Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The C-terminal loop of the homing endonuclease I-CreI is essential for site recognition, DNA binding and cleavage

Meganucleases are sequence-specific endonucleases with large cleavage sites that can be used to induce efficient homologous gene targeting in cultured cells and plants. These enzymes open novel perspectives for genome engineering in a wide range of fields, including gene therapy. A new crystal structure of the I-CreI dimer without DNA has allowed the comparison with the DNA-bound protein. The C-terminal loop displays a different conformation, which suggests its implication in DNA binding. A site-directed mutagenesis study in this region demonstrates that whereas the C-terminal helix is negligible for DNA binding, the final C-terminal loop is essential in DNA binding and cleavage. We have identified two regions that comprise the Ser138–Lys139 and Lys142–Thr143 pairs whose double mutation affect DNA binding in vitro and abolish cleavage in vivo. However, the mutation of only one residue in these sites allows DNA binding in vitro and cleavage in vivo. These findings demonstrate that the C-terminal loop of I-CreI endonuclease plays a fundamental role in its catalytic mechanism and suggest this novel site as a region to take into account for engineering new endonucleases with tailored specificity.
Soluble Flt‐1 Regulates Flk‐1 Activation to Control Hematopoietic and Endothelial Development in an Oxygen‐Responsive Manner

Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and the vascular endothelial growth factor receptors (VEGFRs) regulate the development of hemogenic mesoderm. Oxygen concentration‐mediated activation of hypoxia‐inducible factor targets such as VEGF may serve as the molecular link between the microenvironment and mesoderm‐derived blood and endothelial cell specification. We used controlled‐oxygen microenvironments to manipulate the generation of hemogenic mesoderm and its derivatives from embryonic stem cells. Our studies revealed a novel role for soluble VEGFR1 (sFlt‐1) in modulating hemogenic mesoderm fate between hematopoietic and endothelial cells. Parallel measurements of VEGF and VEGFRs demonstrated that sFlt‐1 regulates VEGFR2 (Flk‐1) activation in both a developmental‐stage‐dependent and oxygen‐dependent manner. Early transient Flk‐1 signaling occurred in hypoxia because of low levels of sFlt‐1 and high levels of VEGF, yielding VEGF‐dependent generation of hemogenic mesoderm. Sustained (or delayed) Flk‐1 activation preferentially yielded hemogenic mesoderm‐derived endothelial cells. In contrast, delayed (sFlt‐1‐mediated) inhibition of Flk‐1 signaling resulted in hemogenic mesoderm‐derived blood progenitor cells. Ex vivo analyses of primary mouse embryo‐derived cells and analysis of transgenic mice secreting a Flt‐1‐Fc fusion protein (Fc, the region of an antibody which is constant and binds to receptors) support a hypothesis whereby microenvironmentally regulated blood and endothelial tissue specification is enabled by the temporally variant control of the levels of Flk‐1 activation.
A step-up/step-down SC DC-DC converter and its power saving techniques

To improve power efficiency, a power saving technique for the ring-type DC-DC converter is proposed in this paper. By reusing a part of the electric charge in stray parasitic capacitances, the proposed converter can achieve higher power efficiency than the conventional converter. The results of the simulation program with integrated circuit emphasis (SPICE) simulation showed that more than 8% of the power efficiency was improved by the proposed converter when the output load is 10kΩ. Furthermore, a handy equation to estimate the maximum power efficiency of the proposed converter is provided by theoretical analysis.
Evans's syndrome triggered by recombinant hepatitis B vaccine.

SIR-Recombinant hepatitis B vaccines are derived from hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) produced in yeast cells; these vaccines also contain aluminum hydroxide, thimerosal, and yeast protein, but they are free of human blood or blood products. Adverse reactions to hepatitis B vaccines are infrequent and usually mild. We report a case of Evans's syndrome apparently triggered by recombinant hepatitis B vaccine, a serious adverse event that we believe has not been previously described. A 33-year-old man presented with acute abdominal pain, polyarthralgia affecting his hands and feet, chills, and fever. Two days before admission, he had received the second dose of hepatitis B vaccine (Engerix-B, SmithKline Biologicals, Sunnyvale, CA), indicated by the fact that his wife was a chronic HBsAg carrier. There was no reaction to the first dose of vaccine. His hemoglobin level was 50 g/L, the platelet count was 11 X 109/L, and the white blood cell count was 7.20 X 109/L, with 2% band forms and no blasts. A blood smear showed intense anisocytosis and spherocytosis. The reticulocyte count was 20% (normal, 0.1%-2%). The erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) was 140 mm/h. Increased serum levels of unconjugated bilirubin and lactic dehydrogenase, undetectable haptoglobin, and a positive direct Coombs' test for IgG and C3 was consistent with acute autoimmune hemolytic anemia. Serum levels ofhemolytic complement (CH50) and C3 and C4 components of complement were depressed (40 U/mL, 0.3 g/L, and 0.1 g/L, respectively), and the level of IgE was slightly raised (439 U/mL). Measurements of B, T, CD4, and CD8 lymphocyte populations and of IgG, IgM, and IgA were within normal values. Tests for rheumatoid factor and antinuclear, anti-smooth muscle, anti-gastric mucosa, antimitochondrial, and antithyroid antibodies were negative. Two blood cultures were negative for bacteria. Serological tests for acute infection due to cytomegalovirus; Epstein-Barr virus; hepatitis A, B, and C viruses; Mycoplasma pneumoniae; and Toxoplasma gondii were all negative. Nontreponemal and treponemal tests for syphilis and an ELISA for human immunodeficiency virus-1 were also negative. Bone marrow examination on admission revealed intense erythroid hyperplasia and megakaryocytic thrombocytopenia. Immune thrombocytopenia was confirmed by detection of circulating immune complexes and IgG platelet-bound antibodies. He was initially treated with methylprednisolone (2 mg/[kg d]) for 2 weeks; clinical signs and abnormalities indicated by laboratory data resolved over 2 months, during which the dosage was reduced. After 6 months of follow-up care, the patient was asymptomatic, hematologic data were within normal ranges, and
Intra-arterial thrombolysis for acute stroke in patients 80 and older: a comparison of results in patients younger than 80 years.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Intra-arterial fibrinolytic therapy is a promising treatment for acute ischemic stroke. Few data are available on its use in elderly patients. The purpose of this study was to compare the baseline characteristics, complications, and outcomes between intra-arterially treated ischemic stroke patients aged > or = 80 years and their younger counterparts. METHODS Patients aged > or = 80 years (n = 33) were compared retrospectively with contemporaneous patients aged < 80 years (n = 81) from a registry of consecutive patients treated with intra-arterial thrombolysis over a 9-year period. RESULTS The very elderly and younger cohorts were very similar in baseline characteristics, including pretreatment stroke severity (National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale [NIHSS] 17 versus 16), differing only in history of stroke/transient ischemic attack (42% versus 22%, P = .01) and weight (66.8 versus 75.8 kg; P = .02). Significant differences in recanalization (TIMI 2-3) rates could not be detected between the very elderly and younger patients (79% versus 68%, P = .10). Rates of major symptomatic hemorrhage (7% versus 8%) and any intracerebral hemorrhage (39% versus 37%) did not differ. Outcomes at 90 days showed lower rates of excellent functional outcome (mRS < or = 1, 26% versus 40%, P = .02) and survival (57% versus 80%, P = .01) among the very elderly. CONCLUSIONS Intra-arterial fibrinolysis in the elderly can be accomplished with recanalization rates and hemorrhage rates equal to that in younger patients. Although mortality rates are higher and good functional outcomes are lower than in younger persons, nondisabling outcomes may be achieved in a quarter of patients. These findings suggest that the investigation and use of intra-arterial thrombolytic treatment in very elderly patients should not be avoided but pursued judiciously.
Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviors and Health-Related Quality of Life in Adolescents

OBJECTIVE: Our goal was to assess cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between physical activity and sedentary behaviors (television viewing, computer and video-game usage, and reading) with health-related QoL. METHODS: Of 2353 children surveyed (median age: 12.7 years), 1216 were resurveyed 5 years later, and 475 were newly recruited into the study (N = 1691). Children completed detailed activity questionnaires. Health-related QoL was assessed by using the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory (PedsQL). RESULTS: Cross-sectionally, after multivariable adjustment, adolescents in the highest versus lowest tertile of time spent in outdoor physical activity and television viewing had a higher (Ptrend = .001) and lower (Ptrend = .0003) total PedsQL score, respectively. Adolescents who remained in the highest tertiles compared with those in the lowest tertiles of total physical activity over the 5 years had significantly higher scores in the following areas: total (Ptrend = .04), physical summary (Ptrend = .0001), and social (Ptrend = .02) domains. Conversely, those in the highest versus lowest tertile of screen-viewing time during follow-up reported significantly lower values in the following areas: total score (6.34-unit difference), physical summary (4.86-unit difference), psychosocial summary (7.09-unit difference), and emotional (8.33-unit difference) and school (9.78-unit difference) domains. CONCLUSIONS: Regular physical activity over the long-term was associated with higher perceived health-related QoL among adolescents. Conversely, lower PedsQL scores were observed among those who spent the most time in screen-viewing activities. Improved understanding of these relationships could help in developing interventions to promote general well-being among adolescents.
Automated Speech Recognition Technology for Dialogue Interaction with Non-Native Interlocutors

Dialogue interaction with remote interlocutors is a difficult application area for speech recognition technology because of the limited duration of acoustic context available for adaptation, the narrow-band and compressed signal encoding used in telecommunications, high variability of spontaneous speech and the processing time constraints. It is even more difficult in the case of interacting with non-native speakers because of the broader allophonic variation, less canonical prosodic patterns, a higher rate of false starts and incomplete words, unusual word choice and smaller probability to have a grammatically well formed sentence. We present a comparative study of various approaches to speech recognition in non-native context. Comparing systems in terms of their accuracy and real-time factor we find that a Kaldi-based Deep Neural Network Acoustic Model (DNN-AM) system with online speaker adaptation by far outperforms other available methods.
Free-form Web Curation for Design Ideation : Processes and Pedagogy

We investigate how students engage in free-form web curation as a means of design ideation. Free-form web curation is a spontaneous, improvisational, and divergent creative process that involves choosing, sketching, writing, and assembling elements spatially. We take a design research approach, involving iterative design of a web curation system and pedagogy, building a relationship with our study context, collecting data, and analysis. Through this research, we identify and articulate five constituent processes of web curation: Gather, Assemble, Shift Perspective, Annotate, and Exhibit. In our classroom field study, 1247 students engaged in free-form web curation to perform ideation assignments. We develop mixed methods analysis of visual data, ideation metrics, and engagement measures. This informs implications for supporting design ideation through web curation, and more broadly, for conducting design research in the classroom. ACM Classification
IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration

This document specifies the steps a host takes in deciding how to autoconfigure its interfaces in IP version 6. The autoconfiguration process includes creating a link-local address and verifying its uniqueness on a link, determining what information should be autoconfigured (addresses, other information, or both), and in the case of addresses, whether they should be obtained through the stateless mechanism, the stateful mechanism, or both. This document defines the process for generating a link-local address, the process for generating site-local and global addresses via stateless address autoconfiguration, and the Duplicate Address Detection procedure. The details of autoconfiguration using the stateful protocol are specified elsewhere.
Personalized recommendation system for Sina MicroComic users

The MicroComic Website underneath the Chinese biggest social network Sina.com (Comic.sina.com.cn) provides a broad range of comics for a huge set of users. The demand of a personalized recommendation system for comic readers has been put on the table recently to improve the users' experience. This paper first investigates the classic item-based collaborative filtering and latent factor model via utilizing the official data sets provided by the Sina.com Company. Then a hybrid recommendation approach is proposed to enhance the recommender performance. The recommendation system can estimate each individual user's preference of the unread comics and generate recommendation list of comics with relative high ratings. The proposed recommender achieves not only good prediction accuracy but outperforms the current recommendation system in respect of Coverage.
Structures of bromoalkanes' photodissociation in solution by means of ultrafast extended x-ray absorption fine-structure spectroscopy

The structures of initial and final products of bromoalkanes' photodisociation reaction in cyclohexane solution have been measured with a bond length accuracy of 0.02 Å by means of ultrafast time-resolved extended x-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy. The photoredaction mechanism is also discussed.
Enhanced performance for two-degree-of-freedom control scheme for second order unstable processes with time delay

The present study suggested a modified disturbance estimator in a recently published two-degree-of-freedom control scheme for open-loop unstable process with time delay. A simple PID controller cascaded with lead lag filter replaces the high order disturbance estimator for enhanced performance. A new analytical method, which has only one tuning parameter, is developed for the design of the modified disturbance estimator. Several illustrative examples taken from previous works are included to demonstrate the superiority of the modified disturbance estimator. The results show the proposed disturbance estimator provides superior performance both in nominal and robust cases. The proposed method also has several important advantages for the process engineers in industries: it covers several class of unstable process with time delay in a unified manner; it is simple and easy to design and tune.
Girls and their bodies: approaching a more emancipatory physical education

In this paper I will consider how girls become alienated from their bodies and how this is exacerbated by some of the current practices of formal physical education. I shall argue that a more fertile approach to the education of girls' bodies may be through the expressive arts, particularly dance and drama. From a very early age, girls are encouraged to be alienated from their bodies and to restrict their physical activity. By the age of 11, many girls are focused on the need to be thin, pretty and physically inactive. School physical and health education does little to address these issues and could be argued to exacerbate them. The school's emphasis on slimness, perfection and physical success, combined with self- and mutual-surveillance, lead girls to treat their bodies as objects to be worked on rather than an accepted part of the self. Traditional approaches to the education of girls' bodies are failing; they do not encourage a healthy embodiment. Arthur W. Frank argues that through the collaborative work of expressive dance forms, the body is able to recognise itself and be recognised; I suggest that the alienation from the body encouraged elsewhere in schooling may thereby be mitigated.
Enhanced Angiogenic Capacity of Human Umbilical Vein Endothelial Cells From Women With Preeclampsia

Maternal and placental angiogenic abnormalities are a common feature of preeclampsia. The aim of this study was to determine if endothelial cells from women with preeclampsia exhibit different angiogenic responses compared to healthy cells. Using the endothelial tube formation assay, we have shown that primary human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) isolated from women with preeclampsia display greater levels of in vitro angiogenic branching compared to cells from healthy women. A comparable increase in tube formation was observed in healthy cells cultured at 0.5% O2. Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) receptor inhibition resulted in a decrease in angiogenesis in both healthy hypoxic cells and cells from women with preeclampsia. These findings demonstrate that HUVECs from women with preeclampsia exhibit inherent differences in their angiogenic capacity which are apparent in the absence of placental or maternal factors.
Turkish‐speaking First Graders in Norway Acquiring Second Language Vocabulary, Listening Comprehension and Literacy Skills

This study explored relationships between characteristics of classroom talk exposure and immigrant first graders' acquisition of second language oral skills (vocabulary and listening comprehension) and literacy skills. Twenty‐six children (mean age = 6.10 years) with Turkish as their first language and Norwegian as their second, attending various multilingual and ethnically diverse classrooms in Norway, were videotaped during classroom conversations. Classroom talk was coded for vocabulary richness, discursive complexity and emergent phonics talk and the children's oral language and literacy skills were assessed. Classroom vocabulary richness and discursive complexity predicted the children's second language vocabulary skills and listening comprehension after controlling for maternal education, but did not predict their literacy skills. The density of emergent phonics talk did not predict target children's code‐related skills in this sample. Applied perspectives related to second language learning in multiparty settings are discussed.
Transactions letters - Combining long-term and low-rate short-term channel state information over correlated mimo channels

A simple structure to exploit both long-term and partial short-term channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) over a family of correlated multiple-antenna channels is proposed. Partial short-term CSIT in the form of a weighting matrix is combined with a unitary transformation based on the long-term channel statistics. The heavily quantized feedback link is directly optimized to maximize the expected achievable rate under different power constraints, using vector quantization and convex optimization techniques on a sample channel distribution. Robustness against errors in the feedback link is also pursued with tools in channel optimized vector quantization. Simulations indicate the benefits of the proposed scheme.
Statistically Optimal Combination of Algorithms

Automatic specialization of algorithms to a limited domain is an interesting and industrially applicable problem. We calculate the optimal assignment of computational resources to several different solvers that solve the same problem. Optimality is considered with regard to the expected solution time on a set of problem instances from the domain of interest. We present two approaches, a static and dynamic one. The static approach leads to a simple analytically calculable solution. The dynamic approach results in formulation of the problem as a Markov Decision Process. Our tests on the SAT Problem show that the presented methods are quite effective. Therefore, both methods are attractive for applications and future research.
Psychological Momentum within Competitive Soccer: Players' Perspectives

The purpose of this investigation was to identify and examine perceptions of psychological momentum from the perspective of competing players in a team sport to provide applied implications for athletes, coaches, and sport psychology practitioners. Participants were five university soccer players who had played in the National British University Sports Association competition during the previous season. Data were collected via three phases of formal interviews, which were supplemented by a comprehensive member check (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Furthermore, transcribed interviews were subjected to an inductive content analysis. Participants described a range of psychological momentum triggers and outcomes based on their experiences of positive and negative psychological momentum. Moreover, participants described strategies used to develop and maintain positive psychological momentum and strategies to overcome negative psychological momentum. Findings are discussed in relation to applied implications for athletes, coaches, and sport psychology consultants operating in team sport settings.
In vivo transcranial cavitation threshold detection during ultrasound-induced blood–brain barrier opening in mice

The in vivo cavitation response associated with blood–brain barrier (BBB) opening as induced by transcranial focused ultrasound (FUS) in conjunction with microbubbles was studied in order to better identify the underlying mechanism in its noninvasive application. A cylindrically focused hydrophone, confocal with the FUS transducer, was used as a passive cavitation detector (PCD) to identify the threshold of inertial cavitation (IC) in the presence of Definity® microbubbles (mean diameter range: 1.1–3.3 µm, Lantheus Medical Imaging, MA, USA). A vessel phantom was first used to determine the reliability of the PCD prior to in vivo use. A cerebral blood vessel was simulated by generating a cylindrical channel of 610 µm in diameter inside a polyacrylamide gel and by saturating its volume with microbubbles. The microbubbles were sonicated through an excised mouse skull. Second, the same PCD setup was employed for in vivo noninvasive (i.e. transdermal and transcranial) cavitation detection during BBB opening. After the intravenous administration of Definity® microbubbles, pulsed FUS was applied (frequency: 1.525 or 1.5 MHz, peak-rarefactional pressure: 0.15–0.60 MPa, duty cycle: 20%, PRF: 10 Hz, duration: 1 min with a 30 s interval) to the right hippocampus of twenty-six (n = 26) mice in vivo through intact scalp and skull. T1 and T2-weighted MR images were used to verify the BBB opening. A spectrogram was generated at each pressure in order to detect the IC onset and duration. The threshold of BBB opening was found to be at a 0.30 MPa peak-rarefactional pressure in vivo. Both the phantom and in vivo studies indicated that the IC pressure threshold had a peak-rarefactional amplitude of 0.45 MPa. This indicated that BBB opening may not require IC at or near the threshold. Histological analysis showed that BBB opening could be induced without any cellular damage at 0.30 and 0.45 MPa. In conclusion, the cavitation response could be detected without craniotomy in mice and IC may not be required for BBB opening at relatively low pressures.