Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Herpes simplex virus type 1 DNA replication and gene expression during explant-induced reactivation of latently infected murine sensory ganglia

Infectious virus assays and PCR amplification of DNA and RNA were used to investigate herpes simplex virus DNA replication and gene expression in two murine in vitro models for virus reactivation. We examined latent infections with wild-type (wt), precisely defined latency-associated transcript-negative (LAT-) mutants, and LAT+ rescuants of these mutants of the 17syn+ strain of virus in both murine trigeminal and lumbosacral ganglia and of the KOS(M) strain in the latter. In explants of ganglia latently infected with the LAT- mutant of strain 17syn+ virus, a reduction in number of cultures exhibiting cytopathic effects due to virus reactivation and measurable delays in virus recovery were observed compared with wt or the LAT+ rescuant. This LAT-specific effect was not seen in explants of lumbosacral ganglia latently infected with mutants derived from the KOS(M) strain of virus. Although there was appreciable variation between individual animals, no significant difference between LAT+ and LAT- virus in time of onset of viral DNA replication in explanted ganglia was seen with use of either virus strain. There was a slight decrease in the relative amount of viral DNA recovered compared with internal cellular controls in latently infected ganglia harboring the LAT- mutant of 17syn+ compared with the wt virus or the LAT+ rescuant. This reduced relative amount ranged from 0 to as much as 50% but averaged 20%. Such differences were not seen in infections with KOS(M)-derived mutants. In contrast, although expression of productive-cycle transcripts could be detected within 4 h following explant cultivation of latently infected ganglia, no differences between LAT+ and LAT- viruses could be seen. As discussed, these data place specific constraints on possible models for the role of LAT expression in in vitro reactivation systems.
GraphStream: A Tool for bridging the gap between Complex Systems and Dynamic Graphs

The notion of complex systems is common to many domains, from Biology to Economy, Computer Science, Physics, etc. Often, these systems are made of sets of entities moving in an evolving environment. One of their major characteristics is the emergence of some global properties stemmed from local interactions between the entities themselves and between the entities and the environment. The structure of these systems as sets of interacting entities leads researchers to model them as graphs. However, their understanding requires most often to consider the dynamics of their evolution. It is indeed not relevant to study some properties out of any temporal consideration. Thus, dynamic graphs seem to be a very suitable model for investigating the emergence and the conservation of some properties. GraphStream is a Java-based library whose main purpose is to help researchers and developers in their daily tasks of dynamic problem modeling and of classical graph management tasks: creation, processing, display, etc. It may also be used, and is indeed already used, for teaching purpose. GraphStream relies on an event-based engine allowing several event sources. Events may be included in the core of the application, read from a file or received from an event handler.
Effect of fiber volume content on electromechanical behavior of strain-hardening steel-fiber-reinforced cementitious composites

This research investigated the effect of fiber volume content on the electromechanical behavior of strain-hardening steel-fiber-reinforced cementitious composites under direct tension. There is strong correlation between the change of electrical resistivity and the tensile response of strain-hardening steel-fiber-reinforced cementitious composites: the electrical resistivity of strain-hardening steel-fiber-reinforced cementitious composites clearly decreased during strain hardening as the tensile strain of them increased. The electrical conductivity, tensile resistance, and damage-sensing capacity of strain-hardening steel-fiber-reinforced cementitious composites were generally increased as the volume content of twisted steel fibers added in a mortar matrix increased from 0.0 to 2.0%. The strain-hardening steel-fiber-reinforced cementitious composites with fiber content more than 1% by volume produced high damage-sensing capacity with high nominal gauge factor: absolute value over 150. Besides, the addition of carbon black or ground granulated blast furnace slag in mortar matrices significantly reduced the electrical resistivity but slightly enhanced the damage-sensing capability of strain-hardening steel-fiber-reinforced cementitious composites.
Study on Properties of High Strength Steel during Warm Roll Forming

Roll forming is a 3D deformation complex process. Stiffness of stands and strength of shafts are the preconditions for the production of precision products. However, the existing roll forming equipment cannot meet the requirements of the production for high strength steel or ultra high strength steel. In order to solve the forming problem of high strength steel or ultra high strength steel, it needs to redesign a set of roll forming equipment. The redesign of roll forming equipment not only makes the production cycle too long, but also results in a high cost. So it is not suitable for the production of forming products. In this paper, based on the existing roll forming equipment a new method of roll forming operation is proposed to optimize the production of U shaped products. The influences of the new method on the roll forming products such as mechanical properties, microstructures and surface qualities, have also been discussed, Based on the new warm roll forming operation, numerical simulation has also been carried out. The simulation result of geometry is in good agreement with experimental result.
Dysfunctionally phosphorylated type 1 insulin receptor substrate in neural‐derived blood exosomes of preclinical Alzheimer's disease

Insulin resistance causes diminished glucose uptake in similar regions of the brain in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM2). Brain tissue studies suggested that insulin resistance is caused by low insulin receptor signaling attributable to its abnormal association with more phospho (P)‐serine‐type 1 insulin receptor substrate (IRS‐1) and less P‐tyrosine‐IRS‐1. Plasma exosomes enriched for neural sources by immunoabsorption were obtained once from 26 patients with AD, 20 patients with DM2, 16 patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and matched case control subjects. At 2 time points, they were obtained from 22 others when cognitively normal and 1 to 10 yr later when diagnosed with AD. Mean exosomal levels of extracted P‐serine 312‐IRS‐1 and P‐pan‐tyrosine‐IRS‐1 by ELISA and the ratio of P‐serine 312‐IRS‐1 to P‐pan‐tyrosine‐IRS‐1 (insulin resistance factor, R) for AD and DM2 and P‐serine 312‐IRS‐1 and R for FTD were significantly different from those for case control subjects. The levels of R for AD were significandy higher than those for DM2 or FTD. Stepwise discriminant modeling showed correct classification of 100% of patients with AD, 97.5% of patients with DM2, and 84% of patients with FTD. In longitudinal studies of 22 patients with AD, exosomal levels of P‐serine 312‐IRS‐1, P‐pan‐tyrosine‐IRS‐1, and R were significantly different 1 to 10 yr before and at the time of diagnosis compared with control subjects. Insulin resistance reflected in R values from this blood test is higher for patients with AD, DM2, and FTD than case control subjects; higher for patients with AD than patients with DM2 or FTD; and accurately predicts development of AD up to 10 yr prior to clinical onset. —Kapogiannis, D. , Boxer, A. , Schwartz, J. B. , Abner, E. L. , Biragyn, A. , Masharani, U. , Frassetto, L. , Petersen, R. C. , Miller, B. L. , Goetzl, E. J. Dysfunctionally phosphorylated type 1 insulin receptor substrate in neural‐derived blood exosomes of preclinical Alzheimer's disease. FASEB J. 29, 589‐596 (2015). www.fasebj. org
Enhancement of Low-Contrast Curvilinear Features in Imagery

A new method is described for enhancing low-contrast curvilinear features in imagery that combines directional filtering with Fischler, Tenenbaum and Wolf's F* algorithm for computing minimum cost paths. The method exploits a phenomenon called "the stability of lines over angle. " The idea is that when a directionally filtered image contains a line plus noise, minimum cost paths tend to be aligned in the direction of the line with random jumps between parallel paths. When the input image contains noise only, the direction of minimum cost paths resemble random walks with drift. As the direction of the filter changes, minimum cost paths that follow true features persist and are more stable over angle than those that follow noise. Adding them up in an accumulator array over angle produces a larger number of votes along signal paths than along noise paths. This provides a means for enhancing trajectories of low-contrast features. Several examples illustrate the enhancement of forest trails in USGS aerial imagery, linear features on Mars, and roads in synthetic aperture radar imagery
Accelerated Training for Matrix-norm Regularization: A Boosting Approach

Sparse learning models typically combine a smooth loss with a nonsmooth penalty, such as trace norm. Although recent developments in sparse approximation have offered promising solution methods, current approaches either apply only to matrix-norm constrained problems or provide suboptimal convergence rates. In this paper, we propose a boosting method for regularized learning that guarantees e accuracy within O(1 /e) iterations. Performance is further accelerated by interlacing boosting with fixed-rank local optimization—exploiting a simpler local objective than previous work. The proposed method yields state-of-the-art performance on large-scale problems. We also demonstrate an application to latent multiview learning for which we provide the first efficient weak-oracle.
Sustained delivery of timolol maleate from poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid)/poly(lactic acid) microspheres for over 3 months

Abstract It is estimated that 2.2 million people have glaucoma in the US and 67 million people worldwide. The majority of cases are associated with elevated intraocular pressure (IOP) and decreasing IOP eliminates or greatly reduces degeneration in most cases, including cases in which the IOP is in the normal range but optic neuropathy occurs. Timolol maleate has the longest record of safety and efficacy to lower IOP and is administered via eye drops one or more times per day. Unfortunately, compliance is poor across patient populations leading to degeneration. Patients typically see their ophthalmologist once every 3–4 months. If one could administer a long-acting treatment while in the doctor's office, one might overcome the compliance issue and effectively preserve sight. The critical step is to develop a formulation for timolol maleate that leads to sustained delivery for greater than 90 days and would permit a different treatment paradigm, namely subconjunctival administration once every 3–4 months. By using a 50 : 50 blend of PLGA 502H and PLA, this study was able to fabricate microspheres that delivered timolol maleate continually over 107 days, well within the time frame needed to make subconjunctival administration feasible and permit a new approach to treating glaucoma and diseases of the eye more broadly.
A Character-Based Joint Model for Chinese Word Segmentation

The character-based tagging approach is a dominant technique for Chinese word segmentation, and both discriminative and generative models can be adopted in that framework. However, generative and discriminative character-based approaches are significantly different and complement each other. A simple joint model combining the character-based generative model and the discriminative one is thus proposed in this paper to take advantage of both approaches. Experiments on the Second SIGHAN Bakeoff show that this joint approach achieves 21% relative error reduction over the discriminative model and 14% over the generative one. In addition, closed tests also show that the proposed joint model outperforms all the existing approaches reported in the literature and achieves the best F-score in four out of five corpora.
Printed electronics: the challenges involved in printing devices, interconnects, and contacts based on inorganic materials

Printed electronics represent an emerging area of research that promises large markets due to the ability to bypass traditional expensive and inflexible silicon-based electronics to fabricate a variety of devices on flexible substrates using high-throughput printing approaches. This article presents a summary of work to date in the field of printed electronics and the materials chemistry involved. In particular, the focus is upon the use of metal- and metal oxide-containing inks in the preparation of contacts and interconnects. The review discusses the challenges associated with processing these types of inks and ways to successfully obtain the desired features.
Zooplankton communities and Bythotrephes longimanus in lakes of the montane region of the northern Alps

Abstract Lakes in the Alps represent a considerable fraction of nutrient-poor lakes in Central Europe, with unique biodiversity and ecosystem properties. Although some individual lakes are well studied, less knowledge is available on large-scale patterns essential to general understanding of their functioning. Here, we aimed to describe crustacean zooplankton communities (Cladocera, Copepoda) and identify their environmental drivers in the pelagic zone of 54 oligotrophic lakes in the montane region of the Alps (400–1200 m) in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, covering a spatial scale of 650 km. Moreover, we aimed to provide data on the distribution and ecological requirements of the North American invader Bythotrephes longimanus in its Central European native range. Communities were mainly dominated by widespread species typical of lowland habitats, and only a few true specialists of oligotrophic alpine lakes were present. The most frequent taxa were the Daphnia longispina complex and Eudiaptomus gracilis, with 48 and 45 occurrences, respectively. Species richness decreased with altitude and increased with lake area. The main structuring factors of community composition were chlorophyll a concentration and depth, which drove an apparent separation of mesotrophic and oligotrophic communities. Bythotrephes had 13 occurrences, showing a preference for deep oligotrophic lakes. Its presence was not coupled with lower crustacean species richness, as was repeatedly observed in North America. Additionally, it frequently co-occurred with the other large predatory cladoceran, Leptodora kindtii. B. longimanus might be considered a truly montane species in Central Europe, given its absence in lowland and alpine lakes.
An estimate of accuracy for interpolant numerical solutions of a PDE problem

In this paper we present an estimate of accuracy for a piecewise polynomial approximation of a classical numerical solution to a non linear differential problem. We suppose the numerical solution u is computed using a grid with a small linear step and interval time Tu, while the polynomial approximation v is an interpolation of the values of a numerical solution on a less fine grid and interval time Tv << Tu. The estimate shows that the interpolant solution v can be, under suitable hypotheses, a good approximation and in general its computational cost is much lower of the cost of the fine numerical solution. We present two possible applications to linear case and periodic case.
Expert Diagnosis Systems for Network Connection Problems

Expert system is an application of artificial intelligence that gathers the expertise of the experts and makes it available for the non-expert user. In this paper, an expert system is designed to diagnose the network connection problems in the computer. The database is built with Prolog and Java is used to build the user interface, and JIProlog is used to connect them both. A case study performed in Al- Nahrain University campus to test the system performance and the efficiency of the user interface. The results show an efficiency of 82.5% and ease of the Java interface for the users. The non-compatible operating system, Java failure, and the language difficulties for the users were behind the 17.5% efficiency failure.
Efficient Analysis of Probabilistic Programs with an Unbounded Counter

We show that a subclass of infinite-state probabilistic programs that can be modeled by probabilistic one-counter automata (pOC) admits an efficient quantitative analysis. We start by establishing a powerful link between pOC and martingale theory, which leads to fundamental observations about quantitative properties of runs in pOC. In particular, we provide a “divergence gap theorem”, which bounds a positive non-termination probability in pOC away from zero. Using these observations, we show that the expected termination time can be approximated up to an arbitrarily small relative error in polynomial time, and the same holds for the probability of all runs that satisfy a given ω-regular property encoded by a deterministic Rabin automaton.
Direct Pituitary Effects of Kisspeptin: Activation of Gonadotrophs and Somatotrophs and Stimulation of Luteinising Hormone and Growth Hormone Secretion

Recent, compelling evidence indicates that kisspeptins, the products of KiSS‐1 gene, and their receptor GPR54, represent key elements in the neuroendocrine control of reproduction, and that they act primarily by regulating gonadotrophin‐releasing hormone (GnRH) secretion at the hypothalamus. Conversely, and despite earlier reports showing GPR54 expression in the pituitary, the potential physiological roles of kisspeptins at this gland have remained elusive. To clarify this issue, cultures of rat pituitary cells were used to evaluate expression of KiSS‐1 and GPR54, and to monitor the ability of kisspeptin‐10 to stimulate Ca2+ responses in gonadotrophs and to elicit luteinising hormone (LH) secretion in vitro. The results obtained show that both GPR54 and KiSS‐1 are expressed in the pituitary of peripubertal male and female rats. Moreover, kisspeptin‐10 induced a rise in free cytosolic Ca2+ concentration ([Ca2+]i) in approximately 10% of male rat pituitary cells. Intriguingly, kisspeptin‐responsive cells included not only gonadotrophs, in which a 62.8 ± 16.0%[Ca2+]i rise was observed, but also somatotrophs, wherein kisspeptin induced a 60.3 ± 5.5%[Ca2+]i increase. Accordingly, challenge of dispersed pituitary cells with increasing kisspeptin‐10 concentrations induced dose‐related LH and growth hormone (GH) secretory responses, which were nevertheless of lower magnitude than those evoked by the primary regulators GnRH and GH‐releasing hormone, respectively. In particular, 10−8 M kisspeptin caused maximal increases in LH release (218.7 ± 23.6% and 180.4 ± 7.2% in male and female rat pituitary cells, respectively), and also stimulated maximally GH secretion (181.9 ± 14.9% and 260.2 ± 15.9% in male and female rat pituitary cells, respectively). Additionally, moderate summation of kisspeptin‐ and GnRH‐induced LH responses was observed after short‐term incubation of male rat pituitary cells. In conclusion, our results provide unequivocal evidence that kisspeptins exert direct pituitary effects in peripubertal male and female rats and suggest a possible autocrine/paracrine mode of action. The precise relevance and underlying mechanisms of this potential new actions of kisspeptins (i.e. the direct modulation of gonadotrophic and somatotrophic axis at the pituitary) deserve further analysis.
Estimation of English and non-English Language Use on the WWW

The World Wide Web has grown so big, in such an anarchic fashion, that it is difficult to describe. One of the evident intrinsic characteristics of the World Wide Web is its multilinguality. Here, we present a technique for estimating the size of a language-specific corpus given the frequency of commonly occurring words in the corpus. We apply this technique to estimating the number of words available through Web browsers for given languages. Comparing data from 1996 to data from 1999 and 2000, we calculate the growth of a number of European languages on the Web. As expected, non-English languages are growing at a faster pace than English, though the position of English is still dominant.
ExplodeLayout: Comprehending Patient Subgroups in Large Networks

Networks have been used to successfully identify and comprehend patient subgroups based on their characteristics (e.g., comorbidities or genes) with the goal of designing targeted interventions, a cornerstone of precision medicine. However, current network layout algorithms often fail to reveal patterns in large and dense networks despite having significant clustering. We therefore developed an algorithm called ExplodeLayout, which exploits the existence of clusters to automatically “explode” a traditional network layout with the goal of separating overlapping clusters to enhance their comprehensibility. We demonstrate the use of this algorithm to visualize a large dataset extracted from Medicare consisting of readmitted hip-fracture patients and their comorbidities, which enabled clinicians to comprehend patient subgroups and their comorbidities, and to infer mechanisms related to hospital readmission.
Optimal Strategies for Gaussian Jamming in Block-Fading Channels under Delay and Power Constraints

Without assuming any knowledge on source's codebook and its output signals, we formulate a Gaussian jamming problem in block fading channels as a two-player zero sum game. The outage probability is adopted as an objective function, over which transmitter aims at minimization and jammer aims at maximization by selecting their power control strategies. Optimal power control strategies for each player are obtained under both short-term and long-term power constraints. For the latter case, we first prove the non-existence of a Nash equilibrium, and then provide a complete solution for both maxmin and minimax problems. Numerical results demonstrate a sharp difference between the outage probabilities of the minimax and maxmin solutions.
BaBar Web job submission with Globus authentication and AFS access

We present two versions of a grid job submission system produced for the BaBar experiment. Both use globus job submission to process data spread across various sites, producing output which can be combined for analysis. The problems encountered with authorization and authentication, data location, job submission, and the input and output sandboxes are described, as are the solutions. The total system is still some way short of the aims of enterprises such as the EDG, but represent a significant step along the way.
Proteolytic conversion of hepatitis B virus e antigen precursor to end product occurs in a postendoplasmic reticulum compartment

At least two proteolytic events are involved in the biogenesis of hepatitis B virus e antigen. The first proteolytic event removes the signal peptide and results in the translocation of the precursor protein, P22, into the lumen of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). The second proteolytic event removes the carboxy-terminal arginine-rich sequence of P22 and converts it to the 16-kDa hepatitis B virus e antigen end product. In contrast to the first proteolytic event, the second proteolytic event is suppressed by brefeldin A, a chemical that inhibits the transport of protein from the ER to the Golgi apparatus. In subcellular fractionation experiments, P22 was detected in both the ER and the Golgi fractions, but P16 was detected only in the Golgi fraction. On the basis of these results, we conclude that the conversion of P22 to P16 occurs ina post-ER compartment, mostly likely the Golgi apparatus.