Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Flavonoids from Litsea japonica Inhibit AGEs Formation and Rat Lense Aldose Reductase In Vitro and Vessel Dilation in Zebrafish

Abstract In our ongoing efforts to identify effective naturally sourced agents for the treating of diabetic complications, two new (1 and 2) and 11 known phenolic compounds (3–13) were isolated from an 80 % ethanol extract of Litsea japonica leaves. The structures of the new compounds were established by spectroscopic and chemical studies. These isolates (1–13) were subjected to an in vitro bioassay evaluating their inhibitory activity on advanced glycation end products formation and rat lens aldose reductase activity. Of the compounds evaluated, the flavonoids (3, 4, 6–8, 11, and 12) markedly inhibited advanced glycation end products formation, with IC50 values of 7.4–72.0 µM, compared with the positive control, aminoguanidine (IC50 = 975.9 µM). In the rat lens aldose reductase assay, consistent with the inhibition of advanced glycation end products formation, the flavonoids (3, 4, 6–8, 11, and 12) exhibited considerable inhibition of rat lens aldose reductase activity, with IC50 values of 1.1–12.5 µM. In addition, the effects of kaempferol (4) and tiliroside (7) on the dilation of hyaloid-retinal vessels induced by high glucose in larval zebrafish were investigated. Only kaempferol significantly reduced the diameters of high glucose-induced hyaloid-retinal vessels, by 52.2 % at 10 µM, compared with those in the high glucose-treated control group.
Re-engineering the Pancreas Tumor Microenvironment: A "Regenerative Program" Hacked

The “hallmarks” of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) include proliferative, invasive, and metastatic tumor cells and an associated dense desmoplasia comprised of fibroblasts, pancreatic stellate cells, extracellular matrix, and immune cells. The oncogenically activated pancreatic epithelium and its associated stroma are obligatorily interdependent, with the resulting inflammatory and immunosuppressive microenvironment contributing greatly to the evolution and maintenance of PDAC. The peculiar pancreas-specific tumor phenotype is a consequence of oncogenes hacking the resident pancreas regenerative program, a tissue-specific repair mechanism regulated by discrete super enhancer networks. Defined as genomic regions containing clusters of multiple enhancers, super enhancers play pivotal roles in cell/tissue specification, identity, and maintenance. Hence, interfering with such super enhancer–driven repair networks should exert a disproportionately disruptive effect on tumor versus normal pancreatic tissue. Novel drugs that directly or indirectly inhibit processes regulating epigenetic status and integrity, including those driven by histone deacetylases, histone methyltransferase and hydroxylases, DNA methyltransferases, various metabolic enzymes, and bromodomain and extraterminal motif proteins, have shown the feasibility of disrupting super enhancer–dependent transcription in treating multiple tumor types, including PDAC. The idea that pancreatic adenocarcinomas rely on embedded super enhancer transcriptional mechanisms suggests a vulnerability that can be potentially targeted as novel therapies for this intractable disease. Clin Cancer Res; 23(7); 1647–55. ©2017 AACR. See all articles in this CCR Focus section, “Pancreatic Cancer: Challenge and Inspiration. ”
Computer Simulation as a Tool in Teaching Park and Wilderness Management.

Abstract A computer based simulation model that traces the recreational use patterns within park and wilderness areas has been employed as a teaching tool in a recreation management course at the University of Vermont. Use of the Wilderness Travel Simulation Model in the classroom reduces the complexity of the system under study, allows students to act as managers (devising and testing their own management strategies), and increases the students' exposure to the characteristics of an actual park or wilderness area. The value of the model as a teaching tool was supported by the students' high degree of interest and enthusiasm in the class.
Between the individual and the community: the impact of genetics on ethical models

This paper discusses how genetics is influencing ethical frameworks with particular focus on the effectiveness and appropriateness of individual and communal models. It suggests that genetics supports a relational understanding of the person and therefore that genetic ethics requires ethical models which respect both individuals and groups. First, the inadequacy of individualistic frameworks – at conceptual, ethical and practical levels – is outlined. Second, the “communal turn” in genetic ethics in both clinical and population ethics is considered. Third, it is claimed that this communal turn is applicable to genetic ethics in general and to illustrate this two further examples are explored: those of UK Biobank and personalized medicine. The paper concludes that ethical frameworks in genetic ethics must accommodate both group and individual concerns.
Effect of Synaptic Plasticity on Correlation between Neural Spike Trains

Simultaneously recorded neurons often exhibit correlations in their spiking activity.Short-term synaptic plasticity(STP) allows synapses to perform critical computational functions in neural circuits.It is critical to understand the properties and mechanisms that generate correlation and the role of STP in these forms of correlation.A nonmonotonic relationship between the output correlation and the negative feedback strength is found in the present paper. By numerical simulations, we also find that when we add STP to the feedback loop the tendency of the changes of the output correlation corresponds to the trajectory of the nonmonotonic curve.
Altered Traffic of Cardiolipin during Apoptosis: Exposure on the Cell Surface as a Trigger for “Antiphospholipid Antibodies”

Apoptosis has been reported to induce changes in the remodelling of membrane lipids; after death receptor engagement, specific changes of lipid composition occur not only at the plasma membrane, but also in intracellular membranes. This paper focuses on one important aspect of apoptotic changes in cellular lipids, namely, the redistribution of the mitochondria-specific phospholipid, cardiolipin (CL). CL predominantly resides in the inner mitochondrial membrane, even if the rapid remodelling of its acyl chains and the subsequent degradation occur in other membrane organelles. After death receptor stimulation, CL appears to concentrate into mitochondrial “raft-like” microdomains at contact sites between inner and outer mitochondrial membranes, leading to local oligomerization of proapoptotic proteins, including Bid. Clustering of Bid in CL-enriched contacts sites is interconnected with pathways of CL remodelling that intersect membrane traffic routes dependent upon actin. In addition, CL association with cytoskeleton protein vimentin was observed. Such novel association also indicated that CL molecules may be expressed at the cell surface following apoptotic stimuli. This observation adds a novel implication of biomedical relevance. The association of CL with vimentin at the cell surface may represent a “new” target antigen in the context of the apoptotic origin of anti-vimentin/CL autoantibodies in Antiphospholipid Syndrome.
Developing Partially-Transcribed Speech Corpus from Edited Transcriptions

Large-scale spontaneous speech corpora are crucial resource for various domains of spoken language processing. However, the available corpora are usually limited because their construction cost is quite expensive especially in transcribing speech precisely. On the other hand, loosely transcribed corpora like shorthand notes, meeting records and closed captions are more widely available than precisely transcribed ones, because their imperfectness reduces their construction cost. Because these corpora contain both precisely transcribed regions and edited regions, it is difficult to use them directly as speech corpora for learning acoustic models. Under this background, we have been considering to build an efficient semi-automatic framework to convert loose transcriptions to precise ones. This paper describes an improved automatic detection method of precise regions from loosely transcribed corpora for the above framework. Our detection method consists of two steps: the first step is a force alignment between loose transcriptions and their utterances to discover the corresponding utterance for the certain loose transcription, and the second step is a detector of precise regions with a support vector machine using several features obtained from the first step. Our experimental result shows that our method achieves a high accuracy of detecting precise regions, and shows that the precise regions extracted by our method are effective as training labels of lightly supervised speaker adaptation.
Theoretically driven experiments may clarify questions about the bilingual advantage

In her keynote paper, Valian (2014) provides a comprehensive review of the literature that examines whether bilingual individuals outperform monolingual participants on various executive processing tasks. The author acknowledges that numerous factors contribute to the outcomes, such as variations in participants’ profile, differences in target functions, as well as variants of tasks and procedures. She also says in her review that, on the one hand, researchers use different tasks to measure similar functions; while, on the other hand, each of these tasks target somewhat different aspects of executive processing. The most widely used tasks, such as the Stroop or flanker tasks, measure several components of executive functions simultaneously.
Exploiting sequence and structure homologs to identify protein–protein binding sites

A rapid increase in the number of experimentally derived three‐dimensional structures provides an opportunity to better understand and subsequently predict protein–protein interactions. In this study, structurally conserved residues were derived from multiple structure alignments of the individual components of known complexes and the assigned conservation score was weighted based on the crystallographic B factor to account for the structural flexibility that will result in a poor alignment. Sequence profile and accessible surface area information was then combined with the conservation score to predict protein–protein binding sites using a Support Vector Machine (SVM). The incorporation of the conservation score significantly improved the performance of the SVM. About 52% of the binding sites were precisely predicted (greater than 70% of the residues in the site were identified); 77% of the binding sites were correctly predicted (greater than 50% of the residues in the site were identified), and 21% of the binding sites were partially covered by the predicted residues (some residues were identified). The results support the hypothesis that in many cases protein interfaces require some residues to provide rigidity to minimize the entropic cost upon complex formation. Proteins 2006. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Teaching Social Skills to Students with Learning and Behavior Problems

Children who fail to acquire appropriate social skills have a lower probability of completing school, becoming employed, and becoming well-adjusted adults. This article provides the practitioner with strategies that can be used for teaching social skills to children with learning and behavior problems. These include how to select students for training, which social skills to use, teaching discrete skills and problem-solving routines, and helping students generalize training across settings and situations.
PAID I EVALUATING ATTENTION NETWORKS FOR ANAPHORA RESOLUTION

In this paper, we evaluate the results of using inter and intra attention mechanisms from two architectures, a Deep Attention Long Short-Term Memory-Network (LSTM-N) (Cheng et al., 2016) and a Decomposable Attention model (Parikh et al., 2016), for anaphora resolution, i.e. detecting coreference relations between a pronoun and a noun (its antecedent). The models are adapted from an entailment task, to address the pronominal coreference resolution task by comparing two pairs of sentences: one with the original sentences containing the antecedent and the pronoun, and another one with the pronoun replaced with a correct or an incorrect antecedent. The goal is thus to detect the correct replacements, assuming the original sentence pair entails the one with the correct replacement, but not one with an incorrect replacement. We use the CoNLL-2012 English dataset (Pradhan et al., 2012) to train the models and evaluate the ability to recognize correct and incorrect pronoun replacements in sentence pairs. We find that the Decomposable Attention Model performs better, while using a much simpler architecture. Furthermore, we focus on two previous studies that use intraand inter-attention mechanisms, discuss how they relate to each other, and examine how these advances work to identify correct antecedent replacements.
Synergistic anti-candidal activity and mode of action of Mentha piperita essential oil and its major components

Abstract Context: Mentha piperita L. (Lamiaceae) has been used in folk medicine since antiquity. Its essential oil (mint EO) and major bioactive components have antimicrobial properties but their mechanism of action is still not clear. Objective: The present work aims to elucidate M. piperita’s anti-Candida activity and mode of action. Materials and methods: Chemical constituents of mint EO were identified by GC-MS by injecting 0.1 ml sample in a splitless mode. MIC was determined by the broth dilution method. Synergy with fluconazole (FLC) was evaluated by checkerboard assay and FICI. Mid log phase cells harvested from YPD media were used for proton extrusion measurement and the rate of glucose-induced H+ efflux gives PM-ATPase activity. Cell membrane integrity was estimated by total ergosterol content and scanning microscopy at respective MIC and sub-MIC values. In vitro hemolytic activity was performed to rule out possible cytotoxicity of the test compounds. Results: The MIC value of mint EO, carvone, menthol, and menthone was 225, 248, 500, and 4200 µg/ml, respectively. At their respective MICs, these compounds showed 47, 42, 35, and 29% decrease in PM-ATPase activity besides showing synergy with FLC. In case of FLC-resistant strains, the decrease in H+ efflux was by 52, 48, 32, and 30%, a trend similar to the susceptible cases. Exposed Candida cells showed a 100% decrease in the ergosterol content, cell membrane breakage, and alterations in morphology. Discussion and conclusion: Our studies suggest that mint EO and its lead compounds exert antifungal activity by reducing ergosterol levels, inhibiting PM-ATPase leading to intracellular acidification, and ultimately cell death. Our results suggest that mint EO and its constituents are potential antifungal agents and need to be further investigated.
The effects of a family analogy on class inclusion reasoning by young children

This paper investigates the role of analogies in logical reasoning as an important aspect of scientific thinking. In particular, we studied the role of analogical reasoning in the solution of Piagetian concrete operational tasks. Halford (1993) has suggested that 4- to 5-year olds should be able to solve Piagetian class inclusion tasks on the basis of analogies to the relational structure of the nuclear family. This idea was tested in two studies. Analogy effects on class inclusion reasoning were indeed found. These effects were strengthened by the provision of hints to use an analogy and by deeper initial processing of the relational structure of the analogy. The family analogy was applied equally to sets of natural kinds and artifacts. These results suggest that children use familiar relational structures as a basis for logical reasoning. It seems likely that analogies will be core to scientific reasoning as well.
Longitudinal Investigation into the Role of Perceived Social Support in Adolescents' Academic Motivation and Achievement.

We examined (a) the relative importance of perceived social support from parents, peers, and teachers; (b) the consequences associated with different types of perceived social support; and (c) the mediation by achievement goals in the relationship between perceived social support and academic outcomes. We analyzed the first 3 waves of the Korean Educational Longitudinal Study 2005 data (Y. Kim et al., 2007), which followed students from Grade 7 to Grade 9 in middle school. Compared with the other 2 social agent groups, support from parents predicted the widest variety of adolescent motivation and achievement indexes. Parental emotional support was most beneficial, predicting stronger mastery goals, weaker performance-avoidance goals, lower test anxiety, and higher academic achievement than any other type of support. Parental academic support functioned as a double-edged sword, predicting not only stronger mastery goals but also stronger performance-approach goals, stronger performance-avoidance goals, and higher test anxiety. Achievement pressure from teachers had the same predictive relationships but was weaker in strength. Perceived emotional support from teachers was not as effective as that from parents in predicting adolescent motivation achievement; however, perceived academic support from teachers was helpful for adolescents in predicting stronger mastery goals. Support from peers worked as a buffer against maladaptive motivation, predicting weaker performance-avoidance goals and lower test anxiety. Mastery goals mediated the relationship between social support and academic achievement, whereas performance-approach goals and performance-avoidance goals mediated the relationship between social support and test anxiety. The same patterns emerged consistently for all 3 years at middle school. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
2 DTAX , A Framework for Clustering Two-dimensional Trajectories Data

Abstract—Searching moving object trajectories in 2dimensional space is a big challenge. Much research work has been performed on this field for many years. However, due to many factors such as sensor failures, noises, and sampling rates, it’s very difficult to design a robust and fast method to retrieve or to do clustering these data. TAX (Textual ApproXimation) is one of the methods for searching one-dimensional time series data, such as stock or electrocardiogram data. TAX has been proved to be more accurate on average than existing methods. The main idea behind TAX is to approximate time series data as a set of temporal terms to apply document retrieval methods. The main problem of applying TAX to multi-dimensional data, such as trajectory data and motion capture data, is how to extract temporal terms from multi-dimensional time series data. In this paper, we propose an unified framework, called 2D-TAX, to cluster 2-dimensional moving object trajectories employing the TAX idea. Employing the TAX idea allows us to pre-process original multi-dimensional time series data into sequence-like data structure, which becomes easier to analyze and classify. With our framework, temporal-terms of 2D data can be obtained by decomposing these data into smaller segments, and by assigning a temporal-term for segments which have similar moving pattern. Our experimental results confirmed that our 2D-TAX is more effective than existing methods in clustering trajectory data.
EMC prediction method of high voltage multi-circuit transmission on the same tower based on improved least squares method

Multi-circuit transmission on the same tower has problems of in accurary in analysis and prediction of nonlinear electromagnetic interference. Based on the existed numerical methods, the expected pattern of interference sources scattering can't be solved exactly. The main purpose of this paper is to develop a numerical optimization algorithm that takes account of mutual coupling among inner elements and interactions with outside scatterers. To achieve this, the improved least squares method(LSM) combined with moments-based scheme is proposed. The correctness and validity of the proposed algorithm are proved by experimental results based on dSPACE.
bla CTX-M-2 Is Located in an Unusual Class 1 Integron (In35) Which Includes Orf513

ABSTRACT Examination of the blaCTX-M-2 gene in plasmid pMAR-12 by sequencing and PCR analysis revealed that the bla gene and the surrounding DNA, which is closely related (99% homology) to the Kluyvera ascorbata chromosomal DNA that contains the blaKLUA-1 gene, are located in a complex sul1-type integron, termed In35, that includes Orf513. It is possible that blaCTX-M-2 was acquired by plasmid pMAR-12 through an uncharacterized recombinational event in which Orf513 could be involved.
On-Surface Locomotion of Particle Based Microrobots Using Magnetically Induced Oscillation

The low Reynolds number condition presents a fundamental constraint on designing locomotive mechanisms for microscale robots. We report on the use of an oscillating magnetic field to induce on-surface translational motion of particle based microrobots. The particle based microrobots consist of microparticles, connected in a chain-like manner using magnetic self-assembly, where the non-rigid connections between the particles provide structural flexibility for the microrobots. Following the scallop theorem, the oscillation of flexible bodies can lead to locomotion at low Reynolds numbers, similar to the beating motion of sperm flagella. We characterized the velocity profiles of the microrobots by measuring their velocities at various oscillating frequencies. We also demonstrated the directional steering capabilities of the microrobots. This work will provide insights into the use of oscillation as a viable mode of locomotion for particle based microrobots near a surface.
Ethical reflections on pharmacogenetics and DNA banking in a cohort of HIV-infected patients.

The aim of this study was to analyse ethical issues concerning the storage of human biological samples to be used in genetic analyses and pharmacogenetic research based on a French experience of DNA banking in a cohort of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected patients started on a protease inhibitor-containing treatment. We describe the ethical issues raised during the establishment of a DNA bank, including questions dealing with autonomy, benefit to the patient, information sharing and confidentiality as well as guarantees concerning the storage and use of DNA. The practical applications of themes illustrated theoretically in the literature are discussed. Most of the points raised are not specific to HIV, but some of them may be more accurate due to the characteristics of the HIV population, which is more involved in the social debate through the community life and the increased risk of stigmatization. Our results are summarized in the memorandum and consent form presented in the Appendices. One issue still open to discussion is the way the results of genetic data will be given to the patients. This work should allow other researchers and members of evaluation committees to enrich their considerations and should stimulate discussion on this topic.