumulation of aldehyde, acid, and alcohol. Our results indicate that, depending on the reaction conditions, product formation could be directed to one specific product.
Butorphanol and pentazocine in patients with severe postoperative pain

Either butorphanol tartrate (1, 2, or 4 mg) or pentazocine (30 or 60 mg) was given intramuscularly (5 dose groups) to 262 patients, who were scheduled for major operations, if they had severe pain after full awakening in the recovery room, postoperatively under double‐blind conditions. There were at least 50 patients in each of the five dosage groups. Pain intensity and relief were scored numerically for each treated patient at ½, 1, 2, 3, and 4 hr, while under direct surveillance, and the patients were seen again for follow‐ups during the first 24 hr postoperatively. Appreciable pain relief developed within 30 min at all dose levels, with a peak analgesic effect apparent at about 1 hr. Satisfactory relief persisted for 4 hr in the majority of patients in each group. With the lowest dose of butorphanol tartrate (1 mg), which gave good pain relief for only 2 to 4 hr, approximately 60% of the patients had to be remedicated within 4 hr. Vital signs were not appreciably affected, but the patients who received the high dose of analgesics (butorphanol tartrate 4 mg or pentazocine lactate 60 mg) were often quite drowsy. The incidence of other side effects was negligible. The relative potency assay showed that butorphanol was approximately 20 times as potent as pentazocine for up to 4 hr.
Fully integrable current-mode feedback suppressor as an analog countermeasure against CPA attacks in 40nm CMOS technology

Security of sensible data for ultraconstrained IoT smart devices is one of the most challenging task in modern design. The needs of CPA-resistant cryptographic devices has to deal with the demanding requirements of small area and small impact on the overall power consumption. In this work, a novel current-mode feedback suppressor as on-chip analog-level CPA countermeasure is proposed. It aims to suppress differences in power consumption due to data-dependency of CMOS cryptographic devices, in order to counteract CPA attacks. The novel countermeasure is able to improve MTD of unprotected CMOS implementation of at least three orders of magnitude, providing a ×1.1 area and ×1.7 power overhead.
Preliminary Empirical Identification of Barriers Faced by Newcomers to Open Source Software Projects

When newcomers try to join an open source software (OSS) project, they face many barriers that hinder their first contribution, leading in many cases to their dropping out. Many projects leverage the contribution of outsiders, and the sustainability of the project relies on retaining some of these newcomers. This research aims to identify the barriers that hinder newcomers' onboarding to OSS projects. Our method consisted of a qualitative study conducted with data obtained from four different sources: (i) systematic literature review; (ii) feedback from nine graduate and undergraduate students after they tried to join OSS projects; (iii) 24 responses to a questionnaire sent to 9 OSS projects; and (iv) semi-structured interviews with 36 subjects from 14 different projects, including newcomers and experienced members. The method to select the candidate papers in the systematic literature review was querying four digital libraries and backward snowballing. The data obtained from the practitioners from all three sources, and the primary studies obtained in the systematic review were analyzed using used procedures of Grounded Theory's open and axial coding. The analysis resulted in a conceptual model composed of 58 barriers, grouped into six different categories: cultural differences, newcomers' characteristics, reception issues, orientation, technical hurdles, and documentation problems. We could observe recurrent barriers evidenced in different data sources. We could notice that the onboarding process of a newcomer to an OSS can be a tough task. This research brings empirical support relying on data from different sources, organizes and discusses the existing common wisdom about barriers faced by newcomers to OSS projects, which deserve attention from researchers and OSS communities.
On Pairwise Spanners

Given an undirected n-node unweighted graph G = (V, E), a spanner with stretch function f(.) is a subgraph H \subseteq G such that, if two nodes are at distance d in G, then they are at distance at most f(d) in H. Spanners are very well studied in the literature. The typical goal is to construct the sparsest possible spanner for a given stretch function. In this paper we study pairwise spanners, where we require to approximate the u-v distance only for pairs (u,v) in a given set P \subseteq V x V. Such P-spanners were studied before [Coppersmith,Elkin'05] only in the special case that f(.) is the identity function, i.e. distances between relevant pairs must be preserved exactly (a.k.a. pairwise preservers). Here we present pairwise spanners which are at the same time sparser than the best known preservers (on the same P) and of the best known spanners (with the same f(.)). In more detail, for arbitrary P, we show that there exists a P-spanner of size O(n(|P|log n)^{1/4}) with f(d) = d + 4 log n. Alternatively, for any epsislon > 0, there exists a P-spanner of size O(n|P|^{1/4} sqrt{(log n) / epsilon}) with f(d) = (1 + epsilon)d + 4. We also consider the relevant special case that there is a critical set of nodes S \subseteq V, and we wish to approximate either the distances within nodes in S or from nodes in S to any other node. We show that there exists an (S x S)-spanner of size O(n sqrt{|S|}) with f(d) = d + 2, and an (S x V)-spanner of size O(n sqrt{|S| log n}) with f(d) = d + 2 log n. All the mentioned pairwise spanners can be constructed in polynomial time.
Asynchronous Periodic Patterns Mining in Temporal Databases

Mining periodic patterns in temporal database is an important data mining problem with many applications. Previous studies have considered synchronous periodic patterns where misaligned occurrences are not allowed. However, asynchronous periodic pattern mining has received less attention and was only been discussed for a sequence of symbols where each time point contains one event. In this paper, we propose a more general model of asynchronous periodic patterns from a sequence of symbol sets where a time slot can contain multiple events. Three parameters min rep, max dis, and global rep are employed to specify the minimum number of repetitions required for a valid segment of non-disrupted pattern occurrences, the maximum allowed disturbance between two successive valid segments, and the total repetitions required for a valid sequence. A four-phase algorithm is devised to discover periodic patterns from a temporal database presented in vertical format. The experiments demonstrate good performance and scalability with large frequent patterns.
Designing Various Multivariate Analysis at Will via Generalized Pairwise Expression

It is well known that dimensionality reduction based on multivariate analysis methods and their kernelized extensions can be formulated as generalized eigenvalue problems of scatter matrices, Gram matrices or their aug- mented matrices. This paper provides a generic and theoretical framework of multivariate analysis introducing a new expression for scatter matrices and Gram matrices, called Generalized Pairwise Expression (GPE). This expression is quite compact but highly powerful. The framework includes not only (1) the traditional multivariate analysis methods but also (2) several regularization techniques, (3) localization techniques, (4) clustering methods based on generalized eigenvalue problems, and (5) their semi-supervised extensions. This paper also presents a methodology for designing a desired multivariate analysis method from the proposed framework. The methodology is quite simple: adopting the above mentioned special cases as templates, and generating a new method by combining these templates appropriately. Through this methodology, we can freely design various tailor-made methods for specific purposes or domains.
Design, Control, and Experimentation of Internally‐Actuated Rovers for the Exploration of Low‐gravity Planetary Bodies

This paper discusses the design, control, and experimentation of internally‐actuated rovers for the exploration of low‐gravity (micro‐g to milli‐g) planetary bodies, such as asteroids, comets, or small moons. The rover is actuated by spinning three internal flywheels, which allows all subsystems to be packaged in one sealed enclosure and enables the platform to be minimalistic, thereby reducing its cost. By controlling the spin rate of the flywheels, the rover can achieve large surface coverage by attitude‐controlled hops, fine mobility by tumbling, and coarse instrument pointing by changing the orientation relative to the ground. We first discuss the dynamics of such rovers, their control, and key design features (e.g., flywheel shape and orientation, geometry of external spikes, and system engineering aspects). We then discuss the design and control of a first‐of‐a‐kind test bed that enables the accurate emulation of a microgravity environment for mobility experiments, which consists of a three‐degree‐of‐freedom gimbal attached to an actively controlled gantry crane. Finally, we present experimental results on the test bed that provide key insights for rover control and validate our theoretical analysis.