Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Y‐chromosome identification in circulating cell‐free fetal DNA using surface plasmon resonance

Since the discovery of cell‐free fetal DNA (cffDNA) in maternal plasma, diagnostic non‐invasive prenatal methods have been developed or optimized for fetal sex determination and identification of genetic diseases. As far as fetal sex determination, this might be important for therapeutic intervention on sex‐associated pathologies such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy, hemophilia and congenital adrenal hyperplasia. Surface plasmon resonance (SPR)‐based biosensors might be useful for these studies, because they allow to monitor the molecular interactions in real‐time providing qualitative and quantitative information, through kinetics, affinity and concentration analyses.
Crevice Corrosion of Stainless Steels in Sea Water: Correlation of Field Data with Laboratory Ferric Chloride Tests

Abstract Two year sea water immersion tests were carried out at four North American sites on a wide range of austenitic stainless steels. Some of these steels were found to be completely free from crevice corrosion at all exposure sites. Immersion of the alloys in FeCl3 in the laboratory provided a more severe test of their crevice corrosion resistance, which could be used to make conservative predictions of their performance in sea water.
There Is a Method to the Madness: Strategies to Study Host Complement Evasion by Lyme Disease and Relapsing Fever Spirochetes

Lyme disease and relapsing fever are caused by various Borrelia species. Lyme disease borreliae, the most common vector-borne pathogens in both the U.S. and Europe, are transmitted by Ixodes ticks and disseminate from the site of tick bites to tissues leading to erythema migrans skin rash, arthritis, carditis, and neuroborreliosis. Relapsing fever borreliae, carried by ticks and lice, trigger reoccurring fever episodes. Following transmission, spirochetes survive in the blood to induce bacteremia at the early stages of infection, which is thought to promote evasion of the host complement system. The complement system acts as an important innate immune defense mechanism in humans and vertebrates. Upon activation, the cleaved complement components form complexes on the pathogen surface to eventually promote bacteriolysis. The complement system is negatively modulated by a number of functionally diverse regulators to avoid tissue damage. To evade and inhibit the complement system, spirochetes are capable of binding complement components and regulators. Complement inhibition results in bacterial survival in serum (serum resistance) and is thought to promote bloodstream survival, which facilitates spirochete dissemination and disease manifestations. In this review, we discuss current methodologies to elucidate the mechanisms of Borrelia spp. that promote serum resistance and bloodstream survival, as well as novel methods to study factors responsible for bloodstream survival of Lyme disease borreliae that can be applied to relapsing fever borreliae. Understanding the mechanisms these pathogens utilize to evade the complement system will ultimately aid in the development of novel therapeutic strategies and disease prevention to improve human health.
11&bgr;-Hydroxysteroid Dehydrogenase Type 2 in Mouse Aorta: Localization and Influence on Response to Glucocorticoids

Abstract—Both isozymes of 11&bgr;-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase, which interconvert active and inactive glucocorticoids, are expressed in the mouse aortic wall. Mice deficient in 11HSD type 2 (which converts active corticosterone into inert 11-dehydrocorticosterone) have hypertension and impaired endothelial nitric oxide activity. It has been suggested that 11HSD2 influences vascular function directly by limiting glucocorticoid-mediated inhibition of endothelium-derived nitric oxide. This study sought to determine (1) the cellular distribution of the 11HSD isozymes within the mouse aortic wall and (2) the influence of 11HSD2 on direct glucocorticoid-mediated changes in aortic function. Mouse aortas were separated into their component layers and RNA extracted for RT-PCR. Both types of corticosteroid (mineralocorticoid and glucocorticoid) receptors and both 11HSD isozymes were expressed in the aortic wall. 11HSD1 expression colocalized with &agr;-smooth muscle actin (a marker for smooth muscle cells), whereas 11HSD2 colocalized with TIE-2 (a marker for endothelial cells). Functional relaxation responses of mouse aortic rings were unaltered after exposure to glucocorticoids for 24 hours. In the presence of l-arginine, glucocorticoids produced an endothelium-independent reduction of contraction; similar results were obtained with aortas from mice with genetic inactivation of 11HSD2. Incubation in medium containing l-arginine reversed the endothelial cell dysfunction associated with 11HSD2 inactivation. Thus, 11HSD2 is appropriately sited to modulate endothelial cell function, but endothelial dysfunction in 11HSD2 knockout mice cannot be explained simply by increased access of corticosterone to endothelial cell corticosteroid receptors. Therefore, additional mechanisms, possibly involving indirect effects of enhanced corticosterone action in the kidney and the resultant hypertension, must be involved.
SURE-LET image denoising with multiple directional LOTs

This paper proposes to adopt a union of directional lapped orthogonal transforms (DirLOTs) to the SURE-LET image denoising. DirLOTs are 2-D non-separable transforms and can have directional characteristics under the fixed-critically-subsampling, overlapping, orthogonal, symmetric, real-valued and compact-support property. As a previous work, the author showed that a DirLOT overcomes a disadvantage of separable wavelet image denoising for diagonal textures and edges. Since there remains a problem that the approach is applicable only to a single geometric direction, this work further investigates to improve the performance by introducing redundant representation with multiple directions. Through some experimental results, it is verified that the proposed technique shows better performance than the traditional single wavelet approach for natural images with rich amount of geometrical structures.
Neuroimaging Evidence for Processes Underlying Repetition of Ignored Stimuli

Prolonged response times are observed with targets having been presented as distractors immediately before, called negative priming effect. Among others, inhibitory and retrieval processes have been suggested underlying this behavioral effect. As those processes would involve different neural activation patterns, a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study including 28 subjects was conducted. Two tasks were used to investigate stimulus repetition effects. One task focused on target location, the other on target identity. Both tasks are known to elicit the expected response time effects. However, there is less agreement about the relationship of those tasks with the explanatory accounts under consideration. Based on within-subject comparisons we found clear differences between the experimental repetition conditions and the neutral control condition on neural level for both tasks. Hemodynamic fronto-striatal activation patterns occurred for the location-based task favoring the selective inhibition account. Hippocampal activation found for the identity-based task suggests an assignment to the retrieval account; however, this task lacked a behavioral effect.
Learning Landmarks for Robot Localization

Our work addresses the problem of learning a set of visual landmarks for mobile robot localization. The learning framework is designed to be applicable to a wide range of environments, and allows for different approaches to computing a pose estimate. Initially, each landmark is detected using a model of visual attention and is matched to observations from other poses using principal components analysis. Attributes of the observed landmarks can be parameterized using a generic parameterization method and then evaluated in terms of their utility for pose estimation. We discuss the status of the work to date, and future directions.
INCIDENTAL THREAT DURING VISUOSPATIAL WORKING MEMORY IN ADOLESCENT ANXIETY: AN EMOTIONAL MEMORY‐GUIDED SACCADE TASK

Pediatric anxiety disorders are among the most common psychiatric mental illnesses in children and adolescents, and are associated with abnormal cognitive control in emotional, particularly threat, contexts. In a series of studies using eye movement saccade tasks, we reported anxiety‐related alterations in the interplay of inhibitory control with incentives, or with emotional distractors. The present study extends these findings to working memory (WM), and queries the interaction of spatial WM with emotional stimuli in pediatric clinical anxiety.
Generation of pseudo random processes with given marginal distribution and autocorrelation function

In this paper a new algorithm for generating a random process with a given marginal distri- bution and autocorrelation function is presented. By using the truncated distribution instead of the order statistics used in the earlier algorithm, the proposed algorithm achieves signiiScant speed up and accuracy. We also develop a scheme for deciding the transition probability matrix based on the Newton optimization technique, that is one of the key steps in the proposed algo-rithm. The experiment for 16 state randomized Markov chain shows about 14 times accelera-tion in comparison with the earher algorithm. The storage requirement is also much smaller.
Epstein-Barr Virus Represses the FoxO1 Transcription Factor through Latent Membrane Protein 1 and Latent Membrane Protein 2A

ABSTRACT Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) infection is associated with the development of many B-cell lymphomas, including Burkitt's lymphoma, Hodgkin's lymphoma, and posttransplant lymphoproliferative disease. The virus alters a diverse range of cellular molecules, which leads to B-cell growth and immortalization. This study was initiated to investigate the interplay between EBV and a proapoptotic transcription factor target, FoxO1. In this report, we show that EBV infection of B cells leads to the downregulation of FoxO1 expression by phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase-mediated nuclear export, by inhibition of FoxO1 mRNA expression, and by alteration of posttranslational modifications. This repression directly correlates with the expression of the FoxO1 target gene Bcl-6 and inversely correlates with the FoxO1-regulated gene Cyclin D2. Expression of the EBV genes for latent membrane protein 1 and latent membrane protein 2A decreases FoxO1 expression. Thus, our data elucidate distinct mechanisms for the regulation of the proapoptotic transcription factor FoxO1 by EBV.
Are the Two Human Papillomavirus Vaccines Really Similar? A Systematic Review of Available Evidence: Efficacy of the Two Vaccines against HPV

Background. When the bivalent and the quadrivalent HPV vaccines were marketed they were presented as having comparable efficacy against cervical cancer. Differences between the vaccines are HPV types included and formulation of the adjuvant. Method. A systematic review was conducted to assess the efficacy of the two vaccines against cervical cancer. Outcomes considered were CIN2+, CIN3+, and AIS. Results. Nine reports (38,419 women) were included. At enrolment mean age of women was 20 years, 90% had negative cytology, and 80% were seronegative and/or DNA negative for HPV 16 or 18 (naïve women). In the TVC-naïve, VE against CIN2+ was 58% (95% CI: 35, 72); heterogeneity was detected, VE being 65% (95% CI: 54, 74) for the bivalent and 43% (95% CI: 23, 57) for the quadrivalent. VE against CIN3+ was 78% (95% CI: <0, 97); heterogeneity was substantial, VE being 93% (95% CI: 77, 98) for the bivalent and 43% (95% CI: 12, 63) for the quadrivalent. VE in the TVC was much lower. No sufficient data were available on AIS. Conclusions. In naïve girls bivalent vaccine shows higher efficacy, even if the number of events detected is low. In women already infected the benefit of the vaccination seems negligible.
Towards a viable out-of-order soft core: Copy-Free, checkpointed register renaming

As a step torward a viable, single-issue out-of-order soft core, this work presents Copy-Free Checkpointing (CFC), an FPGA-friendly register renaming design. CFC supports speculative execution by implementing checkpoint recovery. Compared against the best conventional register renaming implementation CFC requires 7.5x to 6.4x fewer LUTs and is at least 10% faster.
Optimal and Efficient Stochastic Motion Planning in Partially-Known Environments

A framework capable of computing optimal control policies for a continuous system in the presence of both action and environment uncertainty is presented in this work. The framework decomposes the planning problem into two stages: an offline phase that reasons only over action uncertainty and an online phase that quickly reacts to the uncertain environment. Offline, a bounded-parameter Markov decision process (BMDP) is employed to model the evolution of the stochastic system over a discretization of the environment. Online, an optimal control policy over the BMDP is computed. Upon the discovery of an unknown environment feature during policy execution, the BMDP is updated and the optimal control policy is efficiently recomputed. Depending on the desired quality of the control policy, a suite of methods is presented to incorporate new information into the BMDP with varying degrees of detail online. Experiments confirm that the framework recomputes high-quality policies in seconds and is orders of magnitude faster than existing methods.
Pilot-assisted channel estimation based on second-order statistics

A survey about linear channel estimation exploiting slowly varying channel properties is given for receivers with multiple antenna elements. The slowly varying channel properties are described by the channel's second-order statistics. First, a detailed comparison of classical linear pilot-based channel estimators, a novel matched filter, and reduced-rank (RR) approaches is made in a common framework with respect to the model they assume for the channel, their performance (MSE), and complexity. The matched filter channel estimator is introduced, which exploits second-order statistics with quadratic order of complexity. For flat correlated Rayleigh fading channels, an analytical performance comparison of all estimators in terms of the uncoded bit error probability is provided. It is a generalization of previous results and shows that the matched filter is a low complexity alternative with good performance at an interesting signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) range. The effects of these approaches on linear equalization are briefly discussed in the context of direct-sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA), where the focus is on a generalization of the rake receiver in space and time, which reduces the channel rank based on its second-order statistics, resulting in a complexity reduction of the equalizer. For this discussion, a new notation for the generalized rake is presented, which allows for its interpretation in the context of channel estimation and reveals alternatives for implementation. We conclude that exploiting second-order channel statistics results in significant performance gains, and RR channel estimation should only be used together with equalization in the reduced signal subspace.
Selfish sensors in wireless micro-sensor networks

In this paper we develop an energy aware decentralised routing algorithm for adhoc networking of battery-powered wireless microsensors. The useful life of such networks is limited by the battery life of individual sensors and thus the goal of any networking algorithm is to maximise both the lifetime and the coverage of the network, whilst dealing adaptively with sensor failures and changes in network topology. As sensors may be owned and supported by different stakeholders, we view them as selfish agents maximising their own utility. To this end, we develop a mechanism that enables such agents to follow locally selfish strategies which, in turn, result in the achievement of good global performance.
Joint image denoising using self-similarity based low-rank approximations

The observed images are usually noisy due to data acquisition and transmission process. Therefore, image denoising is a necessary procedure prior to post-processing applications. The proposed algorithm exploits the self-similarity based low rank technique to approximate the real-world image in the multivariate analysis sense. It consists of two successive steps: adaptive dimensionality reduction of similar patch groups, and the collaborative filtering. For each target patch, the singular value decomposition (SVD) is used to factorize the similar patch group collected in a local search window by block-matching. Parallel analysis automatically selects the principal signal components by discarding the nonsignificant singular values. After the inverse SVD transform, the denoised image is reconstructed by the weighted averaging approach. Finally, the collaborative Wiener filtering is applied to further remove the noise. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm surpasses the state-of-the-art methods in most cases.
Measuring thermal conductivity and diffusivity by holographic interferometry

Knowledge of the thermal conductivity and the thermal diffusivity are the two most important properties for thermal management in microelectronics design. However, it is difficult to measure the thermal conductivity of ordinary bulk materials accurately, especially of materials that have extremely high values such as copper (4 W/cm.K) and diamond (10 to 25 W/cm.K). In this paper, we proposed and demonstrated three methods for measuring the thermal conductivity of bulk materials based on the nondestructive testing technique in holographic interferometry. Their efficacy for measuring high thermal conductivity values of diamond materials is analyzed. We have obtained values of thermal conductivity for aluminum alloy, copper alloy and pure copper, and molybdenum using these methods. The result from one of these methods shows that it is feasible to achieve such measurements for diamond and diamond-like materials. However, to determine the thermal conductivity of diamond materials the method requires that the thermal diffusivity of the sample must be first measured under high thermal excitation. It is also necessary to capture the dynamic thermal process within a fraction of a second.
Dynamic localization of RNase MRP RNA in the nucleolus observed by fluorescent RNA cytochemistry in living cells

The dynamic intra-nuclear localization of MRP RNA, the RNA component of the ribonucleoprotein enzyme RNase MRP, was examined in living cells by the method of fluorescent RNA cytochemistry (Wang, J., L.-G. Cao, Y.-L. Wang, and T. Pederson. 1991. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 88:7391-7395). MRP RNA very rapidly accumulated in nucleoli after nuclear microinjection of normal rat kidney (NRK) epithelial cells. Localization was specifically in the dense fibrillar component of the nucleolus, as revealed by immunocytochemistry with a monoclonal antibody against fibrillarin, a known dense fibrillar component protein, as well as by digital optical sectioning microscopy and 3-D stereo reconstruction. When MRP RNA was injected into the cytoplasm it was not imported into the nucleus. Nuclear microinjection of mutant MRP RNAs revealed that nucleolar localization requires a sequence element (nucleotides 23-62) previously implicated as a binding site for a nucleolar protein, the To antigen. These results demonstrate the dynamic localization of MRP RNA in the nucleus and provide important insights into the nucleolar targeting of MRP RNA.
A New Design of Differential Space-Time Block Code Allowing Symbol-Wise Decoding

For four (or more) transmitters, a new design of differential space-time block code allowing symbol-wise decoding is presented in this letter. The new design not only has the minimum (symbol-wise) decoding complexity as that by Yuen, Guan and Tjhung (YGT) but also yields a lower error rate. While the YGT code uses a specially designed symbol constellation, the new code uses a conventional QAM with a rotation. At a high data rate such as 3 bps/Hz, the new design with symbol-wise decoding complexity can even yield a lower error rate than the code by Zhu and Jafarkhani that has the pair-wise decoding complexity.
MiniBox: A Two-Way Sandbox for x86 Native Code

This paper presents MiniBox, the first two-way sandbox for x86 native code, that not only protects a benign OS from a misbehaving application, but also protects an application from a malicious OS. MiniBox can be applied in Platform-as-a-Service cloud computing to provide two-way protection between a customer's application and the cloud platform OS. We implement a Mini-Box prototype running on recent x86 multi-core systems from Intel or AMD, and we port several applications to MiniBox. Evaluation results show that MiniBox is efficient and practical.
Work Behind the Service: Web Publishing and Changes in Document Production

With the current rapid diffusion of Internet and World Wide Web, many organisations establish Web services and hence become providers of digital documents. Based on eight smaller case studies and theoretical work with dialectics, this paper discusses the organisational implementation of the World Wide Web among information providers. A Web service typically takes its starting point in the current production of documents using conventional word processors. Creating a Web service therefore results in a major extension of the chain of tasks related to document production. Current practices in document production are not necessarily well suited for this extension of the task chain , however, questioning the current implementation of word processing. The concepts of thesis, antithesis and synthesis from dialectics are used to characterise systems development as con struction, evolution and intervention. In an analogy to thi s interpretation, three approaches to the implementation of Web services are derived: identified as technology oriented , tradition oriented and change oriented approaches respect ively. Two of the cases, both from the Norwegian public administration, are clear examples of a tradition oriented appro ach, although both started in a more technology oriented manner. While this appears to be a typical course of evolution, those two cases also reveal important unrealised possibili ties, indicating that the organisation behind the Web servic s probably have not found its final shape. Realising these possibilities involves a more change oriented approach. This observation confirms the relevance of applying ideas from dialectics to the use of World Wide Web.
Experimental Study on Fluidization Characteristics of Gas Quenching Steel Slag

In order to study the application of fluidized bed process for the gas quenching steel slag(GQSS) slag-iron separation, according to the principles of fluidized bed material separation, based on the all GQSS, this paper researches the influence law of fluidization characteristics and the fluidization performance of GQSS after adding 20% (calculated by volume) iron grains. The experiment uses single hood fluidized bed as experiment device, studies the GQSS and iron grains of critical fluidization and slugging fluidization of other characteristics in the fluidization process, and determinates the packing density in interior and exterior of the tube. The results show that: when the material is all GQSS, the appropriate fluidization thickness of material layer is 300~400mm ; after adding 20% iron grains in the tube, the appropriate fluidization thickness of material layer is 350~400mm. The results of this paper on GQSS slag-iron separation have important theoretical significance.
A New Spectrum of Recursive Models

We describe a strongly minimal theory S in an effective language such that, in the chain of countable models of S, only the second model has a computable presentation. Thus there is a spectrum of an ω1-categorical theory which is neither upward nor downward closed. We also give an upper bound on the complexity of spectra.