Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Toll-like receptor-5 agonist, entolimod, suppresses metastasis and induces immunity by stimulating an NK-dendritic-CD8+ T-cell axis

Significance Innate immune modulators can generate a potent antitumor T-cell response and are thus a desirable approach to immunotherapy. However, their use is limited by the risk of induction of acute inflammation. In this regard, bacterial flagellin is unique among other innate immune modulators because of a significantly safer cytokine profile induced upon activation by its target, Toll-like receptor 5 (TLR5). We show here that systemic administration of entolimod, a pharmacologically optimized flagellin derivative, induces a cascade of cell–cell signaling resulting in mobilization to the liver of various components of innate and adaptive immunity, followed by suppression of liver metastases and development of long-term antitumor immune memory. Thus, TLR5 agonists can be considered as an organ-specific immunotherapy for the treatment and prevention of metastases. Activation of an anticancer innate immune response is highly desirable because of its inherent ability to generate an adaptive antitumor T-cell response. However, insufficient safety of innate immune modulators limits clinical use to topical applications. Toll-like receptor 5 (TLR5) agonists are favorably positioned as potential systemic immunotherapeutic agents because of unusual tissue specificity of expression, uniquely safe profile of induced cytokines, and antitumor efficacy demonstrated in a number of animal models. Here, we decipher the molecular and cellular events underlying the metastasis suppressive activity of entolimod, a clinical stage TLR5 agonist that activates NF-κB–, AP-1–, and STAT3–driven immunomodulatory signaling pathways specifically within the liver. Used as a single agent in murine colon and mammary metastatic cancer models, entolimod rapidly induces CXCL9 and -10 that support homing of blood-borne CXCR3-expressing NK cells to the liver predominantly through an IFN-γ signaling independent mechanism. NK cell-dependent activation of dendritic cells is followed by stimulation of a CD8+ T-cell response, which exert both antimetastatic effect of entolimod and establishment of tumor-specific and durable immune memory. These results define systemically administered TLR5 agonists as organ-specific immunoadjuvants, enabling efficient antitumor vaccination that does not depend on identification of tumor-specific antigens.
A timing model for static CMOS gates

A simple but accurate delay model is presented for both simple and complex static logic gates. Unlike the previous delay models which assume the worst-case scenario, the present model has the capability of handling the different input switching conditions. In the delay analysis of a circuit, failing to take into account the position of the transistor that is switching can result in a delay value which is off by a margin of 100% or more from the actual. This novel modeling technique has been implemented in LISP on a TI Explorer II workstation Lisp Machine as a part of the DROID design automation environment. <<ETX>>
Wavelet analysis of multi-mode behavior of an etched Fiber Bragg Grating Sensor operating in sucrose solutions

Fiber optic sensors represent an attractive alternative in chemical, bio-chemical and medical applications. Their success can be retrieved in their peculiar properties such as: electromagnetic interference immunity, fast response, high sensitivity, and small size. In this context, Fiber Bragg Gratings (FBGs) play a key role in applications like measurements of temperature and strain. The mechanism of FBGs is related to the dependence between the characteristic wavelength reflected by the FBG and the effective index of the modes propagating inside the fibers. This property can be exploited to engineer a new and inexpensive class of FBG devices for measuring refractive index of solutions. By reducing the cladding thickness of the single mode fiber, where the FBG is inscribed, the structure becomes three layers and the modes guidance properties become more and more dependent on the external environment, including the refractive index of the solution to measure. In this work, an FBG has been etched by a solution of HF acid and immersed in different solutions of water and sucrose. Results show a strong multi-modal behavior induced by the guidance properties of the three-layer system. The reflected spectra, characterized by a large band whose width, are strictly dependent on the sucrose concentration in solution. As the sucrose increases, the refractive index of the solution increases. The bandwidth reduces, showing a wavelength shift toward longer wavelength. While the wavelength shift is not so relevant the variation of the bandwidth is significant, suggesting an effective interrogation method based on wavelet signal processing.
Varicose veins and their management

Varicose veins are tortuous, widened veins in the subcutaneous tissues of the legs and are often easily visible. Their valves are usually incompetent so that reflux of blood occurs, and the resulting venous hypertension can cause symptoms. Varicose veins are widely seen as medically unimportant and deserving low priority for treatment. They are common, affecting nearly a third of adults in Western societies, and few people with varicose veins are ever harmed by them. However, they cause concern and distress on a large scale, most of which can be dealt with by good explanation and reassurance, or by a variety of treatments which are evolving rapidly at present. Patients can now be referred for more precise assessment and a greater range of therapeutic options than ever before. A large UK population study has shown age adjusted prevalences of 40% in men and 32% in women, although women more often present for treatment.1 The age of onset varies; some people develop varicose veins in their teens, but prevalence rises with age. Varicose veins often appear first in pregnancy, and further pregnancies can make them worse. A family history is common,1 but people should be reassured that having close relatives with severe symptoms from varicose veins or ulcers does not confer any great likelihood that they will have similar problems. #### Data sources and selection criteria This review is based on three main sources: #### Summary points Most people with varicose veins are never harmed by them—good explanation and reassurance are fundamental Ultrasound techniques (hand held …
Transcriptome Assembly and Comparison of an Allotetraploid Weed Species, Annual Bluegrass, with its Two Diploid Progenitor Species, Poa supina Schrad and Poa infirma Kunth

Annual bluegrass (Poa annua L.) is one of the most widespread weed species in this world. As a young allotetraploid, P. annua has occupied diverse environments from Antarctic area to subtropical regions. To unveil the evolutionary mystery behind P. annua's wide distribution, extensive adaptability and phenotypic plasticity needs collaboration from multiple research scopes from ecology and plant physiology to population genetics and molecular biology. However, the lack of omic data and reference has greatly hampered the study. This is the first comprehensive transcriptome study on Poa species. Total RNA was extracted from P. annua and its two proposed diploid parents, P. supina Schrad and P. infirma Kunth, and sequenced in Illumina Hiseq2000. Optimized, nonredundant transcriptome references were generated for each species using four de novo assemblers (Trinity, Velvet, SOAPdenovo, and CLC Genomics Workbench) and a redundancy‐reducing pipeline (CD‐HIT‐EST and EvidentialGene tr2aacds). Using the constructed transcriptomes together with sequencing reads, we found high similarity in nucleotide sequences and homeologous polymorphisms between P. annua and the two proposed parents. Comparison of chloroplast and mitochondrion genes further confirmed P. infirma as the maternal parent. Less nucleotide percentage differences were observed between P. infirma and infirma homeologs than between P. supina and supina homeologs, indicating a higher nucleotide substitution rates in supina homeologs than in infirma homeologs. Gene ontology (GO) enrichment analysis suggested the more compatible cytoplasmic environment and cellular apparatus for infirma homeologs as the major cause for this phenomenon.
POSTER : Assessing the Usability of the new Radio Clip-Based Human Interaction Proofs

Human Interaction Proofs (HIPs) are widely adopted to protect websites and online accounts from the voracious attacks of automated programs. Unfortunately, HIPs have become one of the major accessibility obstacles for individuals with visual disabilities. Audio-based HIPs were developed to address the challenge. Previous studies suggest that those audio-based HIPs, although theoretically accessible for blind users, are very hard to use and have low task success rates. We conducted an empirical study to evaluate the efficiency and accuracy of the new radio-clip based CAPTCHA. Based on the data collected, blind users still find the audio CAPTCHAs hard to use.
Atmospheric Optics

Colors of the sky and colored displays in the sky are mostly a consequence of selective scattering by molecules or particles, absorption usually being irrelevant. Molecular scattering selective by wavelength – incident sunlight of some wavelengths being scattered more than others – but the same in any direction at all wavelengths gives rise to the blue of the sky and the red of sunsets and sunrises. Scattering by particles selective by direction – different in different directions at a given wavelength – gives rise to rainbows, coronas, iridescent clouds, the glory, sun dogs, halos, and other ice-crystal displays. The size distribution of these particles and their shapes determine what is observed, water droplets and ice crystals, for example, resulting in distinct displays. To understand the variation and color and brightness of the sky as well as the brightness of clouds requires coming to grips with multiple scattering: scatterers in an ensemble are illuminated by incident sunlight and by the scattered light from each other. The optical properties of an ensemble are not necessarily those of its individual members. Mirages are a consequence of the spatial variation of coherent scattering (refraction) by air molecules, whereas the green flash owes its existence to both coherent scattering by molecules and incoherent scattering by molecules and particles.
The information retrieval challenge of human digital memories

Today people are storing increasing amounts of personal information in digital format. While storage of such information is becoming straight forward, retrieval from the vast personal archives that this is creating poses significant challenges. Existing retrieval techniques are good at retrieving from non-personal spaces, such as the World Wide Web. However they are not sufficient for retrieval of items from these new unstructured spaces which contain items that are personal to the individual, and of which the user has personal memories and with which has had previous interaction. We believe that there are new and exciting possibilities for retrieval from personal archives. Memory cues act as triggers for individuals in the remembering process, a better understanding of memory cues will enable us to design new and effective retrieval algorithms and systems for personal archives. Context data, such as time and location, is already proving to play a key part in this special retrieval domain, for example for searching personal photo archives, we believe there are many other rich sources of context that can be exploited for retrieval from personal archives.
Planar Rayleigh scattering and laser-induced fluorescence for visualization of a hot, Mach 2 annular air jet

R. Jeffrey BallaLangley Research Center • Hampton, Virginia(NASA-TM-4576) PLANAR RAYLEIGHSCAT[ERING AND LASER-INDUCEDFLUORESCENCE FOR VISUALIZATION OF AHOT, MACH 2 ANNULAR AIR JET (NASA.L_nq|ey Research Center) 17 pHI/12N95-13196Unclas0028110National Aeronautics and Space AdministrationLangley Research Center • Hampton, Virginia 23681-0001
Coordinate-descent for learning orthogonal matrices through Givens rotations

Optimizing over the set of orthogonal matrices is a central component in problems like sparse-PCA or tensor decomposition. Unfortunately, such optimization is hard since simple operations on orthogonal matrices easily break orthogonality, and correcting orthogonality usually costs a large amount of computation. Here we propose a framework for optimizing orthogonal matrices, that is the parallel of coordinate-descent in Euclidean spaces. It is based on Givens-rotations, a fast-to-compute operation that affects a small number of entries in the learned matrix, and preserves orthogonality. We show two applications of this approach: an algorithm for tensor decompositions used in learning mixture models, and an algorithm for sparse-PCA. We study the parameter regime where a Givens rotation approach converges faster and achieves a superior model on a genome-wide brain-wide mRNA expression dataset.
Management of Symptoms in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Comprehensive Review of Pharmacologic and Complementary-Alternative Medicine Treatments

In the care of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), medical treatment is typically considered an adjunct to educational and behavioral interventions. Nonetheless, large proportions of children with ASD are managed medically and receive both pharmacologic and complementary-alternative medicine (CAM) treatments. Although many medical treatments have been studied in children with ASD, studies vary widely in terms of the sample, sample size, research design, purposes of treatment, and measurements of change. Surprisingly, comprehensive reviews of the options for medical management in ASD are lacking, particularly reviews that address both pharmacologic and CAM treatments. Furthermore, reviews to date tend to emphasize general effects of medication; this perspective contradicts medical practice, which targets particular symptoms during treatment selection and monitoring. This review of 115 studies adds to the ASD treatment literature by (1) including studies of individuals 0 to 22 years of age; (2) aggregating studies of pharmacologic treatments and CAM treatments; and importantly, (3) organizing treatment response by ASD symptoms, differentiating core and associated symptoms.
Survival in patients with acute myeloblastic leukemia in Germany and the United States: Major differences in survival in young adults

Previous epidemiologic studies on AML have been limited by the rarity of the disease. Here, we present population level data on survival of patients with AML in Germany and the United States (US). Data were extracted from 11 population‐based cancer registries in Germany and the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER13) database in the US. Patients diagnosed with AML in 1997–2011 were included. Period analysis was used to estimate 5‐year relative survival (RS) and trends in survival in the early 21st century. Overall 5‐year age‐adjusted RS for patients with AML in 2007–2011 was greater in Germany than in the US at 22.8% and 18.8%, respectively. Five‐year RS was higher in Germany than in the US at all ages, with particularly large differences at ages 15–24 for whom 5‐year RS was 64.3% in Germany and 55.0% in the US and 35–44, with 5‐year RS estimates of 61.8% in Germany and 46.6% in the US. Most of the difference in 5‐year RS was due to higher 1‐year RS, with overall 1‐year RS estimates of 47.0% in Germany and 38.5% in the US. A small increase in RS was observed between 2003–2005 and 2009–2011 in both countries, but no increase in survival was observed in either country for ages 75+. To our knowledge, this is the first detailed description of AML survival in Germany. Comparison to the US suggests that further analysis into risk factors for poor outcomes in AML in the US may be useful in improving survival.
Mobility-aware trustworthy crowdsourcing in cloud-centric Internet of Things

In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, smart devices that are equipped with various types of sensors can enable access to the IoT architecture through a cloud-inspired service model, namely Sensing-as-a-Service (S2aaS). S2aaS can provide crowdsourced data to an application running on a cloud platform. The crowdsourced data can be used for several purposes such as public safety. One of the biggest challenges here is the incentive mechanisms for the users who are requested to provide S2aaS. In this paper, we propose mobility-aware trustworthy crowdsourcing (MATCS) framework in a cloud-centric IoT architecture which adopts and extends a previous scheme, Trustworthy Sensing for Crowd Management (TSCM) [1] by incorporating user mobility-awareness in the presence of maliciously altered sensing data. MATCS employs a user-centric incentive mechanism which collects sensing data based on an auction procedure. In the auction procedure, MATCS uses users' reputations, bids, current location and their estimated dislocation during crowdsourcing process. Furthermore, in order to investigate the benefits of reputation-awareness, we also propose reputation-unaware Mobility-Aware Crowdsourcing (MACS). Performance of MATCS is evaluated via simulations, and it is compared to MACS and a benchmark scheme, which aims at making a compromise between the utilities of the users and the platform by considering neither mobility nor trustworthiness. Simulation results confirm that mobility-awareness improves the utility of the platform significantly whereas combining reputation-awareness and mobility-awareness by MATCS can triple the improvement. Besides, user incomes are not significantly impacted by MACS or MATCS when users are mobile. Furthermore, maliciously altered data ratio can be degraded by 20%~55% by reputation-awareness in MATCS.
Distribution and regulation of gonadotropin-releasing hormone, kisspeptin, RF-amide related peptide-3, and dynorphin in the bovine hypothalamus

Recent work has led to the hypothesis that kisspeptin/neurokinin B/dynorphin (KNDy) neurons in the arcuate nucleus (ARC) play a key role in gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) pulse generation and gonadal steroid feedback, with kisspeptin driving GnRH release and neurokinin B and dynorphin acting as pulse start and stop signals, respectively. A separate cell group, expressing RFamide-related peptide-3 (RFRP-3) has been shown to be a primary inhibitor of GnRH release. Very little is known regarding these cell groups in the bovine. In this study, we examined the relative immunoreactivity of kisspeptin, dynorphin, and RFRP-3 and their possible connectivity to GnRH neurons in the hypothalami of periestrus and diestrus bovine. While GnRH and RFRP-3 immunoreactivity were unchanged, kisspeptin and dynorphin immunoreactivity levels varied in relation to plasma progesterone concentrations and estrous status. Animals with higher plasma progesterone concentrations in diestrus had lower kisspeptin and increased dynorphin immunoreactivity in the ARC. The percentage of GnRH cells with kisspeptin or RFRP-3 fibers in close apposition did not differ between estrous stages. However, the proportions of GnRH cells with kisspeptin or RFRP-3 contacts (∼49.8% and ∼31.3%, respectively) suggest direct communication between kisspeptin and RFRP-3 cells to GnRH cells in the bovine. The data produced in this work support roles for kisspeptin and dynorphin, within the KNDy neural network, in controlling GnRH release over the ovarian cycle and conveying progesterone-negative feedback onto GnRH neurons in the bovine.
Determination of pulp vitality in vivo with pulse oximetry.

AIM To evaluate the use of pulse oximetry as a test for pulp vitality, by comparing in the same patient, the levels of oxygen saturation of the index finger and of the maxillary central incisor and canine teeth without clinically detectable pulp inflammation. METHODOLOGY Seventeen male and female patients aged between 26 and 38 years participated and a total of 32 maxillary central incisor and 32 canine teeth were analysed. Selection criteria required the teeth to have healthy crowns, or with restorations no more than 2 mm in diameter and no clinical and radiographical signs or symptoms of pulp or periapical inflammatory changes. The negative control group consisted of 10 root filled teeth. Measurements were first taken from the index finger of patients. Their teeth were then subjected to a thermal test with refrigerant gas and then to a vitality test with pulse oximetry. Data were analysed by Pearson's and paired t-tests. RESULTS There were no significant statistical correlations between blood oxygen levels in the index finger and in the teeth of the patient (P > 0.05). There was a statistically significant difference in the oxygen levels between the two tooth groups studied and the index finger (P <or= 0.002). Mean oxygen values in the index finger of patients were 95% (SD = 1.6), oxygen values in the maxillary central incisor were 91.29% (SD = 2.61) and mean oxygen values in maxillary canine were 90.69% (SD = 2.71). CONCLUSION The method determined consistently the level of blood oxygen saturation of the pulp in maxillary central incisor and canine teeth and can therefore be used for pulp vitality testing. Further studies are required to assess the effectiveness and validity of pulse oximetry in determining pulp vitality in traumatized teeth.
Mood and sexual function in polycystic ovary syndrome.

Women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) fail to conform with societal norms for outer appearance. Many PCOS patients thus feel stigmatized in the sense of a loss of "feminine identity. " In addition to somatic impairment, mood disturbances such as depression and limitations in emotional well-being, quality of life, and life satisfaction, the diagnosis of PCOS also has a negative impact on sexual self-worth and sexual satisfaction. Both obesity and hirsutism are major determinants of the physical component of quality of life in affected women. However, its psychological aspect appears to be inherent and specific for PCOS. Confirmation of the diagnosis and provision of detailed information to affected women, together with the availability of interdisciplinary treatment aimed at improving PCOS-related symptoms, such as hirsutism, obesity, menstrual irregularity, and infertility, will also reduce psychological distress and improve sexual self-worth. New treatment options, including insulin sensitizers, psychological counseling, and participation in a PCOS support group, are likely to further improve life satisfaction and coping of affected women.
Protected data paths: delivering sensitive data via untrusted proxies

The ability to share sensitive information is a key necessity for today's distributed enterprise applications. This paper presents a kernel-level mechanism for controlling the exchanges of sensitive data, termed Protected Data Paths. The mechanism permits only machines with suitable credentials to cache and manipulate protected data, and it gives protection domains access to such data only as per their rights specified in the capabilities they possess. Our implementation of Protected Data Paths in Linux operates by creating protected communication channels between participating machines. Path establishment requires such machines' kernel domains to have suitable credentials. Data transferred via such paths is made available to application-level domains only as per their current data access capabilities, guaranteed by kernellevel supervision of such data accesses.