Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
hERGAPDbase: a database documenting hERG channel inhibitory potentials and APD-prolongation activities of chemical compounds

Drug-induced QT interval prolongation is one of the most common reasons for the withdrawal of drugs from the market. In the past decade, at least nine drugs, i.e. terfenadine, astemizole, grepafloxacin, terodiline, droperidol, lidoflazine, sertindole, levomethadyl and cisapride, have been removed from the market or their use has been severely restricted because of drug-induced QT interval prolongation. Therefore, this irregularity is a major safety concern in the case of drugs submitted for regulatory approval. The most common mechanism of drug-induced QT interval prolongation may be drug-related inhibition of the human ether-á-go-go-related gene (hERG) channel, which subsequently results in prolongation of the cardiac action potential duration (APD). hERGAPDbase is a database of electrophysiological experimental data documenting potential hERG channel inhibitory actions and the APD-prolongation activities of chemical compounds. All data entries are manually collected from scientific papers and curated by a person. With hERGAPDbase, we aim to provide useful information for chemical and pharmacological scientists and enable easy access to electrophysiological experimental data on chemical compounds. Database URL: http://www.grt. kyushu-u.ac. jp/hergapdbase/
Feasibility Study for Applying Electrostatic Adhesion on Wall Climbing Robots

This paper presents a feasibility study for applying electrostatic actuators on wall climbing robot (WCR). These film actuators have generated useful level of attachment force on vertical wall surface. It works on non-conductive surface such as ceramic tiles. The confirmed advantages of electrostatic adhesion are encouraging for the development of WCR. Design considerations for the WCR are also discussed, to particularly include an active tail for countering pitch-back moment. The control strategy for WCR is not complicated and involves only a separate circuitry to provide HVdc to the electrostatic actuators. As a short summary, electrostatic adhesion is a feasible method to empower ordinary tracked mobile robot for becoming a WCR. Keywords—electrostatic adhesion, wall climbing robot
CVD risk in South Asians: the importance of defining adiposity and influence of dietary polyunsaturated fat*

The prevalence of the metabolic syndrome (MetS), CVD and type 2 diabetes (T2D) is known to be higher in populations from the Indian subcontinent compared with the general UK population. While identification of this increased risk is crucial to allow for effective treatment, there is controversy over the applicability of diagnostic criteria, and particularly measures of adiposity in ethnic minorities. Diagnostic cut-offs for BMI and waist circumference have been largely derived from predominantly white Caucasian populations and, therefore, have been inappropriate and not transferable to Asian groups. Many Asian populations, particularly South Asians, have a higher total and central adiposity for a similar body weight compared with matched Caucasians and greater CVD risk associated with a lower BMI. Although the causes of CVD and T2D are multi-factorial, diet is thought to make a substantial contribution to the development of these diseases. Low dietary intakes and tissue levels of long-chain (LC) n-3 PUFA in South Asian populations have been linked to high-risk abnormalities in the MetS. Conversely, increasing the dietary intake of LC n-3 PUFA in South Asians has proved an effective strategy for correcting such abnormalities as dyslipidaemia in the MetS. Appropriate diagnostic criteria that include a modified definition of adiposity must be in place to facilitate the early detection and thus targeted treatment of increased risk in ethnic minorities.
Systems Genetics Reveals the Functional Context of PCOS Loci and Identifies Genetic and Molecular Mechanisms of Disease Heterogeneity

Genome wide association studies (GWAS) have revealed 11 independent risk loci for polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a common disorder in young women characterized by androgen excess and oligomenorrhea. To put these risk loci and the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) therein into functional context, we measured DNA methylation and gene expression in subcutaneous adipose tissue biopsies to identify PCOS-specific alterations. Two genes from the LHCGR region, STON1-GTF2A1L and LHCGR, were overexpressed in PCOS. In analysis stratified by obesity, LHCGR was overexpressed only in non-obese PCOS women. Although not differentially expressed in the entire PCOS group, INSR was underexpressed in obese PCOS subjects only. Alterations in gene expression in the LHCGR, RAB5B and INSR regions suggest that SNPs in these loci may be functional and could affect gene expression directly or indirectly via epigenetic alterations. We identified reduced methylation in the LHCGR locus and increased methylation in the INSR locus, changes that are concordant with the altered gene expression profiles. Complex patterns of meQTL and eQTL were identified in these loci, suggesting that local genetic variation plays an important role in gene regulation. We propose that non-obese PCOS women possess significant alterations in LH receptor expression, which drives excess androgen secretion from the ovary. Alternatively, obese women with PCOS possess alterations in insulin receptor expression, with underexpression in metabolic tissues and overexpression in the ovary, resulting in peripheral insulin resistance and excess ovarian androgen production. These studies provide a genetic and molecular basis for the reported clinical heterogeneity of PCOS.
Local density of states and scanning tunneling currents in graphene

We present exact analytical calculations of scanning tunneling currents in locally disordered graphene using a multimode description of the microscope tip. Analytical expressions for the local density of states (LDOS) are given for energies beyond the Dirac cone approximation. We show that the LDOS at the A and B sublattices of graphene are out of phase by π implying that the averaged LDOS, as one moves away from the impurity, shows no trace of the 2qF (with qF the Fermi momentum) Friedel modulation. This means that a scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) experiment lacking atomic resolution at the sublattice level will not be able to detect the presence of the Friedel oscillations (this seems to be the case in the experiments reported in Brihuega et al 2008 Phys. Rev. Lett. 101 206802). The momentum maps of the LDOS for different types of impurities are given. In the case of the vacancy, 2qF features are seen in these maps. In all momentum space maps, K and K+K′ features are seen. The K+K′ features are different from what is seen around zero momentum. An interpretation for these features is given. The calculations reported here are valid for chemical substitution impurities, such as boron and nitrogen atoms, as well as for vacancies. It is shown that the density of states close to the impurity is very sensitive to the type of disorder: diagonal, non-diagonal, or vacancies. In the case of weakly coupled (to the carbon atoms) impurities, the LDOS presents strong resonances at finite energies, which leads to steps in the scanning tunneling currents and to suppression of the Fano factor.
Role of Aging and Hippocampus in Time-Place Learning: Link to Episodic-Like Memory?

Introduction: With time-place learning (TPL), animals link an event with the spatial location and the time of day (TOD). The what–where–when TPL components make the task putatively episodic-like in nature. Animals use an internal sense of time to master TPL, which is circadian system based. Finding indications for a role of the hippocampus and (early) aging-sensitivity in TPL would strengthen the episodic-like memory nature of the paradigm. Methods: Previously, we used C57Bl/6 mice for our TPL research. Here, we used CD1 mice which are less hippocampal-driven and age faster compared to C57Bl/6 mice. To demonstrate the low degree of hippocampal-driven performance in CD1 mice, a cross maze was used. The spontaneous alternation test was used to score spatial working memory in CD1 mice at four different age categories (young (3–6 months), middle-aged (7–11 months), aged (12–18 months) and old (>19 months). TPL performance of middle-aged and aged CD1 mice was tested in a setup with either two or three time points per day (2-arm or 3-arm TPL task). Immunostainings were applied on brains of young and middle-aged C57Bl/6 mice that had successfully mastered the 3-arm TPL task. Results: In contrast to C57Bl/6 mice, middle-aged and aged CD1 mice were less hippocampus-driven and failed to master the 3-arm TPL task. They could, however, master the 2-arm TPL task primarily via an ordinal (non-circadian) timing system. c-Fos, CRY2, vasopressin (AVP), and phosphorylated cAMP response element-binding protein (pCREB) were investigated. We found no differences at the level of the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN; circadian master clock), whereas CRY2 expression was increased in the hippocampal dentate gyrus (DG). The most pronounced difference between TPL trained and control mice was found in c-Fos expression in the paraventricular thalamic nucleus, a circadian system relay station. Conclusions: These results further indicate a key role of CRY proteins in TPL and confirm the limited role of the SCN in TPL. Based on the poor TPL performance of CD1 mice, the results suggest age-sensitivity and hippocampal involvement in TPL. We suspect that TPL reflects an episodic-like memory task, but due to its functional nature, also entail the translation of experienced episodes into semantic rules acquired by training.
Therapeutic transdifferentiation of human fibroblasts into endothelial cells using forced expression of lineage-specific transcription factors

Transdifferentiation is the direct conversion from one somatic cell type into another desired somatic cell type. This reprogramming method offers an attractive approach for regenerative medicine. Here, we demonstrate that neonatal fibroblasts can be transdifferentiated into endothelial cells using only four endothelial transcription factors, namely, ETV2, FLI1, GATA2, and KLF4. We observed a significant up-regulation of endothelial genes including KDR, CD31, CD144, and vWF in human neonatal foreskin (BJ) fibroblasts infected with the lentiviral construct encoding the open reading frame of the four transcription factors. We observed morphological changes in BJ fibroblasts from the fibroblastic spindle shape into a more endothelial-like cobblestone structures. Fluorescence-activated cell sorting analysis revealed that ~16% of the infected cells with the lentiviral constructs encoding 4F expressed CD31. The sorted cells were allowed to expand for 2 weeks and these cells were immunostained and found to express endothelial markers CD31. The induced endothelial cells also incorporated fluorescence-labeled acetylated low-density lipoprotein and efficiently formed capillary-like networks when seeded on Matrigel. These results suggested that the induced endothelial cells were functional in vitro. Taken together, we successfully demonstrated the direct conversion of human neonatal fibroblasts into endothelial cells by transduction of lentiviral constructs encoding endothelial lineage-specific transcription factors ETV2, FLI1, GATA2, and KLF4. The directed differentiation of fibroblasts into endothelial cells may have significant utility in diseases characterized by fibrosis and loss of microvasculature.
Temperature-Compensated dB-linear Digitally Controlled Variable Gain Amplifier With DC Offset Cancellation

This paper presents a compact digitally controlled variable gain amplifier (DVGA) with capabilities of both temperature compensated linear-in-decibel (dB-linear) gain control and dc offset cancellation (DCOC) without making use of either the feedback or the feed-forward loop. The proposed DVGA design is a three-stage inductorless cascaded amplifier that is integrated with a temperature-compensated dB-linear gain control, a DCOC, an output common mode feedback, a 6-bit digital gain control (with a 64-step resolution), a power shutdown mode, and a linearizer for improving the 1-dB gain compression point. The design is fabricated using a commercial 0.18-μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The DVGA has a measured gain range of 18.4 dB with an average step size of 0.3 dB, a 3-dB bandwidth from 2 MHz to 1.9 GHz with a ±0.75-dB gain flatness from 2.75 MHz to 1.2 GHz, an input 1-dB gain compression point better than -12.5 dBm, an input return loss better than 12 dB, an output return loss better than 16 dB, and a dc power consumption of 12.2 mW from a 1.8-V supply. The core DVGA, by excluding the I/O measurement pads, occupies a die area of 160 μm × 300 μm.
Dual Tasking Under Compromised Visual and Somatosensory Input in Elderly Fallers and Non-Fallers

Background: Performance of additional tasks disturbs postural control in elderly. It is unknown, however, how postural control is affected in elderly fallers and non-fallers in a reduced sensory situation. Objective: To compare differences between single and dual tasking in three test conditions; (1) no-vision, (2) under reduced somatosensory information and (3) with a combination of both conditions. Design: An observational cohort study with participants assigned to a 12-month pretest fall assessment and a postural balance assessment. Methods: Fifteen independently living elderly participated (77.5 ± 7.0 [63-87] years). Falls were pre-assessed with a 1- year monthy “fall calendar”. Postural control was analyzed by means of a force platform. Participants were standing quiet (first task) while counting backwards (second task). A 2-factor (group x condition) ANOVA was performed at p<. 05. Differences of postural (DTCp) and cognitive dual task costs (DTCc) between test conditions were analyzed (one-way ANOVA). Results: The analysis showed significant group (fallers/non-fallers) and condition effects. Post hoc analyses indicated that the postural control variables were significantly different during the concurrent reduced vision and somatosensory information. Dual task costs showed a significant difference between normal (N) and the combined condition (NV+RP) in non-fallers. Conclusion: The combination of reduced visual and somatosensory information causes a larger disturbance of postural stability compared with the reduction of visual or somatosensory information alone. Non-fallers seem to have no threats to the postural control stability in this combined reduced sensory situation. They reduce their postural control, which leaves them enough resources to compensate for the reduced sensory information.
A nosocomial outbreak of Acinetobacter baumannii isolates expressing the carbapenem-hydrolysing oxacillinase OXA-58.

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to analyse the spread of the bla(OXA-58) gene as a source of carbapenem resistance in Acinetobacter baumannii in the burns unit of a university hospital in Toulouse in 2003-2004. METHODS Six carbapenem-resistant A. baumannii isolates from six patients, and a carbapenem-resistant environmental A. baumannii isolate were collected in the burns unit of the Rangueil hospital (Toulouse). Susceptibility tests were carried out by disc diffusion and agar dilution methods. The detection of the bla(OXA-58) gene was conducted by PCR followed by sequence analysis. Plasmids were extracted and hybridized with a probe specific for bla(OXA-58). DNA fingerprints were obtained by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis of ApaI- or SmaI-digested chromosomal DNA of the tested strains. RESULTS The multidrug-resistant clinical isolates had a similar 30 kb plasmid that encoded the carbapenem-hydrolysing beta-lactamase OXA-58. These isolates were clonally related. The unrelated environmental carbapenem-resistant A. baumannii isolate had a similar bla(OXA-58)-carrying plasmid, suggesting spread of this gene. CONCLUSIONS A novel oxacillinase was the source of carbapenem resistance in the A. baumannii isolates. Its gene was plasmid-, but not integron-borne.
Decision-Tree based Error Correction for Statistical Phrase Break Prediction in Korean

In this paper, we present a new phrase break prediction architecture that integrates probabilistic approach with decision-tree based error correction. The probabilistic method alone usually suffers from performance degradation due to inherent data sparseness problems and it only covers a limited range of contextual information. Moreover, the module can not utilize the selective morpheme tag and relative distance to the other phrase breaks. The decision-tree based error correction was tightly integrated to overcome these limitations.The initially phrase break tagged morpheme sequence is corrected with the error correcting decision tree which was induced by C4.5 from the correctly tagged corpus with the output of the probabilistic predictor. The decision tree-based post error correction provided improved results even with the phrase break predictor that has poor initial performance. Moreover, the system can be flexibly tuned to new corpus without massive retraining.
Modeling Cooking Tutorials using Hidden Markov Models Robot Learning from Demonstration

With the advancement of personal robotics, learning from demonstration has become a popular technique to teach robots new tasks. However, for a robot to adapt different tasks and environments, it is not feasible for endusers to provide demonstrations for all possible tasks and scenarios. Instead if robots could leverage the large amount of instructional data available on the web to perform tasks, such as video and text tutorials, the amount of effort required by endusers to teach robots could be minimized. In this project, we look at the problem of recovering the latent structure present in textual instructions sets for cooking recipes specifically peanut butter and jelly sandwich and chocolate cake recipes. We manually collect a set of 20 recipes for each recipe type and train Hidden Markov Models to recover the latent steps generating these recipes. We use four different types of HMMs which vary based on the language models used for computing the probabilities of textual observations given the latent state. We discover that a single HMM is not able to capture all desired properties of a model assumed to be generating recipes from a set of latent steps representativeness, discrimination and alignment.
Multiple Access Channels with State Information Known at Some Encoders

We consider a multiple access channel (MAC) with state information non-causally known at some encoders. For simplicity of exposition, we focus on a two-encoder model in which one of the encoders is non-causally informed of the the channel state information (CSI). The results can in principle be extended to any number of encoders with a subset of them being informed. We derive an inner bound for the capacity region in the general discrete memoryless case and specialize to a binary noiseless case. We also derive an inner bound for the capacity region of an additive white Gaussian MAC with one encoder being informed of the CSI. In both binary case and Gaussian case, we compare the inner bounds with trivial outer bounds obtained by giving the CSI to the decoder. For both the binary and the Gaussian inner bounds, the informed encoder uses a slightly generalized dirty paper coding (DPC) scheme that allows arbitrary correlation between the codeword and the known CSI with negative correlation being viewed as partial state cancellation. It appears that the generalized DPC can not completely eliminate the effect of the CSI, in contrast to the case of all encoder being informed.
Striving and Dreaming: A Grounded Theory of the Transition to Adulthood for Cross-Systems Youth

The transition to adulthood is an underresearched topic for cross-systems youth, defined as young people who have experienced homelessness, child welfare system involvement, and educational challenges. This qualitative study explored processes of resilience in the transition to adulthood for cross-systems youth aged 18 to 24 (n = 20). Analysis of in-depth interviews using a grounded theory open coding process revealed two thematic concepts, striving and dreaming. As illustrated in two case studies, striving was characterized by participants having specific educational and career goals and making strategic choices about programs and resources. In contrast, the dreaming concept indicated participants having little understanding of the steps and resources needed to achieve their goals. Implications for practice include the importance of helping cross-systems youth maintain supportive relationships with families of origin and peers to enhance striving, and the use of motivational interviewing to assist emerging adults in gauging their readiness and motivation to set and pursue goals.
Modeling and Application of Series Elastic Actuators for Force Control Multi Legged Robots

A microprocessor with a floating point unit configured to efficiently allocate multi-pipeline executable instructions is disclosed. Multi-pipeline executable instructions are instructions that are not forced to execute in a particular type of execution pipe. For example, junk ops are multi-pipeline executable. A junk op is an instruction that is executed at an early stage of the floating point unit's pipeline (e.g., during register rename), but still passes through an execution pipeline for exception checking. Junk ops are not limited to a particular execution pipeline, but instead may pass through any of the microprocessor's execution pipelines in the floating point unit. Multi-pipeline executable instructions are allocated on a per-clock cycle basis using a number of different criteria. For example, the allocation may vary depending upon the number of multi-pipeline executable instructions received by the floating point unit in a single clock cycle.
The role of the feedforward loop into the information transmission

The capability of respond to external stimuli is crucial for living organisms, life or death issue. The stimulus can be encoded into molecular species, it travels along the cell (signaling pathway) and triggers a specific response. Furthermore, this process happens in a noisy environment. A particular motif is recurrent over diverse organisms when transmission of information is needed, the feedforward loop. This motif transduces and amplifies the input. To know the impact of the amplification into the information assimilation, we implemented an in silico signaling pathway with unitary gain. We quantified the maximal amount of information that the system can manage via the information theory tools. The results indicate that the information capacity of the two nested feedforward channel is enhanced by the amplification in this signal pathway.
Making Sense of Voices: a case series

ABSTRACT The current evidence-base for the psychological treatment of distressing voices indicates the need for further clinical development. The Maastricht approach (also known as Making Sense of Voices) is popular within sections of the Hearing Voices Movement, but its clinical effectiveness has not been systematically evaluated. The aim of the approach is to develop a better understanding of the role of the voice, in part through opening a dialogue between the voice hearer and the voice. The current study was a (N = 15) case series adopting a concurrent multiple baseline design. The Maastricht approach was offered for up to 9-months. The main outcome, weekly voice-related distress ratings, was not statistically significant during intervention or follow-up, although the effect size was in the moderate range. The PSYRATS Hallucination scale was associated with a large effect size both at the end of treatment, and after a 3-month follow-up period, although again the effect did not reach statistical significance. The results suggest further evaluation of the approach is warranted. However, given the large variance in individual participant outcome, it may be that a better understanding of response profiles is required before conducting a definitive randomised controlled trial.