Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rare inborn errors associated with chronic hepatitis B virus infection *

Chronic hepatitis B (CHB) is a major global health issue. The role of rare genetic variants in CHB has not been elucidated. We aimed to identify rare allelic variants predisposing to CHB. We performed exome sequencing in 50 CHB patients who had no identifiable risk factors for CHB and 40 controls who were healthy and hepatitis B surface antibody‐positive, but had never received hepatitis B vaccination. We selected six rare variant alleles and followed up their association with disease status by Sanger sequencing in a case‐control study comprising 1,728 CHB patients and 1,636 healthy controls. The latter had either not been immunized with hepatitis B vaccine or had uncertain vaccination status. Our results showed that transmembrane protein 2 p.Ser1254Asn, interferon alpha 2 p.Ala120Thr, its regulator NLR family member X1 p.Arg707Cys, and complement component 2 p.Glu318Asp were associated with CHB, with P values of <1.0 × 10−7, 2.76 × 10−5, 5.08 × 10−5, 2.78 × 10−4 and odds ratios (ORs) of 2.45, 4.08, 2.34, and 1.97, respectively. The combined P value was <2.0 × 10−16. As there has been no indication of immunological functions for the associated gene, transmembrane protein 2, we further studied its expression by immunohistochemistry, real‐time polymerase chain reaction, and western blotting. Our results showed that it was strongly expressed by healthy hepatocytes, but its expression was reduced in liver tissues with CHB, hepatitis B viral (HBV) genome‐containing HepG2.2. 15 cells, as compared with healthy liver tissues and non‐HBV genome‐containing HepG2 cells (P = 0.022 and 0.0036, respectively). Conclusion: We identified four missense mutations associated with CHB, our results providing evidence for rare inborn genetic defects that contribute to increased host susceptibility to CHB. (HEPATOLOGY 2012;56:1661–1670)
Template‐Assisted Electroforming of Fully Semi‐Hard‐Magnetic Helical Microactuators

The authors report on the fabrication of semi‐hard‐magnetic microhelices using template‐assisted electroforming. The method consists of electrodepositing a material on a sacrificial mandrel on which a pattern has been previously written. To electroform the helical microswimmers, a helical template on a polymer‐coated metallic mandrel is created using a laser, which precisely ablates the polymer coating and exposes the mandrel surface. Subsequently, the semi‐hard‐magnetic material is electrodeposited in the trenches produced by the laser. In this investigation, the helical structures are obtained from an electrolyte, which enables the production of hard‐magnetic CoPt alloys. The authors also show that electroformed semi‐hard‐magnetic helical microswimmers can propel in viscous environments such as silicon oil in three dimensions and against gravity. Their manufacturing approach can be used for the fabrication of more complex architectures for a wide range of applications and can be potentially extended to any electroplatable material.
Overexpression of microRNA-722 fine-tunes neutrophilic inflammation by inhibiting Rac2 in zebrafish

ABSTRACT Neutrophilic inflammation is essential for defending against invading pathogens, but can also be detrimental in many clinical settings. The hematopoietic-specific small Rho-GTPase Rac2 regulates multiple pathways that are essential for neutrophil activation, including adhesion, migration, degranulation and production of reactive oxygen species. This study tested the hypothesis that partially suppressing rac2 in zebrafish neutrophils by using a microRNA (miRNA) would inhibit neutrophil migration and activation, which would reduce the immunological damage caused by systemic inflammation. We have generated a transgenic zebrafish line that overexpresses microRNA-722 (miR-722) in neutrophils. Neutrophil motility and chemotaxis to tissue injury or infection are significantly reduced in this line. miR-722 downregulates the transcript level of rac2 through binding to seed-matching sequence in the rac2 3′UTR. Furthermore, miR-722-overexpressing larvae display improved outcomes in both sterile and bacterial systemic models, which correlates with a robust upregulation of the anti-inflammatory cytokines in the whole larvae and isolated neutrophils. Finally, an miR-722 mimic protects zebrafish from lethal lipopolysaccharide challenge. Together, these results provide evidence for and the mechanism of an anti-inflammatory miRNA that restrains detrimental systemic inflammation. Summary: Identification of a microRNA that suppresses Rac2 expression and regulates neutrophil migration and systemic inflammation. This article has an associated First Person interview with the first author of the paper as part of the supplementary information.
Smooth muscle cell plasticity: fact or fiction?

More than 50 years ago, smooth muscle cells (SMC) of the carotid artery were shown to undergo "de-differentiation" upon ligation injury. 1 Since this classic study, scores of research groups have used a variety of in vivo and in vitro model systems as well as numerous clinical studies to demonstrate the conversion of normally contractile vascular SMC to a less differentiated state of proliferation, migration, and exuberant extracellular matrix secretion, a process generally referred to as phenotypic modulation or plasticity [reviewed in 2-6]. Such changes in vascular SMC phenotype are thought to underlie many vascular occlusive diseases. However, in a recent issue of Nature Communications , Tang et al 7 provide data from in vitro cell culture, flow cytometry, and lineage tracing experiments which they believe directly challenge this long-standing and widely accepted paradigm. Specifically, these authors contend that: (1) differentiated (SM myosin heavy chain, SM MHC+) vascular SMC are incapable of proliferation either in vivo in response to injury or in vitro in cell culture; (2) within the media of mature blood vessels there exists a small population (
Improving mobile ad hoc network routing with satellite out‐of‐band signaling

Routing in mobile ad hoc networks is a complex task due to the mobility of the nodes and the constraints linked to a wireless multihop network (e.g., limited bandwidth, collisions, and bit errors). These adverse conditions impair not only data traffic but also routing signaling traffic, which feeds route computation. In this contribution, we propose to use satellite communications to help in the distribution of mobile ad hoc network routing signaling. The optimized link‐state routing (OLSR) is chosen among several routing protocols to be extended with satellite‐based signaling, yielding a version we call OLSR hybrid signaling (OLSR‐H). This new scheme is evaluated through simulations and yields improvements of approximately 10% in the data delivery ratio compared with a regular OLSR. This evaluation is conducted using two different network topology models, one being fit for representing forest firefighting operations. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Determinants of Long-term Economic Development: An Empirical Cross-country Study Involving Rough Sets Theory and Rule Induction

Empirical findings on determinants of long-term economic growth are numerous, sometimes inconsistent, highly exciting and still incomplete. The empirical analysis was almost exclusively carried out by standard econometrics. This study compares results gained by cross-country regressions as reported in the literature with those gained by the rough sets theory and rule induction. The main advantages of using rough sets are being able to classify classes and to discretize. Thus, we do not have to deal with distributional, independence, (log-)linearity, and many other assumptions, but can keep the data as they are. The main difference between regression results and rough sets is that most education and human capital indicators can be labeled as robust attributes. In addition, we find that political indicators enter in a non-linear fashion with respect to growth.
Effects of Two Different Training Methods in Women With Fibromyalgia Syndrome

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects generated by the methods of training in women with fibromyalgia. Two methods were applied—aerobic training (TA) and circuit training (TCIRC)—and their effects were compared on the quality of life of patients through diagnostic tests for fibromyalgia (questionnaire on the impact of fibromyalgia, visual scale of pain), development of aerobic capacity (test time, VO2max, and HRmax), and strength (15RM test). With the analysis performed in the pre- and post-training periods, it was found that in diagnosis of fibromyalgia the TCIRC had a greater development than the TA when pre- and post-test evolution were compared. In 6 weeks, however, the TA had better results than the TCIRC in aerobic capacity, considering the duration of the training period. In the variable strength development, as expected, the TCIRC showed a higher evolution. Thus, it was concluded that circuit training can be an alternative form of treatment of fibromyalgia.
Artificial Electrical Morris–Lecar Neuron

In this paper, an experimental electronic neuron based on a complete Morris-Lecar model is presented, which is able to become an experimental unit tool to study collective association of coupled neurons. The circuit design is given according to the ionic currents of this model. The experimental results are compared with the theoretical prediction, leading to a good agreement between them, which therefore validate the circuit. The use of some parts of the circuit is also possible for other neurons models, namely for those based on ionic currents.
Balanced association algorithm for IEEE 802.11 extended service areas

Most wireless local area network performance estimations are done with the assumption of uniformly distributed (UD) users. In practice, however, stations (STAs) are distributed unevenly among access points (APs) in an extended service area, causing congested hot-spots (HS) and under-utilized APs. Considering a typical network is made up of multiple APs, having some nodes carrying excessive loads degrades the overall network performance. The system performance can be improved by associating STAs efficiently throughout the network, in a sense sharing the network resources fairly among APs and thus relieving congestion. The association algorithm currently employed in IEEE 802.11 systems, that is specifically designed for residential and small office environments, takes into account signal strength as the only parameter and associates STAs to the closest (in signal strength sense) AP, ignoring its load. Novel user association algorithms are required to solve the problems commonly seen in corporate network environments spanning multiple APs, namely congestion relief and resource sharing. In this work, a distributed and online association algorithm is proposed that demonstrates improved average throughput performance, a balanced load distribution as well as fairness across the network compared to the conventional algorithm. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bootstrapping Translation Detection and Sentence Extraction from Comparable Corpora

Most work on extracting parallel text from comparable corpora depends on linguistic resources such as seed parallel documents or translation dictionaries. This paper presents a simple baseline approach for bootstrapping a parallel collection. It starts by observing documents published on similar dates and the cooccurrence of a small number of identical tokens across languages. It then uses fast, online inference for a latent variable model to represent multilingual documents in a shared topic space where it can do efficient nearestneighbor search. Starting from the Gigaword collections in English and Spanish, we train a translation system that outperforms one trained on the WMT’11 parallel training set.
Adaptive Control With Exponential Regulation in the Absence of Persistent Excitation

With set point regulation being the most common goal in control engineering, persistence of excitation (PE) is generically absent in adaptive control applications. In the absence of PE, not only is the parameter estimate not guaranteed to converge to the true value, but the state is regulated to the set point at a rate that is not necessarily exponential. In this technical note we introduce a strategy that employs time-varying adaptation gains (as well as time-varying control gains, when appropriate) and achieves exponential regulation of the plant state, with an exponential rate that is uniform in the initial condition. This idea fundamentally differs from exponential stability results achieved in the presence of PE because we make the gains (rather than reference signals) time-varying, i.e., we use time-varying tools in a multiplicative (rather than in an additive) fashion. We provide full state feedback results for general classes of nonlinear and linear systems and establish global uniform stability, exponential regulation of the plant state, boundedness of the control input and the update rate, and the asymptotic constancy (but not convergence to the true value) of the parameter estimate.
Qualitative Triadic Study of the Relational Factors Influencing the Formation of Quality in a Community-Based Aged Health Care Service Network

A service is produced through the interactions of the various service participants. This study aims to identify the factors that influence the interactions of the service providers, recipients, and enablers of a community-based aged health care service, within a single service network. Interviews were conducted with the manager, three care workers, and five clients using the convergent interview technique. Data were analyzed inductively using thematic content analysis. Client focus, client contribution, client empowerment, and provider empowerment were identified as key themes. Whilst these themes are independently supported by the literature, they have previously been studied largely in isolation to each other.
When Specular Object Meets RGB-D Camera 3D Scanning: Color Image Plus Fragmented Depth Map

3D scanning is an important technology since one can apply the scanning results of objects to numerous 3D applications (e.g. Artwork sculpture preserving, 3D animation and 3D printing). However, 3D laser scanners are too expensive to be adopted in daily usage. Therefore, building a 3D scanner by a low cost RGB-D camera (e.g. Kinect) is an emerging trend. For a 3D scanner, a specular object is one of the challenging 3D scanning targets where the specular surface will compromise the scanning (laser) lights and lead to scanning failure. In order to acquire the ground truth for 3D scanning of specular objects, we have to perform a non-specular painting process even a 3D laser scanner is used. In order to meet this challenge for an RGB-D camera based 3D scanner, we integrate the response of visual cues reflection and the depth scattering characteristics of specular surfaces to resolve the artifacts of 3D scanning results. Experimental results show our proposed system outperforms the traditional RGB-D 3D scanners in reconstruction quality while keeping the specular object intact (i.e., We need not to perform the pre-described non-specular painting process on the object before scanning).
Follistatin modulates a BMP autoregulatory loop to control the size and patterning of sensory domains in the developing tongue

The regenerative capacity of many placode-derived epithelial structures makes them of interest for understanding the molecular control of epithelial stem cells and their niches. Here, we investigate the interaction between the developing epithelium and its surrounding mesenchyme in one such system, the taste papillae and sensory taste buds of the mouse tongue. We identify follistatin (FST) as a mesenchymal factor that controls size, patterning and gustatory cell differentiation in developing taste papillae. FST limits expansion and differentiation of Sox2-expressing taste progenitor cells and negatively regulates the development of taste papillae in the lingual epithelium: in Fst-/- tongue, there is both ectopic development of Sox2-expressing taste progenitors and accelerated differentiation of gustatory cells. Loss of Fst leads to elevated activity and increased expression of epithelial Bmp7; the latter effect is consistent with BMP7 positive autoregulation, a phenomenon we demonstrate directly. We show that FST and BMP7 influence the activity and expression of other signaling systems that play important roles in the development of taste papillae and taste buds. In addition, using computational modeling, we show how aberrations in taste papillae patterning in Fst-/- mice could result from disruption of an FST-BMP7 regulatory circuit that normally suppresses noise in a process based on diffusion-driven instability. Because inactivation of Bmp7 rescues many of the defects observed in Fst-/- tongue, we conclude that interactions between mesenchyme-derived FST and epithelial BMP7 play a central role in the morphogenesis, innervation and maintenance of taste buds and their stem/progenitor cells.
Transformations Between Specifications of Requirements and User Interfaces

Separating requirements from user interface specifications often leads to unusable systems or to systems that do not support the users’ needs. We address this issue by introducing explicit transformations between models of these different “worlds”. In fact, we show how to transform artifacts in a model specifying requirements to artifacts in a model specifying a user interface, and vice versa (inverse transformations). We also transform from a more abstract to a more concrete model of a user interface, and vice versa. In effect, this allows starting either from requirements and getting support for transforming to a user interface, or from a user interface prototype and getting support for transforming to requirements.
Numerical simulation of long-term creep tests on prestressed beams

The deformations of concrete elements can increase significantly over time as a result of creep and shrinkage. Different material models, which have been calibrated on large datasets, are available in literature in order to predict this time-dependent behaviour. A cross-sectional calculation tool which employs the age-adjusted effective modulus has been developed to verify the accuracy of six models with respect to creep data available for 24 prestressed beams. These prestressed beams with a span of 8 m were loaded up until 4.5 years in a four point bending configuration. This paper reports on the comparison between the measured and calculated compression strains and deflections. It was observed that the mid-span deflection of the prestressed beams at the end of loading is best prescribed by the model B3 and the Gardner Lockmann 2000 model.
Rectification for any epipolar geometry

This paper proposes a new approach to rectification, a process whereby a stereo pair of images is re-sampled so as to make imposing the two view geometric constraint simple. This is normally performed by applying a single linear transformation per image, a method which has the drawback that some camera motions produce rectified images which are heavily distorted or unbounded. More recent attempts have used nonlinear transformations to allow any camera motion, but as a consequence distort images so that matching features no longer look the same in both images. This work provides a hybrid linear/nonlinear method that greatly reduces this problem, and simplifies the technique. The technique also provides further improvements by selecting the rectifying transformation so as to minimise perspective effects between the images.
Method for controlling stress gradients in PVD aluminum nitride

In this paper we describe a method for controlling both the residual stress and the through-thickness stress gradient of aluminum nitride (AlN) thin films using a multi-step deposition process that varies the applied radio frequency (RF) substrate bias. The relationship between the applied RF substrate bias and the AlN residual stress is characterized using AlN films grown on oxidized silicon substrates is determined using 100 nm–1.5 μm thick blanket AlN films that are deposited with 60–100 W applied RF biases; the stress-bias relationship is found to be well described using a power law relationship. Using this relationship, we develop a model for varying the RF bias in a series of discrete deposition steps such that each deposition step has zero average stress. The applied RF bias power in these steps is tailored to produce AlN films that have minimized both the residual stress and the film stress gradient. AlN cantilevers were patterned from films deposited using this technique, which show reduced curvature compared to those deposited using a single RF bias setting, indicating a reduction of the stress gradient in the films.
Assessment of brain functional connectome alternations and correlation with depression and anxiety in major depressive disorders

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is highly prevalent, recurrent, and associated with functional impairment, morbidity, and mortality. Herein, we aimed to identify disruptions in functional connectomics among subjects with MDD by using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). Sixteen subjects with MDD and thirty health controls completed resting-state fMRI scans and clinical assessments (e.g., Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAMD) and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS)). We found higher amplitude of low frequency fluctuations (ALFF) bilaterally in the hippocampus and amygdala among MDD subjects when compared to healthy controls. Using graph theoretical analysis, we found decreased clustering coefficient, local efficiency, and transitivity in the MDD patients. Our findings suggest a potential biomarker for differentiating individuals with MDD from individuals without MDD.
Software defined green data center network with exclusive routing

The explosive expansion of data center sizes aggravates the power consumption and carbon footprint, which has restricted the sustainable growth of cloud services and seriously troubled data center operators. In recent years, plenty of advanced data center network architectures have been proposed. They usually employ richly-connected topologies and multi-path routing to provide high network capacity. Unfortunately, they also undergo inefficient network energy usage during the traffic valley time. To address the problem, many energy-aware flow scheduling algorithms are proposed recently, primarily considering how to aggregate traffic by flexibly choosing the routing paths, with flows fairly sharing the link bandwidths. In this paper, we leverage software defined network (SDN) technique and explore a new solution to energy-aware flow scheduling, i.e., scheduling flows in the time dimension and using exclusive routing (EXR) for each flow, i.e., a flow always exclusively utilizes the links of its routing path. The key insight is that exclusive occupation of link resources usually results in higher link utilization in high-radix data center networks, since each flow does not need to compete for the link bandwidths with others. When scheduling the flows, EXR leaves flexibility to operators to define the priorities of flows, e.g., based on flow size, flow deadline, etc. Extensive simulations and testbed experiments both show that EXR can effectively save network energy compared with the regular fair-sharing routing (FSR), and significantly reduce the average flow completion time if assigning higher scheduling priorities to smaller flows.