Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estrogen receptor ligands ameliorate fatty liver through a nonclassical estrogen receptor/Liver X receptor pathway in mice

Liver X receptor (LXR) activation stimulates triglyceride (TG) accumulation in the liver. Several lines of evidence indicate that estradiol‐17β (E2) reduces TG levels in the liver; however, the molecular mechanism underlying the E2 effect remains unclear. Here, we show that administration of E2 attenuated sterol regulatory element‐binding protein (SREBP)‐1 expression and TG accumulation induced by LXR activation in mouse liver. In estrogen receptor alpha (ERα) knockout (KO) and liver‐specific ERα KO mice, E2 did not affect SREBP‐1 expression or TG levels. Molecular analysis revealed that ERα is recruited to the SREBP‐1c promoter through direct binding to LXR and inhibits coactivator recruitment to LXR in an E2‐dependent manner. Our findings demonstrate the existence of a novel liver‐dependent mechanism controlling TG accumulation through the nonclassical ER/LXR pathway. To confirm that a nonclassical ER/LXR pathway regulates ERα‐dependent inhibition of LXR activation, we screened ERα ligands that were able to repress LXR activation without enhancing ERα transcriptional activity, and, as a result, we identified the phytoestrogen, phloretin. In mice, phloretin showed no estrogenic activity; however, it did reduce SREBP‐1 expression and TG levels in liver of mice fed a high‐fat diet to an extent similar to that of E2. Conclusion: We propose that ER ligands reduce TG levels in the liver by inhibiting LXR activation through a nonclassical pathway. Our results also indicate that the effects of ER on TG accumulation can be distinguished from its estrogenic effects by a specific ER ligand. (Hepatology 2014;59:1791–1802)
Concept acquisition in the human infant.

The ability of 18-, 24-, and 30-week-old infants to learn conceptual categories regarding adult female faces was examined using a habituation paradigm. Little evidence for conceptual categorization occurred at 18 or 24 weeks, but at 30 weeks infants learned to respond to "a specific female face regardless of orientation" and to "female faces in general. "
High speed CMOS output stage for integrated DC-DC converters

A Hybrid Waffle layout technique is introduced for the design of CMOS power transistors in integrated low voltage DC-DC converters. Comparing with conventional multi-finger layout scheme, the Hybrid Waffle layout scheme allows optimized trade-off between device on-resistance and metal interconnect resistance to minimize overall on-resistance. Interestingly, the reduced channel width per unit area also leads to lower gate capacitance and faster switching speed. This paper presents a prototype DC-DC converter IC that contains integrated gate drivers, protection circuits and CMOS output transistors. Implemented in a standard 0.25 ¿m CMOS, this IC can be switched at 12.5 MHz with output current rated at 800 mA with input voltage of up to 4.2 V. Peak power efficiency of 85% was observed at 100 mA. Die size is 1.1 × 1.5 mm2.
On information theoretic criteria for determining the number of signals in high resolution array processing

An important problem in high-resolution array processing is the determination of the number of signals arriving at the array. Information theoretic criteria provide a means to achieve this. Two commonly used criteria are the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and minimum descriptive length (MDL) criterion. While the AIC tends to overestimate even at a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the MDL criterion tends to underestimate at low or moderate SNR. By excluding irrelevant parameters, a new log likelihood function has been chosen. Utilizing this new log likelihood function gives a set of more accurate estimates of the eigenvalues and in the establishment of modified information theoretic criteria which moderate the performance of the AIC and the MDL criterion. Computer simulations confirm that the modified criteria have superior performance. >
Weighted Spatial Covariance Matrix Estimation for MUSIC Based TDOA Estimation of Speech Source

We study the estimation of time difference of arrival (TDOA) under noisy and reverberant conditions. Conventional TDOA estimation methods such as MUltiple SIgnal Classiﬁcation (MUSIC) are not robust to noise and reverberation due to the distortion in the spatial covariance matrix (SCM). To address this issue, this paper proposes a robust SCM estimation method, called weighted SCM (WSCM). In the WSCM estimation, each time-frequency (TF) bin of the input signal is weighted by a TF mask which is 0 for non-speech TF bins and 1 for speech TF bins in ideal case. In practice, the TF mask takes values between 0 and 1 that are predicted by a long short term memory (LSTM) network trained from a large amount of simulated noisy and reverberant data. The use of mask weights signiﬁ-cantly reduces the contribution of low SNR TF bins to the SCM estimation, hence improves the robustness of MUSIC. Experimental results on both simulated and real data show that we have signiﬁcantly improved the robustness of MUSIC by using the weighted SCM.
Antibody-Dependent Enhancement of Ebola Virus Infection

ABSTRACT Most strains of Ebola virus cause a rapidly fatal hemorrhagic disease in humans, yet there are still no biologic explanations that adequately account for the extreme virulence of these emerging pathogens. Here we show that Ebola Zaire virus infection in humans induces antibodies that enhance viral infectivity. Plasma or serum from convalescing patients enhanced the infection of primate kidney cells by the Zaire virus, and this enhancement was mediated by antibodies to the viral glycoprotein and by complement component C1q. Our results suggest a novel mechanism of antibody-dependent enhancement of Ebola virus infection, one that would account for the dire outcome of Ebola outbreaks in human populations.
User’s guide to mechanism of action and clinical use of GLP-1 receptor agonists

Abstract Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs) are injectable glucose-lowering medications approved for the treatment of adult patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). This article provides practical information to guide primary care physicians on the use of GLP-1RAs in patients with T2DM. Two short-acting (once- or twice-daily administration; exenatide and liraglutide) and three long-acting (weekly administration; albiglutide, dulaglutide and exenatide) GLP-1RAs are currently approved in the US. These drugs provide levels of GLP-1 receptor agonism many times that of endogenous GLP-1. The GLP-1RAs have been shown to significantly improve glycemic parameters and reduce body weight. These agents work by activating GLP-1 receptors in the pancreas, which leads to enhanced insulin release and reduced glucagon release—responses that are both glucose-dependent—with a consequent low risk for hypoglycemia. Effects on GLP-1 receptors in the CNS and the gastrointestinal tract cause reduced appetite and delayed glucose absorption due to slower gastric emptying. The most common adverse effects are gastrointestinal, which are transient and less common with the long-acting drugs. GLP-1RAs are recommended as second-line therapy in combination with metformin, sulfonylureas, thiazolidinediones or basal insulin, providing a means of enhancing glucose control while offsetting the weight gain associated with insulin and some oral agents. GLP-1RAs represent a useful tool that the primary care physician can use to help patients with T2DM achieve their therapeutic goals.
On the Massive String Problem

In this paper, we discuss an efficient and effective index mechanism to support the matching of massive pattern strings in against a very long target string. It is very important to the next generation sequencing in the biological research. The main idea behind it is to construct an automaton over all the pattern strings, and search the automaton against a BWT-array L created for a target string s to locate all the occurrences of every pattern in s once for all. Experiments have been conducted, which show that our method for this problem is better than the existing approaches. Keywords—string matching; DNA sequences; automata; BWTtransformation
Interactive digital storytelling in the sarajevo survival tools virtual environment

Virtual museums enable Internet users to explore museum collections online. The question is how to enhance the viewer's experience and learning in such environments. In the Sarajevo Survival Tools virtual museum we introduced a new concept of interactive digital storytelling that will enable the visitors to explore the virtual exhibits - objects from the siege of Sarajevo - guided by a digital story. This way the virtual museum visitors will learn about the context of the displayed objects and be motivated to explore all of them. In this paper we present the virtual environment we developed and our experience with it. The results from three empirical studies we conducted, indicate the positive influence of digital storytelling and sound effects on visitors' perceptual response, resulting in increased motivation and enjoyment, and more effective information conveyance.
High-resolution high-speed spectral domain optical coherence tomography

We have designed the spectral domain optical coherence tomography system using a broadband superluminescent diode laser source and home-built spectrometer, which acquires 2D or 3D images with high speed and high resolution. We have also introduced the N-point complex FFT algorithm, which is faster than 2N point real FFT, into the signal processing part, thus shortening signal processing time after image data acquisition. For the sake of convenient measurements, the spectral domain optical coherence tomography was manufactured in the form of a microscope. The volumetric image of a mouse anterior eye could be reconstructed from a few hundred 2D images.
O(sqrt(n))-Space and Polynomial-time Algorithm for the Planar Directed Graph Reachability Problem

Throughout this paper we will use n to denote the number of vertices of an input graph, which is the unique input size parameter. For a directed graph G = (V,E), its underlying graph is the undirected graph ‘G = (V, ‘E), where the vertex pair {u, v} belongs to ‘E if and only if at least one of (u, v) or (v, u) belongs to E. The planar directed graph reachability problem is a special case of the reachability problem where we restrict attention to input graphs whose underlying graph is planar. For a simpler setting to introduce some of our algorithmic ideas, we also consider the grid directed graph reachability problem, where we restrict attention to input graphs whose underlying graph is an edge-induced subgraph of a square grid. We will frequently refer to these problems with the shorter names “planar reachability” and “grid reachability. ” The directed graph reachability problem is a core problem in computational complexity theory. It is a canonical complete problem for the nondeterministic log-space, NL, and the famous open question L = NL is essentially asking whether the problem is solvable deterministically in logspace. The standard breadth first search algorithm and Savitch’s algorithm are two of the most fundamental algorithms known for solving the directed graph reachability problem. The former has a (roughly) linear space and time implementation, and the latter uses only O((log n)2)-space but requires Θ(nlogn) time. Hence a natural and significant question is whether we can design an algorithm for directed graph reachability that is efficient in both space and time. In particular, can we design a polynomial-time algorithm for the directed graph reachability problem that uses only O(n )-space for some small constant < 1? This question was asked by Wigderson in his excellent survey paper [13], and it remains unsettled. The best known result in this direction is the two decades old bound due to Barns, Buss, Ruzzo and Schieber [4], who showed a polynomial-time algorithm for the problem that uses O(n/2 √ logn) space. Note that this space bound is only slightly sublinear, and improving this bound remains a significant open question. In fact, there are indications that it may be difficult to improve this bound because there are
A robust real time system for remote heart rate measurement via camera

Heart rate (HR) is an important indicator of human health status. Traditional heart rate measurement methods rely on contact-based sensors or electrodes, which are inconvenient and troublesome for users. Remote sensing of the photoplephysmography (PPG) signal using a video camera provides a promising means to monitor vital signs of people without the need of any physical contact. However, until recently, most of the literature papers approaching this problem have only reported results from off-line recording videos taken under well controlled environments. In this paper, we propose a method to improve HR measurement accuracy under challenging environments involving factors such as subjects movement, complicated facial models (i.e., hair, glass, beards, etc.), subjects' distance to camera, and low illumination condition. We also build a framework for real-time measuring system and construct a stable model for recording and displaying results for long term heart rate monitoring. We tested our system on challenging dataset, and demonstrated that our method not only deals with real-time, on-line measurement tasks, but also outperforms others' works.
An Efficient Data-Distribution Mechanism in a Processor-In-Memory (PIM) Architecture Applied to Motion Estimation

In general, the main purpose of using processor-in-memory (PIM) modules is to dramatically increase the data-level parallelism (DLP) and avoid the limited issue rate of current systems (even when they include SIMD extensions) caused by the limited data bandwidth and functional units. Our approach is to divide the PIM module into hundreds of smaller pieces so that each of these smaller PIMs can execute motion estimation for a group of macro blocks in a parallel fashion. We also design the logic in each PIM to execute in a highly pipelined fashion so that even more parallelism can be exploited. The main contribution of this paper is the presentation of architectural techniques that can be used in the PIM module to overcome the addressing and data sharing overhead when these smaller PIMs are used. Our architectural techniques have been applied to motion estimation. Indeed, it has been reported that motion estimation takes the majority of the execution time of MPEG encoding and it has been researched by many because of its importance in MPEG encoding. With our paradigm and techniques, the host processor can be relieved from the most computationally demanding and data-intensive portions of the workload, which should therefore yield a significant performance gain. Indeed, we observed (when 512 of these smaller PIMs were used) a reduction in the number of memory accesses by a factor of up to 2,034 times. At the same time, the performance improved by a multiplicative factor as high as 439 times.
Issues in Disaster Communications

The Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11th, 2011 caused severe damage to the northern coast of the main island in Japan. Since then we have been working to help out the affected area in terms of IT support such as internetworking and providing PCs. Through our support activities we came across an interesting issue concerning collaboration with people from heterogeneous backgrounds. We call this problem disaster communications. In this paper we report our experiences during our support activities and our findings as well as some issues and our current work.
Preliminary study of a dot immunogold filtration assay for rapid detection of anti-HCV IgG.

Hepatitis C is a world-wide epidemic disease stemming from the hepatitis C virus (HCV). HCV is not only the pathogenic factor of hepatitis C but also plays an important role in the process of triggering and development of cirrhosis and liver cancer. There are two indicators for detecting HCV infection: one is HCV RNA which is the gene of the virus itself and the other is anti-HCV which is the antibody produced when the HCV antigen stimulates the body. The HCV antibody detection includes the detection of HCV IgG and HCV-IgM antibody. At present, EIA and the recombinant immunoblot assay (RIBA) are mainly used for detecting anti-HCV-IgG. By using the colloidal gold labeling technique to fix the structural and the non-structural domains of HCV recombinant antigen on the millipore membrane, a dot immunogold filtration assay for detecting anti-HCV-IgG was successfully established.
Manipulation of Mouse Hematopoietic Progenitors by Specific Retroviral Infection*

Previous studies have identified an enhancer 3′ of the scl gene that can direct transgene expression to hematopoietic progenitors and stem cells. Here we use this enhancer to restrict expression of the avian leukosis virus receptor, TVA, to hematopoietic stem cells and progenitors in bone marrow and fetal liver and demonstrate that retroviral infection can be used to specifically introduce exogenous sequences. We show that a majority of CFU-S12 multipotential progenitor cells can be transduced in vitro. Uniquely, transduction of TVA+ progenitors with a retrovirus encoding a puromycin resistance gene allows selection and expansion of a multipotential hematopoietic progenitor population that can be superinfected with high efficiency. Using this system we show for the first time that v-Myb oncoproteins expressed from avian viruses can induce a leukemic transformation in the mouse. The phenotype of the transformed cells is similar to that which is seen in the chicken and is likewise dependent on the particular structure of v-Myb. This implies that the basic mechanisms of action of mutated transcription factors in the etiology of leukemia are conserved between birds and mammals.
A wide-band bandpass filter using a novel embedded short-circuited stub resonator

This paper presents a wideband bandpass filter using an embedded short-circuited stub resonator. The resonator consists of a short-circuited stub placed inside the close-loop ring resonator functioning as the parallel circuits of inductor and capacitor. Therefore, its resonant frequency depends on loop dimension and the length of the stub. From the experiment, the resonator cell provides low return loss, sharp band rejection and the circuit size is much smaller than a quarter of wavelength. Then, the simple bandpass filter was designed at 2 GHz by using these resonators. It is found that the filter gives a fractional bandwidth (FBW) of more than 66% measured at the return loss of 20 dB and the insertion loss of less than 1 dB. Moreover, the measurement results are in good agreement with the simulation results.
Access Point Selection under QoS Requirements in Variable Channel-Width WLANs

This work investigates the access point (AP) selection problem in Variable channel-width WLANs (V-WLANs) using an evolutionary game-theoretic approach. A practical utility function is designed for each station in which the QoS requirement and energy consumption are considered. An Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) of the game corresponds to the desired AP selection outcome, which remains stable even if the stations occasionally select inappropriate APs. A distributed learning algorithm based on replicator dynamics is developed to obtain the ESS with only local information. Simulation results verify the convergence and effectiveness of our algorithm.
The Biotechnology Industry

Growth and change are the hallmarks of the developing biotechnology industry. Since the first approval of a biological product in 1982, over 40 biologicals, many of them medical breakthroughs, have been brought to market. The majority of biotechnology companies focus on developing human therapeutic agents, but about 25 percent of biotechnology companies focus on the diagnostic area, using monoclonal antibody technology, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology, and genetics to provide advances in diagnosis and disease monitoring. Structurally, few biotechnology firms are fully integrated companies with full capabilities in research, development, manufacturing, and sales and marketing. Many pursue strategic alliances with other companies to enhance their capabilities in research, development, and sales and marketing. Research alliances between companies and universities are also frequently used to enhance research capabilities. As the industry has matured, consolidation has occurred, with major pharmaceutical companies purchasing biotechnology companies and biotechnology companies merging to expand their capabilities. Research investment, as a percentage of gross sales, continues to be very high for biotechnology companies compared with traditional pharmaceutical companies. The cost of drug development is high, but the probability of approval appears to be somewhat better in the biotechnology field compared with traditional pharmaceuticals. Today, the biotechnology product pipeline is rich, with between 400 to 700 products in various stages of clinical development. Technology developments beyond recombinant DNA technology and monoclonal antibodies, such as antisense, genomics, and combinatorial chemistry, will lead to additional therapeutic and diagnostic breakthroughs.
Temporal Assessment Model for Monitoring Critical Patients

This paper gives an integrated view of developing a model for an assessment systems and monitoring tasks of critical patients. This model was designed according to the Temporal Abstraction dimensions and state interpretation levels, particularly the monitored physiological state. Monitoring arrhythmias was used as reference case for models development. A model based on the algorithm Smith-Waterman with the matrix substitution modified, was developed for the assessment state interpretation model, for this application. The modification was oriented to give more influence to the principal state for the temporal pattern represented. The assessment state space model, allow to obtain additional temporal information about a possible evolution, not previously available in classic monitors.
The first archaeological evidence for death by spearing in Australia

An Aboriginal man done to death on the dunes 4000 years ago was recently discovered during excavations beneath a bus shelter in Narrabeen on Sydney's northern beaches. The presence of backed microliths and the evidence for trauma in the bones showed that he had been killed with stone-tipped spears. Now we know how these backed points were used. A punishment ritual is implied by analogies with contact-period observations made in the eighteenth century AD.