Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Trm9-Catalyzed tRNA Modifications Regulate Global Protein Expression by Codon-Biased Translation

Post-transcriptional modifications of transfer RNAs (tRNAs) have long been recognized to play crucial roles in regulating the rate and fidelity of translation. However, the extent to which they determine global protein production remains poorly understood. Here we use quantitative proteomics to show a direct link between wobble uridine 5-methoxycarbonylmethyl (mcm5) and 5-methoxy-carbonyl-methyl-2-thio (mcm5s2) modifications catalyzed by tRNA methyltransferase 9 (Trm9) in tRNAArg(UCU) and tRNAGlu(UUC) and selective translation of proteins from genes enriched with their cognate codons. Controlling for bias in protein expression and alternations in mRNA expression, we find that loss of Trm9 selectively impairs expression of proteins from genes enriched with AGA and GAA codons under both normal and stress conditions. Moreover, we show that AGA and GAA codons occur with high frequency in clusters along the transcripts, which may play a role in modulating translation. Consistent with these results, proteins subject to enhanced ribosome pausing in yeast lacking mcm5U and mcm5s2U are more likely to be down-regulated and contain a larger number of AGA/GAA clusters. Together, these results suggest that Trm9-catalyzed tRNA modifications play a significant role in regulating protein expression within the cell.
Comparative trial of a short workshop designed to enhance appropriate use of screening tests by family physicians.

BACKGROUND Educational interventions that support the implementation of complex clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) require substantial time commitments from participants. We conducted a comparative study to evaluate if a 90-minute workshop would increase compliance with the recommendations of the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care as well as decrease the ordering of tests not the subject of specific recommendations. METHODS Eighty-seven family physicians from Quebec participated in the study. Group assignment was initially randomized, but, owing to logistic problems, randomization was not maintained. After unannounced visits, 2 standardized patients coded the physicians' performance of 23 items recommended for inclusion in the periodic health examination (10 for men and 13 for women) and 8 items recommended for exclusion (4 for both men and women). The "exposed" physicians were visited within 4 to 6 months after the workshop. The "nonexposed" physicians were visited within 4 to 6 months after consent was obtained but before they attended the workshop. We used linear regression analysis to determine if exposure to the workshop resulted in improved performance. RESULTS Exposure to the workshop was not associated with a difference in the adjusted mean score for items recommended for inclusion (12.07 for exposed physicians v. 12.35 for those not exposed; maximal and ideal score 23; r = -0.28; 95% confidence interval [CI] = -1.63 to 1.08). However, workshop exposure was associated with lower adjusted mean scores for items recommended for exclusion (1.55 v. 3.17; maximal score 8, ideal score 0; r = -1.63; 95% CI = -2.50 to -0.75) and for other tests (3.59 v. 6.53; r = -2.95; 95% CI = -5.10 to -0.79). INTERPRETATION A short workshop can decrease the ordering of unnecessary screening tests by family physicians. Given its low cost and its potential for general application, such an intervention can support the implementation of prevention CPGs.
Reaching new heights: comparing interpretation bias modification to exposure therapy for extreme height fear.

OBJECTIVE Cognitive models of anxiety disorders posit that biases in interpretation maintain, and potentially cause, anxiety. This study tested whether it is possible to decrease height fear symptoms through cognitive bias modification for interpretations (CBM-I). Additionally, the clinical utility of CBM-I was tested by comparing it to an already established treatment: exposure therapy. METHOD Extremely height fearful individuals (N = 110) participated in the study. Acrophobic symptoms were measured before and after 2 sessions of CBM-I and were compared to the standard treatment for acrophobia (exposure therapy), a combination of CBM-I and exposure therapy, and a Control condition. RESULTS In line with hypotheses, participants in the 3 active conditions showed greater response to treatment than the Control condition in height-relevant interpretation bias, symptoms, and behavioral avoidance on a height stressor, with few differences between the active conditions. Further, symptom change was mediated by change in interpretation bias. CONCLUSIONS Overall, findings suggest that different pathways to fear reduction (exposure vs. shifting interpretations) can lead to similar reductions in height fear. This study provides the first evidence that directly shifting cognitive processing, even with no therapist involvement, can reduce symptoms as effectively as the gold standard, therapist-directed exposure therapy.
State of the Practice for Sustainability as an Explicit Objective

Survey: Incorporating Sustainability while Taking Software Product Management Decisions This survey evaluates a list of value aspects that should be taken into consideration for incorporating sustainability while taking software product management decisions. In the given context, these `management decisions' are all decisions that relate to whether a requirement will or will not be considered during product development. It is an approach to using a catalogue of value aspects for product management decisions for the purpose of supporting different aspects of sustainability during software system development. We would like you to rate the importance of the following value aspects and provide us with an example from your personal experience wherever possible. To complete the survey including examples will take you about 10 minutes your effort is very much appreciated. In case you would like to be informed about the survey's results, we will provide you with the opportunity to leave your email address on the last page of the survey. For any other issues, please contact Mahvish Khurum at Mahvish.Khurum@bth.se
Continuous Intravenous Insulin Infusion Reduces Incidence of Deep Sternal Wound Infection In Diabetic Cardiac Surgery Patients

Background: Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a risk factor for deep sternal wound infection (DSWI) following open heart surgery. We have previously shown that elevated postoperative blood glucose is a predictor of DSWI in diabetics. Therefore, we hypothesized that aggressive intravenous pharmacologic control of post operative blood glucose would reduce the incidence of deep sternal wound infection. Methods: In a prospective study of 2,467 consecutive diabetic patients who underwent open heart surgery between 1987 and 1997, perioperative blood glucose levels were recorded every 1-2 hours. Patients were divided into two sequential groups: the control group consisted of 968 patients treated with sliding scale guided intermittent subcutaneous insulin injections (SQI); the study group consisted of 1,499 patients treated with a continuous intravenous insulin infusion (CII) in an attempt to maintain blood glucose levels <200 mg/dl. There were no differences between these groups with respect to age, sex, procedure, bypass time, antibiotic prophylaxis, or skin preparation methods. Results: As compared to SQI control, CII induced significant reductions in perioperative blood glucose levels which led to a significant reduction in the incidence of DSWI in the CII group (0.8%) vs. SQI (2.0%) (12/1499 vs. 19/968, chi-square p = 0.01). Multivariable logistic regression revealed that CII induced a significant decrease in the risk of DSWI (p=0.005, relative risk =0.34) while obesity (p<0.03, relative
Dental Mercury — A Public Health Hazard

The aim of this review is to point out the health hazards of the uncontrolled global use of implanted mercury-leaking dental amalgam fillings. In spite of the pandemic use of amalgam, most dentists and doctors are still ignorant about the levels of mercury exposure and its health implications. This review discusses the following chronically neglected aspects in clinical practice: The use of materials science in calculating the mercury exposure levels, which may exceed the TLVs by an order of magnitude; Microbial dissolution and methylation of mercury from amalgam by oral and intestinal bacteria; Diagnostic problems and effects of chronic mercury exposure with emphasis on intestinal, cardiovascular, mental and neurologic symptoms and disorders; Diagnostic value of faeces--instead of urine examination--as the main indicator of Hg exposure; Lack of control groups unexposed to Hg (amalgam free) for epidemiologic investigations of health problems; Contribution of dental mercury to environmental pollution. In conclusion, a lack of interdisciplinary research and of a critical approach to established clinical routine appears to be the reason for the failure of the dental profession to protect the patient from Hg exposure when saving the tooth.
Spiritually and Religiously Integrated Group Psychotherapy: A Systematic Literature Review

We systematically reviewed the research literature on spiritually and religiously integrated group psychotherapy to answer the following three questions: first, how are spirituality and religiosity defined; second, how are spiritual and religious factors characterized and integrated into group psychotherapy; and, third, what is the outcome of the group psychotherapies? We searched in two databases: PsycINFO and PubMed. Inclusion and exclusion criteria and checklists from standardized assessment tools were applied to the research literature. Qualitative and quantitative papers were included. In total, 8 articles were considered eligible for the review. Findings from the evaluation suggested that the concepts of spirituality and religiosity were poorly conceptualized and the way in which spiritual and religious factors were integrated into such group psychotherapies, which distinguished it from other types of group psychotherapies, was not fully conceptualized or understood either. However, clear and delimited conceptualization of spiritual and religious factors is crucial in order to be able to conclude the direct influences of spiritual or religious factors on outcomes. Implications for spiritually or religiously integrated group psychotherapy and conducting research in this field are propounded.
Leakage-Aware Energy-Efficient Scheduling of Real-Time Tasks in Multiprocessor Systems

This work targets energy-efficient scheduling of periodic real-time tasks over multiple DVS processors with the considerations of power consumption due to leakage current. A polynomial-time algorithm with a 1.283 approximation bound is proposed when the overheads in turning on/off a processor are negligible. When the overheads are non-negligible, we develop polynomial-time algorithms with a 2 approximation bound. A series of simulation experiments was done for the performance evaluation of the proposed algorithms. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms could derive schedules very close to optimal solutions.
Subretinal mononuclear phagocytes induce cone segment loss via IL-1β

Photo-transduction in cone segments (CS) is crucial for high acuity daytime vision. For ill-defined reasons, CS degenerate in retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and in the transitional zone (TZ) of atrophic zones (AZ), which characterize geographic atrophy (GA). Our experiments confirm the loss of cone segments (CS) in the TZ of patients with GA and show their association with subretinal CD14+mononuclear phagocyte (MP) infiltration that is also reported in RP. Using human and mouse MPs in vitro and inflammation-prone Cx3cr1GFP/GFPmice in vivo, we demonstrate that MP-derived IL-1β leads to severe CS degeneration. Our results strongly suggest that subretinal MP accumulation participates in the observed pathological photoreceptor changes in these diseases. Inhibiting subretinal MP accumulation or Il-1β might protect the CS and help preserve high acuity daytime vision in conditions characterized by subretinal inflammation, such as AMD and RP. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.16490. 001
User experience of driver assistance systems

A positive user experience has become an important goal for interactive system design. The aim of this paper is to discuss the usefulness of the user experience concept for the domain of automotive UIs. An integrative approach to user experience of interactive systems will be presented. The application of the approach to the domain of automotive UIs is illustrated and discussed using a first example.
Detection of the Splicing Sites with Kernel Method Approaches Dealing with Nucleotide Doublets

The RNA-splicing is a very important phenomenon in eukaryotic cells to make pre mRNAs intomature forms. Despite its importance, biochemical details of the mechanism of RNA-splicing havenot been understood completely. In this research, using machine learning approaches, we aimedto discriminate the true splice sites from pseudo sites which wouldn’t be spliced. Support VectorMachine (SVM) is known as an ecient machine learning method used in many scienti c disciplinesincluding bioinformatics [3]. As several researchers have shown, DNA sequence data can be treatedwith adequate design of kernel functions i.e. core parts of SVM [1, 2, 4]. We focused on patterns ofnucleotide doublets of DNA sequence and designed a kernel which might better represent the featureof sequence around splice sites. By examining more than 10,000 human splicing donor (5’ ends ofintrons) and acceptor (3’ ends of introns) sites, we found that the accuracies of this methods were94.49% and 93.94% respectively. These results imply higher eciency of this method than thoseobserved with other kernel methods and methods based on rst- and second-order Markov models.This method would reect properties of sequence data and would give us insights for the mechanismsof the RNA-splicing.
Cerebral Responses to Acute Maternal Alcohol Intoxication in Immature Fetal Sheep

ABSTRACTS: Previous studies in mature fetal sheep have shown that alcohol depresses cerebral blood flow (CBF), cerebral O2 consumption (CMRO2), and cerebral glucose consumption (CMRglu). This effect earlier in gestation might contribute to the pathogenesis of fetal alcohol syndrome. Physiologic studies of immature fetal sheep have demonstrated lower CBF, CMRO2, and CMRglu as well as a blunted vasodilatory response to hypoxia compared with mature fetal sheep. The purpose of this study was to determine whether immature fetal responses to alcohol are blunted compared with near-term fetal responses. We studied seven immature fetal sheep in utero at 92 ± 1 d gestation (term = 147 d) 2 d after placement of vascular catheters. Pure ethanol (1 g/kg) was infused i.v. to the mother over 1 h. We measured CBF and myocardial blood flow by radioactive microspheres and calculated CMRO2 and CMRglu using arterial and sagittal sinus O2 and glucose concentrations. At a fetal ethanol concentration of 33 + 8 mmol/L (150 ± 37 mg/dL), there were no significant changes in CBF, CMRO2, or CMRglu. There was mild hypoglycemia (glucose concentration = 1.05 ± 0.2 versus 1.33 ± 0.2 mM baseline) and lactic acidemia (lactate concentration = 1.29 ± 0.3 versus 1.07 ± 0.2 mM baseline). Cardiovascular variables were unchanged as was myocardial blood flow. The immature fetal sheep brain shows no significant cerebrovascular and metabolic response to acute alcohol intoxication compared with mature fetal sheep. Mild hypoglycemia and lactic acidemia did develop. The reason for the developmental differences in response to alcohol and their relationship to fetal alcohol syndrome remain to be elucidated.
The Influence of Body Movement on Subjective Presence in Virtual Environments

We describe an experiment to assess the influence of body movements on presence in a virtual environment. In the experiment 20 participants were to walk through a virtual field of trees and count the trees with diseased leaves. A 2 × 2 between-subjects design was used to assess the influence of two factors on presence: tree height variation and task complexity. The field with greater variation in tree height required participants to bend down and look up more than in the lower variation tree height field. In the higher complexity task participants were told to remember the distribution of diseased trees in the field as well as to count them. The results showed a significant positive association between reported presence and the amount of body movement - in particular, head yaw - and the extent to which participants bent down and stood up. There was also a strong interaction effect between task complexity and gender: Women in the morecomplex task reported a much lower sense of presence than in the simpler task. For applications in which presence is an important requirement, the research in this paper suggests that presence will be increased when interaction techniques are employed that permit the user to engage in whole-body movement.
Incoming traffic modeling of heterogeneous Public Safety Network

Accurate traffic models are necessary for a service provider of emergency communications to properly maintain the capacity planning of the network. To meet the necessity, the good traffic model must be developed that can capture characteristics including occurrences of few and large random incidents and accidents. These occurrences may be described as the unusual spikes and long tails in a probability model term of an actual network load. Therefore, the proposed mixed model for a peak period traffic brings significant results to capture the characteristics than other statistical models. We employ the Lognormal mixture model with high accuracy based on simulations with the real data set of emergency incoming traffic types. The results show that main traffic of a peak period is fitted reasonably by a mixture of Lognormal distributions with two or more components compared to well known statistical candidate distributions such as General Pareto, Weibull, and simple Lognormal.
Dynamic contrast-enhanced MR renography for renal function evaluation in ureteropelvic junction obstruction: feasibility study.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to evaluate split renal function, estimate single-kidney renal function, and identify cause of obstruction in patients with ureteropelvic junction (UPJ) obstruction by using contrast-enhanced dynamic MR renography (MRR). MATERIALS AND METHODS Seventeen patients with UPJ obstruction underwent MRR and diuresis nuclear renography. Nuclear renography assessment of split renal function and mechanical versus functional obstruction served as the reference standard. The Baumann-Rudin model for determining glomerular filtration rate (GFR) was applied to generate single-kidney renal function (SK-GFRMRR) from MRR cortical and medullary enhancement curves. MRR split renal function of the right kidney (SK-GFRMRR of the right kidney normalized to the sum of SK-GFRMRR of both kidneys) was compared with nuclear renography. The MRR estimate of total GFR (eGFRMRR) was compared with that derived from Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) formula (eGFRMDRD). Renal pelvic rate of signal intensity change (PUR) was compared between functionally and mechanically obstructed kidneys. RESULTS There was excellent correlation between MRR and nuclear renography measure of split renal function ratio (r = 0.87, p < 0.01), with mean difference of less than 10%. There was moderate correlation (r = 0.60, p = 0.01) between eGFRMRR and eGFRMDRD. eGFRMRR underestimated eGFRMDRD, with mean difference of 13.3 mL/min/1.73 m(2). PUR in mechanically obstructed units was significantly lower (0.39 ± 0.26 vs 2.0 ± 1.38 min(-1); p < 0.01) compared with functionally obstructed units. PUR discriminated mechanical from functional obstruction with accuracy of 89%. CONCLUSION In patients with UPJ obstruction, MRR can measure split renal function, estimate eGFRMDRD with moderate correlation, and accurately discriminate mechanical from functional obstruction, thus potentially providing a "one-stop shop" examination.
On the security of XOR-method in biometric authentication systems

A biometric authentication system can be partitioned into a layer that extracts common randomness out of a pair of related biometric sequences [Maurer, 1993] and a layer that masks a key sequence with this common randomness. We will analyze the performance of such a layered system first, and will show that an alternative method, the XOR-technique, is not always secure.
"Theoric Transformations" and a New Classification of Abductive Inferences

Based on a definition of "abductive insight" and a critical discussion of G. Schurz's (2008) distinction of eleven "patterns of abduction" that he organizes in four groups, I suggest an even more comprehensive classification that distinguishes 15 forms in an alternative structure. These forms are organized, on the one hand, with regard to what is abductively inferred—singular facts, types, laws, theoretical models, or representation systems—and, on the other, with regard to the question whether the abductive procedure is selective or creative (including a distinction between "psychologically creative," as in school learning, or "historically creative"). Moreover, I argue that theoretical-model abduction—which seems to be the most important form of abduction—depends on two preconditions: first on the availability of an adequate system of representation, and second on finding a new "perspective" on a given problem, as Peirce described it with the notion of a "theoric transformation. " To understand the significance of theoric transformations—especially in mathematics—it is necessary to analyze in some detail Peirce's main example for a theoric transformation: the proof of Desargues's theorem.
Genetic visualization with an improved GCaMP calcium indicator reveals spatiotemporal activation of the spinal motor neurons in zebrafish

Animal behaviors are generated by well-coordinated activation of neural circuits. In zebrafish, embryos start to show spontaneous muscle contractions at 17 to 19 h postfertilization. To visualize how motor circuits in the spinal cord are activated during this behavior, we developed GCaMP-HS (GCaMP-hyper sensitive), an improved version of the genetically encoded calcium indicator GCaMP, and created transgenic zebrafish carrying the GCaMP-HS gene downstream of the Gal4-recognition sequence, UAS (upstream activation sequence). Then we performed a gene-trap screen and identified the SAIGFF213A transgenic fish that expressed Gal4FF, a modified version of Gal4, in a subset of spinal neurons including the caudal primary (CaP) motor neurons. We conducted calcium imaging using the SAIGFF213A; UAS:GCaMP-HS double transgenic embryos during the spontaneous contractions. We demonstrated periodic and synchronized activation of a set of ipsilateral motor neurons located on the right and left trunk in accordance with actual muscle movements. The synchronized activation of contralateral motor neurons occurred alternately with a regular interval. Furthermore, a detailed analysis revealed rostral-to-caudal propagation of activation of the ipsilateral motor neuron, which is similar to but much slower than the rostrocaudal delay observed during swimming in later stages. Our study thus demonstrated coordinated activities of the motor neurons during the first behavior in a vertebrate. We propose the GCaMP technology combined with the Gal4FF-UAS system is a powerful tool to study functional neural circuits in zebrafish.