Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
EFFECT OF CARBONIC ANHYDRASE INHIBITORS ON THE INORGANIC CARBON UPTAKE BY PHYTOPLANKTON NATURAL ASSEMBLAGES 1

The role of carbonic anhydrase (CA) in inorganic carbon acquisition (dissolved inorganic carbon, DIC) was examined in Alboran Sea phytoplankton assemblages. The study area was characterized by a relatively high variability in nutrient concentration and in abundance and taxonomic composition of phytoplankton. Therefore, the relationship between environmental variability and capacity for using HCO3− via external CA (eCA) was examined. Acetazolamide (AZ, an inhibitor of eCA) inhibited the primary productivity (PP) in 50% of the samples, with inhibition percentages ranging from 13% to 60%. The AZ effect was more prominent in the samples that exhibited PP >1 mg C · m−3 · h−1, indicating that the contribution of eCA to the DIC photosynthetic flux was irrelevant at low PP. The inhibition of primary productivity by AZ was significantly correlated to the abundance of diatoms. However, there was no a relationship between AZ effect and CO2 partial pressure (pCO2) or nutrient concentration, indicating that the variability in the PP percentage supported by eCA was mainly due to differences in taxonomic composition of the phytoplankton assemblages. Ethoxyzolamide (EZ, an inhibitor of both external and internal CA) affected 13 of 14 analyzed samples, with PP inhibition percentages varying from 50% to 95%. The effects of AZ and EZ were partially reversed by doubling DIC concentration. These results imply that CA activity (external and/or internal) was involved in inorganic carbon acquisition in most the samples. However, EZ effect was not correlated with pCO2 or taxonomic composition of the phytoplankton.
Detection and Protection of Macro-Users in Dominant Area of Co-Channel CSG Cells

Co-channel deployment of Closed Subscriber Group (CSG) home-cells or Home E-UTRAN NodeBs (HeNBs) will create coverage holes for macro connected user that is not part of the CSG. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting the macro-cell coverage hole and protecting the macro-users that are located inside such a coverage hole. To reduce the impact of HeNB interference on the macro-cell performance, the HeNBs can be partially muted on some subframes, leading to Time Domain (TDM) muting. With TDM muting, macro-users in the coverage hole can be protected by scheduling them only on the muted subframes that are free of HeNB interference. Different methods for coverage hole detection are considered, and their performance is evaluated under the downlink transmission of a Long Term Evolution (LTE) network. These methods are based on user measurements. Recommendations on the coverage hole detection will be provided based on the obtained results.
Theoretical Analysis of DNA Branch Migration in the Presence of a Slow Reversible Initiation Step

Abstract Branched DNA structures include several DNA regions connected by three- or four-way DNA junctions. Branched DNAs can be intermediates in DNA replication and recombination in living organisms and in sequence-specific DNA targeting in vitro. Branched DNA structures are usually metastable and irreversibly dissociate to non-branched products via a DNA strand exchange process commonly known as DNA branch migration. The key parameter in the DNA dissociation process is its characteristic time, which depends on the length of the dissociating DNA structure. Here, we predict that the presence of a slow reversible initiation step, which precedes DNA branch migration, can alter, to almost linear dependence, the “classic” quadratic dependence of the dissociation time on the length of the dissociating DNA structure. This prediction can be applied to dissociation of Y-like DNA structures and double D-loop DNA hybrids, which are DNA structures similar to replication bubbles. In addition, the slow initiation step can increase the effect of DNA sequence heterologies within the structure on its kinetic stability. Applications of our analysis for genetic manipulations with branched DNA structures are discussed.
Microgrids coordination based on heterogeneous multi-agent systems

This paper presents the application of heterogeneous multi-agent models to coordinated microgrids. Hybrid microgrids requires interlink converters to manage the AC side to DC side and vice versa. The consensus equation for heterogeneous agents is applied through a simulated VSI (Voltage Source Inverter) to obtain an agreement in frequency. In this way several microgrids of different topology can be managed appropriately.
Selection of Natural and Base‐Modified DNA Aptamers for a Camptothecin Derivative

Nucleic acid aptamers for small molecules are currently being developed and have a potential role in diverse applications including biosensing, diagnostics, and therapeutics involving low‐molecular‐weight biomarkers and drugs. To enhance and broaden their functions through chemical modification, systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX) selection has been attempted with modified DNA/RNA libraries. Recently, we demonstrated the superior efficacy of base modification for affinity enhancement and the usefulness of unnatural nucleic acid libraries for development of small‐molecule aptamers. In this unit, we describe construction of a modified DNA library that includes (E)‐5‐(2‐(N‐(2‐(N 6‐adeninyl)ethyl))carbamylvinyl)uracil bases and acquisition of high‐affinity camptothecin‐binding DNA aptamers, in addition to those of the corresponding natural DNA library and aptamers, using the SELEX method. © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
The joy of feedback: nonlinear and adaptive

It is argued that, for a cautious design, a nonlinear analysis is needed to reveal when and why linear tools fail. Emerging nonlinear tools that can be used to overcome the limitations of nonlinear designs are discussed. It is shown that some of these tools can be made adaptive and applied to nonlinear systems with unknown parameters. The emergence of robust designs for nonlinear 'interval' plants is pointed out. <<ETX>>
Tiredness and fatigue during processes of illness and recovery: A qualitative study of women recovered from fibromyalgia syndrome

ABSTRACT Fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS), a chronic musculoskeletal pain condition, is often accompanied by fatigue. In this study, inspired by narrative approaches to health and illness, we explore how women who have regained their health after FMS describe tiredness along a storyline from before they fell ill, through their illness, recovery process, and present-day health. The data derive from qualitative interviews with eight Norwegian women who previously suffered from FMS but who no longer had the condition at the time of interview. We undertook a narrative analysis to understand the complexity of the stories about tiredness and fatigue and on this basis identified a storyline based on four sub-narratives: 1) Alarming but ignored tiredness (before illness); 2) paralyzing fatigue (during illness); 3) making sense of fatigue (recovery process); and 4) integrating tiredness into life (today). The findings highlight participants’ different understandings and meanings of tiredness and fatigue and the ways in which these link past, present, and future. Significantly, a clear distinction between tiredness and fatigue was not always found. Overall, the storyline that emerges from the narratives is about balancing tiredness/fatigue with everyday life, and how this unfolds in different ways across the span of FMS, from falling ill to recovering and regaining health.
Noninvasive MRI and multilineage differentiation capability of ferritin‐transduced human mesenchymal stem cells

Molecular imaging can be a breakthrough tool for the investigation of the behavior and ultimate feasibility of transplanted human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) inside the body, and for the development of guidelines and recommendations based on the treatment and evaluation of stem cell therapy for patients. The goals of this study were to evaluate the multilineage differentiation ability of hMSCs expressing an MRI reporter, human ferritin heavy chain (FTH) and to investigate the feasibility of using FTH‐based MRI to provide noninvasive imaging of transplanted hMSCs. The transduction of FTH and green fluorescence protein (GFP) did not influence the expression of the mesenchymal stem cell surface markers (CD29+/CD105+/CD34–/CD45–) or the self‐renewal marker genes [octamer‐binding transcription factor 4 (OCT‐4) and SRY (sex determining region Y)‐box 2 (Sox‐2)], cell viability, migration ability and the release of cytokines [interleukin‐5 (IL‐5), IL‐10, IL‐12p70, tumor necrosis factor‐α (TNF‐α)]. FTH‐hMSCs retained the capacity to differentiate into adipogenic, chondrogenic, osteogenic and neurogenic lineages. The transduction of FTH led to a significant enhancement in cellular iron storage capacity and caused hypointensity and a significant increase in R2* values of FTH‐hMSC‐collected phantoms and FTH‐hMSC‐transplanted sites of the brain, as shown by in vitro and in vivo MRI performed at 9.4 T, compared with control hMSCs. This study revealed no differences in biological characteristics between hMSCs and FTH‐hMSCs and, therefore, these cells could be used for noninvasive monitoring with MRI during stem cell therapy for brain injury. Our study suggests the use of FTH for in vivo long‐term tracking and ultimate fate of hMSCs without alteration of their characteristics and multidifferentiation potential. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Providing Adaptive Health Updates Across the Personal Social Network

This article presents research conducted to establish how information is shared across the personal social network in the sensitive context of a health crisis. We worked with parents of very sick babies who were cared for in a hospital's Neonatal Unit (NNU). Through a combination of interviews, a focus group, and surveys, we developed a user model of the information that parents wanted to share, and how they adapted this information to individual recipients. We then developed a prototype software tool which created adaptive updates for members of the parents' social network. The updates contained summaries of large volumes of complex medical data about the baby, nonmedical information about the parents, and practical information about the hospital. Updates were automatically adapted to individual members of parents' social networks, based on our user model. The tool was evaluated in a large NNU in the United Kingdom with parents of babies who were currently being cared for in the unit. We found that parents adapted the information that they shared about themselves and their babies based on the emotional proximity of their network members. They gave most detail to those who were emotionally closest to them and least to those who were less close. Parents also adapted information content to the recipient's tendency to worry and empathize. Two adaptive strategies were deployed by parents, (a) benign deceit—not telling the whole truth—and (b) promotion of empathetic members of the social network to a higher level of emotional proximity, so that they were given more information. We generated a number of directions for future work, and issues to consider around designing adaptive mediated communications systems for sensitive contexts. These include the potential to generalize our model to other medical contexts and considerations to apply when deliberately designing deceit into adaptive systems.
Photodiodes in deep submicron CMOS process for fully integrated optical receivers

This paper explores the performance of CMOS photodiodes in a deep submicron CMOS technology to be used in fully integrated optical receiver intended for short range optical communication. For this purpose different structures of n-well/p-substrate photodiode were fabricated in 65nm CMOS process. When characterized at 850nm wavelength, DC responsivities between 0.12 and 0.16 A/W and 3-dB bandwidths of about 6 MHz with a roll-off of about 5.5dB/decade were measured. These results are important when designing the transimpedance amplifier and equalizer of a fully integrated optical receiver. A simple optical receiver is designed using results from these investigations.
Adaptive importance sampling for multi-ray gathering

We present an adaptive noise reduction technique for integrating incident radiance at a fixed position. We use a Russian-roulette-based importance sampler to reshape the directional probability density of future rays in a batch, based on an affinity map that incorporates ratings of evaluated rays, provided by the rendering engine. Our method is unbiased, has low overhead, requires no precomputation, and works in concert with other importance sampling schemes.
Visual recognition: Evidence for two distinctive mechanisms from a PET study

In this study, we examined the hypothesis that two distinct sets of cortical areas subserve two dissociable neurophysiological mechanisms of visual recognition. We posited that one such mechanism uses category specific cues extractable from the viewed pattern for the purpose of recognition. The other mechanism matches the pattern to be recognized with a pre‐encoded memory representation of the pattern. In order to distinguish the cortical areas active in these two strategies, we measured changes in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) with positron emission tomography (PET) and 15O Butanol as the radiotracer. Ten subjects performed pattern recognition tasks based on three different short‐term memory conditions and a condition based on visual categories of the patterns. When subjects used representations of the patterns held in short‐term memory for the purpose of recognition, the precunei were bilaterally activated. Recognition based on visual categories of the patterns activated the right (R) angular gyrus, left (L) inferior temporal gyrus, and L superior parieto‐occipital cortex. These findings demonstrate that the R angular gyrus, the L inferior temporal gyrus, and the L superior parieto‐occipital cortex are associated with recognition of patterns based on visual categories, whereas recognition of patterns using memory representations is associated with the activity of the precunei. This study is the first to show functional dual dissociation of active cortical fields for different mechanisms of visual pattern recognition. Hum. Brain Mapping 12:110–119, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion Using Conditional Random Fields

We propose an approach to grapheme-to-phoneme conversion based on a probabilistic method: Conditional Random Fields (CRF). CRF give a long term prediction, assume relaxed state independence condition. Moreover, we propose an algorithm to one-to-one letter to phoneme alignment needed for CRF training. This alignment is based on discrete HMM. The proposed system is validated on two pronunciation dictionaries. Different CRF features are studied: POS-tag, context size, unigram versus bigram. Our approach compares favorably with the performance of the state-of-the-art Joint-Multigram Models for the quality of the pronunciations, but provides better recall and precision measures for multiple pronunciation variants generation.
Real and Simulated Upper Body Tracking with Annealing Particle Filter and Belief Propagation for Human-Robot Interaction

This article presents an algorithm for 3D upper body tracking. This algorithm is a combination of two well-known methods: annealing particle filter and belief propagation. It is worth to underline that the 3D body tracking presents a challenging problem because of the high dimensionality of state space and so because of the huge computational time. In this work, we show that with our algorithm, it is possible to tackle this problem. Experiments both on real and synthetic human gesture sequences demonstrate that this combined approach leads to reliable results, as it reduces computational time without loosing robustness.
Transcription automatique de la musique de piano

La transcription automatique de la musique (TAM) s'inscrit dans le champ de l'indexation audio et de la recherche d'informations musicales. Elle vise a extraire l'information relative aux notes jouees - debut, fin, hauteur - dans un enregistrement numerique. Cette these aborde la TAM dans le cadre du piano, instrument difficile a transcrire par les systemes actuels et qui occupe une place majeure d'instrument solo dans la musique occidentale. La problematique generale de la TAM etant vaste et complexe, nous exploitons certains aspects specifiques du piano pour specialiser la tâche, tout en abordant des thematiques generales comme l'estimation de frequences fondamentales (F0) ou l'evaluation. Nous etudions tout d'abord la caracterisation spectrale des sons de piano pour la transcription a travers la distribution inharmonique des partiels, la modelisation de l'enveloppe spectrale des notes et celle du bruit. Nous proposons ensuite une methode d'estimation de F0 isolees performante dans des conditions d'analyse difficiles qui sont reunies dans le cas du piano: les contraintes d'une fenetre d'analyse courte et d'un registre etendu. L'estimation de F0 multiples et du degre de polyphonie est abordee via une modelisation conjointe parametrique (autoregressive/a moyenne ajustee). Cette methode spectrale s'integre dans un systeme de TAM pour le piano analysant tout enregistrement avec des limites raisonnables en termes de polyphonie, de velocite et de tessiture. Enfin, nous proposons de nouvelles metriques d'evaluation des transcriptions, un cadre d'evaluation de la qualite des metriques et une base de donnees de sons de piano pour l'estimation de F0 multiples et la TAM.
ANTHROPOMORPHIC MODULAR RECONFIGURABLE GRIPPERS WITH THREE AND FOUR FINGERS – DESIGN AND PROTOTYPE

In this paper one class of anthropomorphic modular reconfigurable grippers for robots are described , including a prototype. For the first time the stages of synthesis, analysis design and functional simulation are presented. We choice two versions: with three and four identical fingers with three phalanxes on finger. The kinematic synthesis is used to obtain a correct closing of the finger and of the gripping mechanism. With the constructive dimensions a 3D model can be obtained using CATIA soft. Some aspects regarding functional CAD and virtual simulations are shown too. For one variant of this type of gripper, with three fingers, the technical documentation is completed and the technical project has all the conditions for practical achievement and a prototype was made. There are two main constructive modules: the support – the palm and the finger. Main technical characteristics of the prototype are indicated.
The associations of social support and other psychosocial factors with mortality and quality of life in the dialysis outcomes and practice patterns study.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES This study aimed to investigate the influence of social support and other psychosocial factors on mortality, adherence to medical care recommendations, and physical quality of life among hemodialysis patients. DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, & MEASUREMENTS Data on 32,332 hemodialysis patients enrolled in the Dialysis Outcomes and Practice Patterns Study (1996 to 2008) in 12 countries were analyzed. Social support and other psychosocial factors related to ESRD and its treatment were measured by patient self-reports of health interference with social activities, isolation, feeling like a burden, and support from family and dialysis staff. Cox regression and logistic regression were used to examine associations of baseline social support and other psychosocial factors with all-cause mortality and with other measured outcomes at baseline, adjusting for potential confounders. RESULTS Mortality was higher among patients reporting that their health interfered with social activities, were isolated, felt like a burden, and were dissatisfied with family support. Poorer family support and several psychosocial measures also were associated with lower adherence to the prescribed hemodialysis length and the recommended weight gain between sessions. Some international differences were observed. Poorer self-reported social support and other psychosocial factors were associated with poor physical quality of life. CONCLUSIONS Poorer social support and other psychosocial factors are associated with higher mortality risk, lower adherence to medical care, and poorer physical quality of life in hemodialysis patients. More research is needed to assess whether interventions to improve social support and other psychosocial factors will lengthen survival and enhance quality of life.
Toxicity of clove essential oil and its ester eugenyl acetate against Artemia salina

The production of compounds via enzymatic esterification has great scientific and technological interest due to the several inconveniences related to acid catalysis, mainly by these systems do not fit to the concept of “green chemistry”. Besides, natural products as clove oil present compounds with excellent biological potential. Bioactives compounds are often toxic at high doses. The evaluation of lethality in a less complex animal organism can be used to a monitoring simple and rapid, helping the identification of compounds with potential insecticide activity against larvae of insect vector of diseases. In this sense, the toxicity against Artemia salina of clove essential oil and its derivative eugenyl acetate obtained by enzymatic esterification using Novozym 435 as biocatalyst was evaluated. The conversion of eugenyl acetate synthesis was 95.6%. The results about the evaluation of toxicity against the microcrustacean Artemia salina demonstrated that both oil (LC50= 0.5993 μg.mL –1) and ester (LC50= 0.1178 μg.mL –1) presented high toxic potential, being the eugenyl acetate almost 5 times more toxic than clove essential oil. The results reported here shows the potential of employing clove oil and eugenyl acetate in insecticide formulations.
Lactate detection at 3T: Compensating J coupling effects with BASING

Detection of lactate by in vivo 1H magnetic resonance spectroscopy may provide a means of identifying regions of metabolic stress in brain and other human tissue, potentially identifying regional ischemia in stroke or necrosis in tumors. At higher field strengths (3 and 4 T), which have recently become available for whole‐body human studies, the chemical shift difference between the doublet from the methyl protons and the quartet from the methine proton becomes comparable to the available radiofrequency (RF) pulse bandwidth. In this case “anomalous” J modulation occurs in PRESS [5] and STEAM [1] because the coupling partner of the observed resonance may or may not be refocused by the RF pulses depending on the position of the molecule within the voxel and the size of the chemical shift misregistration artifact. These anomalies lead to signal cancellation for echo times near odd multiples of 1/J (often used to highlight the inverted lactate doublet against nearby lipid peaks) in single voxel studies, and spatial variation of the doublet lineshape in chemical shift imaging studies, producing erroneous determination of relative lactate concentrations. While increasing the bandwidth of the RF pulses can reduce this effect by reducing the signal cancellation, some cancellation will always remain. A means of eliminating this effect using BASING/MEGA (Mescher M et al. Solvent suppression using selective echo dephasing J Magn Reson A 1996;123:226–229; Star‐Lack J et al. Improved water and lipid suppression for 3D PRESS CSI using RF band selective inversion with gradient dephasing (BASING). Magn Reson Med 1997;38:311–321) water suppression pulses will be described, along with some of its limitations. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 1999;9:732–737. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.