Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
No evidence for homeoviscous adaptation in a heterothermic tissue: tuna heat exchangers.

Many poikilotherms are known to adjust the membrane composition of their cells in response to a temperature change so that membrane fluidity, and therefore function, is conserved. Such compensatory changes in membrane composition are considered "homeoviscous adaptations. " In this study, we examined a heterothermic tissue, the visceral rete mirabile of the bluefin tuna, for evidence of homeoviscous adaptation. We measured the proportions of phospholipid fatty acids and phospholipid head groups as a function of position along the rete thermal gradient, which has been estimated to be ∼10°C. We found no effect of position along the rete on the composition of either phospholipid fatty acids or head groups. Our results were unexpected in light of our previous demonstration of compensation of metabolic enzyme activity in the same tissue. The lack of evidence for a homeoviscous response may be due to the fluctuating nature of the thermal gradient along the visceral retia; i.e., membranes may be adapted to a eurythermal existence rather than being fine-tuned to a particular temperature.
Obesity‐risk behaviours and their associations with body mass index (BMI) in Korean American children

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES To describe obesity-risk behaviours (diet, physical activity and sedentary behaviour) and examine the relationships of the obesity-risk behaviours with body mass index (BMI) in school-aged Korean American children. BACKGROUND Korean American children have a risk of becoming overweight or obese and developing obesity-related complications; however, there is limited research about obesity-risk behaviours in Korean American children. DESIGN A cross-sectional study. METHODS Obesity-risk behaviours of children were assessed with well-validated self-report questionnaires (i.e., Elementary-level School-based Nutrition Monitoring Questionnaire) from children and their mothers. Height and weight of children were measured. Data were analysed with bivariate and multivariate analyses using mixed effects models to incorporate the correlation within siblings. RESULTS A total of 170 Korean American children (mean age 10.9 [2.0] years; 52.4% girls; mean BMI 19.3 [3.2]; 28.7% ≥85 percentiles) participated in the study. Only 38.3% of Korean American children met established recommendations of five fruits/vegetables per day; 56.5% met recommendations for more than 3 days per week of vigorous physical activity; and 40.8% met recommendations for <2 hr of recreational screen time per day. Sixty per cent and 88.8% of children met the recommendation of sleep on a weekday and weekend, respectively. Only screen time was positively associated with child BMI z-score (β = 0.08; p < .03). CONCLUSION Healthcare providers need to be aware of the increased rate of overweight and obesity in Korean American children and initiate clinical interventions to improve obesity-risk behaviours, especially sedentary behaviour, in Korean American children. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE Clinical assessment and management of the risk of developing overweight and obesity as well as obesity-related behaviours are important to improve obesity-related complications in overall Korean Americans.
G protein-dependent activation of smooth muscle eNOS via natriuretic peptide clearance receptor.

In gastrointestinal smooth muscle, the neuropeptides vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) and pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide (PACAP) induce relaxation by interacting with VIP2/PACAP3receptors coupled via Gs to adenylyl cyclase and with distinct receptors coupled via Gi1 and/or Gi2 to a smooth muscle endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS). The present study identifies the receptor as the single-transmembrane natriuretic peptide clearance receptor (NPR-C). RT-PCR and Northern analysis demonstrated expression of the natriuretic peptide receptors NPR-C and NPR-B but not NPR-A in rabbit gastric muscle cells. In binding studies using125I-labeled atrial natriuretic peptide (125I-ANP) and125I-VIP as radioligands, VIP, ANP, and the selective NPR-C ligand cANP(4-23) bound with high affinity to NPR-C. ANP, cANP-(4-23), and VIP initiated identical signaling cascades consisting of Ca2+ influx, activation of eNOS via Gi1 and Gi2, stimulation of cGMP formation, and muscle relaxation. NOS activity and cGMP formation were abolished (93 ± 3 to 96 ± 2% inhibition) by nifedipine, pertussis toxin, the NOS inhibitor, N G-nitro-l-arginine, and the antagonists ANP-(1-11) and VIP-(10-28). NOS activity stimulated by all three ligands in muscle membranes was additively inhibited by Gi1 and Gi2 antibodies (82 ± 2 to 84 ± 1%). In reconstitution studies, VIP, cANP-(4-23), and guanosine 5'- O-(3-thiotriphosphate) stimulated NOS activity in membranes of COS-1 cells cotransfected with NPR-C and eNOS. The results establish a unique mechanism for G protein-dependent activation of a constitutive NOS expressed in gastrointestinal smooth muscle involving interaction of the relaxant neuropeptides VIP and PACAP with a single-transmembrane natriuretic peptide receptor, NPR-C.
Blends of Polylactic Acid/Starch Toughened by Tetrabutyl Titanate

Polylactic acid(PLA)/starch blends toughened by tetrabutyl titanate [Ti(OBu)_4] were prepared.The rheological properties,mechanical properties,blending morphology,crystal properties,hydrophobicity and degradability of blends were investigated.Results show that impact strength increases 40.9% and flexural decreases 59.2% when m_(Ti(OBu)_4)∶m_(PLA)=0.20. FT-IR and SEM measurements indicate that chemical cross-linking is set up between PLA phase and starch phase,the compatibility of starch phase and PLA phase is improved.With the increase of the content of tetrabutyl titanate,water absorptions of blends decrease. Weights of blends decrease 5%~8% after buried for 150 d.
Effect of interactions between nitric oxide and angiotensin II on pressure diuresis and natriuresis.

The present study examined the effect of an angiotensin II AT1 or AT2 receptor antagonist on the impairment of the pressure diuresis and natriuresis response produced by nitric oxide (NO) synthesis blockade. N ω-nitro-l-arginine methyl ester (l-NAME, 37 nmol ⋅ kg-1 ⋅ min-1) lowered renal blood flow and reduced the slopes of the pressure diuresis and natriuresis responses by 44 and 40%, respectively. Blockade of AT1 receptors with valsartan increased slightly sodium and water excretion at low renal perfusion pressure (RPP). Blockade of AT2 receptors with PD-123319 had no effect on renal function. The administration of valsartan or PD-123319 to rats given l-NAME had no effect on the renal vasocontriction induced by NO synthesis blockade. In addition, in rats givenl-NAME, valsartan elevated baseline excretory values at all RPP studied, but it had no effect on the sensitivity of the pressure diuresis and natriuresis response. However, the administration of PD-123319 tol-NAME-pretreated rats shifted the slopes of the pressure diuresis and natriuresis responses toward control values, indicating that the impairment produced by NO synthesis blockade on pressure diuresis is dependent on the activation of AT2 angiotensin receptors.
Effects of Fruiting-Branch Position,Temperature-Light Factors and Nitrogen Rates on Cotton(Gossypium hirsutum L.) Fiber Strength Formation

【Objective】The effects of fruiting-branch position,temperature-light factor and nitrogen rates on cotton fiber strength were studied. 【Method】 Field experiments were carried out in Nanjing(118o50′E,32o02′N,middle lower reaches of Yangtze River Valley) and Xuzhou(117°11′E,34°15′N,Yellow River Valley) with two cotton cultivars(Kemian 1 with average fiber strength 35 cN? tex-1;NuCOTN 33B with average fiber strength 32 cN? tex-1). Two sowing dates and three nitrogen application levels were applied,thus cotton fiber developing process can be arranged at different fruiting-branch positions and ecological conditions. 【Result】 An interaction between fruiting branch and temperature was observed.Cotton bolls in the middle-branch produced stronger fiber than that in lower-and upper-branch when temperature-light factor was optimal.While temperature-light decreased,fruiting-branch effects were not significant.Development of cotton fiber strength could be divided into rapid and steady growth periods.PTP(cumulative photo-thermal product) during cotton fiber secondary wall thickening period(as temperature-light factor) were linear with the rate(VRG) and duration(TRG) of fiber strength rapid growth period,while the rate(VSG) and duration(TSG) of fiber strength steady growth period,the observed cotton fiber strength(FSobs) were quadratic with PTP,respectively.The strongest Strobs(34.8 and 31.9 cN? tex-1 for Kemian 1 and NuCOTN 33B,respectively) was obtained at PTP of 291 MJ? m-2,when VRG was 1.5 cN? tex-1? d-1 and TRG was 16 d,VSG and TSG for Kemian 1 were 0.32 cN? tex-1? d-1 and 21.4 d,while for NuCOTN 33B were 0.18 cN? tex-1? d-1 and 24.0 d,respectively.N fertilization significantly affected formation of cotton fiber strength and had a compensatory effect on PTP.As N increased,PTP for obtaining the highest Strobs decreased.NA under 240 kg N? hm-2 was more suitable for cotton fiber strength when PTP was greater than 104 MJ? m-2;when PTP was less than that value,NA under 480 kg N? hm-2 was more appropriate. 【Conclusion】Fruiting-branch significantly affects the formation of cotton fiber strength and there is an interaction between fruiting-branch and temperature-light factor.Temperature-light factor and nitrogen rate significantly influence cotton fiber strength formation,nitrogen has a compensate effect on temperature-light factor.Development of cotton fiber strength can be divided into rapid and steady growth period.Cultivar difference in cotton fiber strength may come from the difference in steady growth period.
Relationships Between Force–Time Characteristics of the Isometric Midthigh Pull and Dynamic Performance in Professional Rugby League Players

West, DJ, Owen, NJ, Jones, MR, Bracken, RM, Cook, CJ, Cunningham, DJ, Shearer, DA, Finn, CV, Newton, RU, Crewther, BT, and Kilduff, LP. Relationships between force–time characteristics of the isometric midthigh pull and dynamic performance in professional rugby league players. J Strength Cond Res 25(11): 3070–3075, 2011—There is considerable conflict within the literature regarding the relevance of isometric testing for the assessment of neuromuscular function within dynamic sports. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between isometric measures of force development and dynamic performance. Thirty-nine professional rugby league players participated in this study. Forty-eight hours after trial familiarization, participants performed a maximal isometric midthigh pull, with ∼120–130° bend at the knee, countermovement jump (CMJ), and a 10-m sprint. Force–time data were processed for peak force (PF), force at 100 milliseconds (F100ms), and peak rate of force development (PRFD). Analysis was carried out using Pearson's product moment correlation with significance set at p < 0.05. The PF was not related to dynamic performance; however, when expressed relative to body weight, it was significantly correlated with both 10-m time and CMJ height (r = −0.37 and 0.45, respectively, p < 0.05). The F100ms was inversely related to 10-m time (r = −0.54, p < 0.01); moreover, when expressed relative to body weight, it was significantly related to both 10-m time and CMJ height (r = −0.68 and 0.43, p < 0.01). In addition, significant correlations were found between PRFD and 10-m time (r = −0.66, p < 0.01) and CMJ height (r = 0.387, p < 0.01). In conclusion, this study provides evidence that measures of maximal strength and explosiveness from isometric force–time curves are related to jump and sprint acceleration performance in professional rugby league players.
Global illumination with radiance regression functions

We present radiance regression functions for fast rendering of global illumination in scenes with dynamic local light sources. A radiance regression function (RRF) represents a non-linear mapping from local and contextual attributes of surface points, such as position, viewing direction, and lighting condition, to their indirect illumination values. The RRF is obtained from precomputed shading samples through regression analysis, which determines a function that best fits the shading data. For a given scene, the shading samples are precomputed by an offline renderer. The key idea behind our approach is to exploit the nonlinear coherence of the indirect illumination data to make the RRF both compact and fast to evaluate. We model the RRF as a multilayer acyclic feed-forward neural network, which provides a close functional approximation of the indirect illumination and can be efficiently evaluated at run time. To effectively model scenes with spatially variant material properties, we utilize an augmented set of attributes as input to the neural network RRF to reduce the amount of inference that the network needs to perform. To handle scenes with greater geometric complexity, we partition the input space of the RRF model and represent the subspaces with separate, smaller RRFs that can be evaluated more rapidly. As a result, the RRF model scales well to increasingly complex scene geometry and material variation. Because of its compactness and ease of evaluation, the RRF model enables real-time rendering with full global illumination effects, including changing caustics and multiple-bounce high-frequency glossy interreflections.
Querying object-oriented databases

1 Introduction Recent yeara saw several proposals for languages for querying object-oriented databases [2, 3, 4, 5, 13, 6]. None of them, however , captures (or even attempts to deal with) all the aspects of the object-oriented model. In this paper, we present a new query language, henceforth referred to as XSQL, that incorporates fea tures not found in earlier languages. XSQL is easier to use and it has more expressive power than previous languages. It is not our goal here to give the full-fledged syntax and semantics of XSQL. Rather, we use the familiar SQL-like syntax to illustrate certain philosophy in designing object-oriented languages-a philosophy put forward in [12, 10, 13, 8]. Before discussing the novelties found in XSQL, we should point out some of the differences between the object-oriented model and the relational model. The different features of these two models induce different modes of representing information and querying it. Suppose that a database includes information about engines and their types (e.g., turbo engines, diesel engines, etc.). In a relational database, there would likely be an attribute Eragin e Type having the various engine types aa its possible values. In an object-oriented database, there would likely be a class Engines having the various engine types as subclasses. This is a fundamental difference, because it shifts the information about engine types from the data to the schema. For example, suppose we want to know what are all the engine types. In the relational model, we simply project onto the attribute Engine Type. In the object-oriented model, we have to interrogate the schema rather than the data (and there is hardly any language for doing that). This shows the need for features not available in relational query languages. Jh particular, as an object-oriented schema is likely to have much more information than a relational schema, querying the schema (as well aa data without a complete knowledge of the schema) becomes an important issue. We also need to deal easily with nested structures. XSQL provides these (and other) features through path expressions. Although the idea of path expressions is not new (it first *Work supported in part by the NSF grants IRI-8903507 sad CCR-9102159. On sabbatical leave from Stony Brook University, Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice …
The cholinergic system in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease: An in vivo MRI and DTI study

Few studies have investigated in vivo changes of the cholinergic basal forebrain in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI), an at risk stage of AD. Even less is known about alterations of cortical projecting fiber tracts associated with basal forebrain atrophy. In this study, we determined regional atrophy within the basal forebrain in 21 patients with AD and 16 subjects with MCI compared to 20 healthy elderly subjects using deformation‐based morphometry of MRI scans. We assessed effects of basal forebrain atrophy on fiber tracts derived from high‐resolution diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) using tract‐based spatial statistics. We localized significant effects relative to a map of cholinergic nuclei in MRI standard space as determined from a postmortem brain. Patients with AD and MCI subjects showed reduced volumes in basal forebrain areas corresponding to anterior medial and lateral, intermediate and posterior nuclei of the Nucleus basalis of Meynert (NbM) as well as in the diagonal band of Broca nuclei (P < 0.01). Effects in MCI subjects were spatially more restricted than in AD, but occurred at similar locations. The volume of the right antero‐lateral NbM nucleus was correlated with intracortical projecting fiber tract integrity such as the corpus callosum, cingulate, and the superior longitudinal, inferior longitudinal, inferior fronto‐occipital, and uncinate fasciculus (P < 0.05, corrected for multiple comparisons). Our findings suggest that a multimodal MRI‐DTI approach is supportive to determine atrophy of cholinergic nuclei and its effect on intracortical projecting fiber tracts in AD. Hum Brain Mapp, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Principles of Physical Layer Security in Multiuser Wireless Networks: A Survey

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of physical layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers, without relying on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access, interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered. Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical layer message authentication is also briefly introduced. The survey concludes with observations on potential research directions in this area.
A Survey on Passive Image Copy-Move Forgery Detection

With the rapid development of the science and technology, it has been becoming more and more convenient to obtain abundant information via the diverse multimedia medium. However, the contents of the multimedia are easily altered with different editing software, and the authenticity and the integrity of multimedia content are under threat. Forensics technology is developed to solve this problem. We focus on reviewing the blind image forensics technologies for copy-move forgery in this survey. Copy-move forgery is one of the most common manners to manipulate images that usually obscure the objects by flat regions or append the objects within the same image. In this paper, two classical models of copy-move forgery are reviewed, and two frameworks of copy-move forgery detection (CMFD) methods are summarized. Then, massive CMFD methods are mainly divided into two types to retrospect the development process of CMFD technologies, including block-based and keypoint-based. Besides, the performance evaluation criterions and the datasets created for evaluating the performance of CMFD methods are also collected in this review. At last, future research directions and conclusions are given to provide beneficial advice for researchers in this field.
Witness Memory and Alcohol: The Effects of State-Dependent Recall

Many real-world eyewitnesses are under the influence of alcohol either at the time of the crime, the interview, or both. Only recently has empirical research begun to examine the effects of alcohol on witness memory, yielding mixed results. The present study tested the importance of state-dependent memory in the context of alcohol’s effects on encoding versus retrieval of a witnessed event, while simultaneously informing real-world investigative practices: Should witnesses sober up before an interview? Participants (N = 249) were randomized to a control, placebo, or alcohol condition at encoding and to either an immediate retrieval condition (in the same state) or a 1-week delay control, placebo, or alcohol retrieval condition. They recalled a witnessed mock crime using open ended and cued recall formats. After a delay, witnesses intoxicated at both encoding and retrieval provided less accurate information than witnesses in sober or placebo groups at both times. There was no advantage of state-dependent memory but intoxicated witnesses were best when recalling immediately compared to 1 week later (sober, placebo, or reintoxicated). Findings have direct implications for the timing of intoxicated witnesses’ interviews such that moderately intoxicated witnesses may not benefit from a sobering delay but rather, should be interviewed immediately.
Prioritizing PubMed articles for the Comparative Toxicogenomic Database utilizing semantic information

The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) contains manually curated literature that describes chemical–gene interactions, chemical–disease relationships and gene–disease relationships. Finding articles containing this information is the first and an important step to assist manual curation efficiency. However, the complex nature of named entities and their relationships make it challenging to choose relevant articles. In this article, we introduce a machine learning framework for prioritizing CTD-relevant articles based on our prior system for the protein–protein interaction article classification task in BioCreative III. To address new challenges in the CTD task, we explore a new entity identification method for genes, chemicals and diseases. In addition, latent topics are analyzed and used as a feature type to overcome the small size of the training set. Applied to the BioCreative 2012 Triage dataset, our method achieved 0.8030 mean average precision (MAP) in the official runs, resulting in the top MAP system among participants. Integrated with PubTator, a Web interface for annotating biomedical literature, the proposed system also received a positive review from the CTD curation team.