Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A small population of liver endothelial cells undergoes endothelial-to-mesenchymal transition in response to chronic liver injury.

Rising evidence points to endothelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EndMT) as a significant source of the mesenchymal cell population in fibrotic diseases. In this context, we hypothesized that liver endothelial cells undergo EndMT during fibrosis progression. Cirrhosis in mice was induced by CCl4 A transgenic mouse expressing a red fluorescent protein reporter under the control of Tie2 promoter (Tie2-tdTomato) was used to trace the acquisition of EndMT. Sinusoidal vascular connectivity was evaluated by intravital microscopy and high-resolution three-dimensional confocal microscopy. A modest but significant fraction of liver endothelial cells from both cirrhotic patients and CCl4-treated Tie2-tdTomato mice acquired an EndMT phenotype characterized by the coexpression of CD31 and α-smooth muscle actin, compared with noncirrhotic livers. Bone morphogenetic protein-7 (BMP-7) inhibited the acquisition of EndMT induced by transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1) treatment in cultured primary mouse liver endothelial cells from control mice. EndMT was also reduced significantly in vivo in cirrhotic Tie2-tdTomato mice treated intraperitoneally with BMP-7 compared with untreated mice (1.9 ± 0.2 vs. 3.8 ± 0.3%, respectively; P < 0.05). The decrease of EndMT in cirrhotic livers correlated with a significant decrease in liver fibrosis (P < 0.05) and an improvement in the vascular disorganization rate (P < 0.05). We demonstrated the acquisition of the EndMT phenotype by a subpopulation of endothelial cells from cirrhotic livers in both animal models and patients. BMP-7 treatment decreases the occurrence of the EndMT phenotype and has a positive impact on the severity of disease by reducing fibrosis and sinusoidal vascular disorganization.NEW & NOTEWORTHY A subpopulation of liver endothelial cells from cirrhotic patients and mice with liver fibrosis undergoes endothelial-to-mesenchymal transition. Liver endothelial cells from healthy mice could transition into a mesenchymal phenotype in culture in response to TGF-β1 treatment. Fibrotic livers treated chronically with BMP-7 showed lower EndMT acquisition, reduced fibrosis, and improved vascular organization.
Activation of mammalian target of rapamycin in cytomegalic neurons of human cortical dysplasia

The cortex of patients with cortical dysplasia contains several abnormal cell types. Among the dysplastic cells, cytomegalic neurons are known to be electrically hyperactive and may contribute to epileptic activity. In this study, we sought to identify molecular markers of cytomegalic neurons in focal or hemispheric cortical dysplasia and to determine whether the activity of the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) kinase is abnormally high in these cells.
Polarimetric Optical High-Voltage Sensor Using Synthetic-Heterodyne Demodulation and Hilbert Transform With Gain Control Feedback

Optical voltage sensors are widely used for high-voltage (HV) sensing, but the measurement accuracy is often compromised by a sensitivity drift due to variations in the ambient conditions. Synthetic-heterodyne demodulation is a useful technique for dynamic displacement measurements using interferometric sensors as it can provide a detected signal that is immune to an interferometric drift. In this paper, a new synthetic-heterodyne technique, employing the Hilbert transform and gain control feedback, is applied to a polarimetric-based optical sensor system and used to measure an HV signal. The system comprises an He-Ne laser source, optical phase modulator, and HV sensor located between two polarizers followed by a photodetector and real-time electrical signal acquisition and processing. The use of a control loop results in significant improvements in the stability and accuracy of the detected HV signal. The sensor system was used to measure a 60-Hz HV signal with an amplitude range of 300 V to 7.5 kV. The sensor was also used to successfully measure the total power line harmonic distortion of a highly distorted 4 kV signal. The experimental results show very good agreement with measurements obtained by using the industry standard signal coincidence method.
Unemployment and inflation in Malaysia: evidence from error correction model

The negative association between unemployment and inflation is known as the Phillips Curve because the trade-off relationship between these two variables was first pointed out by William Phillips in 1958. For several decades, the Phillips Curve has been an important tool for macroeconomic policy formulators in various countries. Considering the fact that the majority of the studies on the Phillips Curve have been done in the context of the developed economies, this study focuses on Malaysia and aims to empirically analyze the relationship between unemployment rate and inflation rate in a developing country. The main finding of the current inquiry is that there existed an equilibrium relationship between unemployment rate and inflation rate in Malaysia. In other words, the results of this study support the validity of the Phillips Curve hypothesis.
Factors Associated with Use of Hormone Therapy Among Women with Mobility Impairments

ABSTRACT The purpose of the study was to examine the factors associated with hormone therapy (HT) use among women with mobility impairments. A non-probability sample of 188 menopausal women (average age = 53 years) from 38 states was recruited in 2004 for the study. Twenty-two percent of participants were currently taking HT; 33% were past users. Using multinomial logistic regression, this study found that those most likely to be taking HT now or in the past were older women, knowledgeable about HT, had had a hysterectomy, had bone loss, and had their providern's encouragement. Implications for health care providers are discussed.
Call : Can social mobilization promote toilet use and improve welfare ? Results from a field experiment in Orissa , India

A subset of the Millennium Development Goals reflect the world’s collective hope and resolve to reverse a particularly pernicious, pervasive, and persistent set of problems in much of the developing world: high rates of diarrhea (the number one killer of small children), insufficient water and sanitation services, and seemingly unsafe, inadequate, and myopic behaviors. How can we change this? This paper uses a community field experiment in rural Orissa, India to gain insight into household-level decisions to build and use individual household latrines and to examine the welfare impacts of sanitation improvements. We outline a generalizable theory of healthand sanitation-related behavior change, highlighting a number of factors that may affect the perceived costs and benefits of adopting a new behavior, and explain how our experiment provided an exogenous shock to different components of households’ utility functions. Our data show that the sanitation campaign had a substantial impact on latrine adoption and use. Using a difference-in-differences estimator, we find that the intervention increased latrine uptake by about 30%. This increase in latrine ownership, in turn, may have reduced child diarrhea and associated costs, although these results are less robust to different model specifications. We also investigate the role of social interactions in driving latrine adoption in the study area, and find some evidence that expected adoption by community members may have a significant and positive effect on a household’s own adoption decision. Taken together, these results highlight the importance of understanding the motivators of household decisions in designing and implementing health and development interventions.
Polymorphic Membrane Protein H Has Evolved in Parallel with the Three Disease-Causing Groups of Chlamydia trachomatis

ABSTRACT Chlamydia trachomatis is a human pathogen causing trachoma, urogenital disease, and lymphogranuloma venereum (LGV). A family of nine polymorphic membrane protein genes (pmpA to pmpI), resembling autotransporter proteins, has recently been discovered in C. trachomatis. pmp genes are large and predicted to be outer membrane proteins. We hypothesized that they would contain useful nucleotide sequence variability for epidemiologic studies. Since sequence information is available only for serovars D and L2, we sought to determine the amount of diversity within an individual pmp gene among serovars. We used restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis as a primary screen to assess the amount of sequence divergence among the pmp genes for serovars A to L3 of C. trachomatis. RFLP analysis showed little variation for some of the genes, such as pmpA, but substantial variation in others, such as pmpI. pmpH and pmpE yielded RFLP patterns that clustered the 15 serovars into ocular, urogenital, and LGV groups, and both proteins have been localized to the outer membrane. Therefore, we chose to sequence pmpE, pmpH, and pmpI from each of the 15 serovars. Evolutionary analysis showed three distinct divergence patterns. PmpI was least variable, resulting in an ambiguous evolutionary pattern. PmpE showed a high degree of diversity in the ocular strains compared to the other strains. Finally, the evolution of PmpH shows three groups that reflect disease groups, suggesting this protein may play a role in pathogenesis.
Wide-area Robust H/sub /spl infin// Control with pole placement for Damping Inter-area Oscillations

A wide-area robust control method for damping inter-area oscillations of power system is suggested in this paper. Both local and PMU-provided remote signals are utilized as feedback inputs to the controller. Participation vector is used to select remote signal and position controller. The damping controller design is formulated as an output disturbance rejection problem based on the mixed-sensitivity formulation and with pole placement constraints. This multi-objective synthesis can be transformed into a standard linear matrix inequality (LMI) problem which can be tractable numerically. A 4-generator power system is used to illustrate the whole design procedure and demonstrate the effectiveness of the designed controller and robustness with respect to variations of the system operating conditions. The results are also compared with the conventional PSS damping control
Evaluation of potential flavonoid inhibitors of glyoxalase-I based on virtual screening and in vitro studies

Glyoxalase-I (GLO-I) is a component of the ubiquitous detoxification system involved in the conversion of methylglyoxal (MG) to d-lactate in the glycolytic pathway. MG toxicity arises from its ability to form advanced glycation end products. GLO-I has been reported to be frequently overexpressed in various types of cancer cells. In this study, we performed structure-based virtual screening of focused flavonoids commercial library to identify potential and specific inhibitors of GLO-I. The compounds were ranked based on Glide extra precision docking score and five hits (curcumin, quercetin, morin, naringin and silibinin) were selected on the basis of their interaction with active site amino acid residues of GLO-I. Mixed mode QM/MM calculation was performed on the top-scoring hit to ascertain the role of zinc ion in ligand binding. In addition, the identified hits were subjected to MM/GBSA binding energy prediction, ADME prediction and similarity studies. The hits were tested in vitro for cell viability, and GLO-I inhibition. Naringin (ST072162) was found to be most potent inhibitor of GLO-I among the identified hits with highest glide XP dock score of −14.906. These findings suggest that naringin could be a new scaffold for designing inhibitors against GLO-I with potential application as anticancer agents.
Improving the performance of an incremental algorithm driven by error margins

Classification is a quite relevant task within data analysis field. This task is not a trivial task and different difficulties can arise depending on the nature of the problem. All these difficulties can become worse when the datasets are too large or when new information can arrive at any time. Incremental learning is an approach that can be used to deal with the classification task in these cases. It must alleviate, or solve, the problem of limited time and memory resources. One emergent approach uses concentration bounds to ensure that decisions are made when enough information supports them. IADEM is one of the most recent algorithms that use this approach. The aim of this paper is to improve the performance of this algorithm in different ways: simplifying the complexity of the induced models, adding the ability to deal with continuous data, improving the detection of noise, selecting new criteria for evolutionating the model, including the use of more powerful prediction techniques, etc. Besides these new properties, the new system, IADEM-2, preserves the ability to obtain a performance similar to standard learning algorithms independently of the datasets size and it can incorporate new information as the basic algorithm does: using short time per example.
Voltage Balancing in Diode Clamped Multilevel Inverter Using Sinusoidal PWM

Multilevel inverters offer several advantages compared to the conventional 3-phase bridge inverter in terms of lower dv/dt stresses, lower electromagnetic compatibility, smaller rating and better output features. This project presents a 9-level diode Clamped inverter using Sinusoidal pulse width Modulation techniques as the control strategies. The algorithm has been developed within the carrier-based PWM framework to facilitate its implementation in diode clamped converters with three or more levels. A simulation model of 9-level DCMI has been designed and developed. The results obtained from the simulation model have been compared with the 3-level and 5-level diode clamped inverter. By increasing the level of inverter, effective balancing in line voltage and reduced THD is obtained. The good performance of the proposed modulation technique is demonstrated from simulation results for a nine-level diode-clamped inverter and the 3-level diode clamped inverter hardware model is designed and exhibited.
Designing sociable robots

From the Publisher: Cynthia Breazeal here presents her vision of the sociable robot of the future, a synthetic creature and not merely a sophisticated tool. A sociable robot will be able to understand us, to communicate and interact with us, to learn from us and grow with us. It will be socially intelligent in a humanlike way. Eventually sociable robots will assist us in our daily lives, as collaborators and companions. Because the most successful sociable robots will share our social characteristics, the effort to make sociable robots is also a means for exploring human social intelligence and even what it means to be human. Breazeal defines the key components of social intelligence for these machines and offers a framework and set of design issues for their realization. Much of the book focuses on a nascent sociable robot she designed named Kismet. Breazeal offers a concrete implementation for Kismet, incorporating insights from the scientific study of animals and people, as well as from artistic disciplines such as classical animation. This blending of science, engineering, and art creates a lifelike quality that encourages people to treat Kismet as a social creature rather than just a machine. The book includes a CD-ROM that shows Kismet in action.
Output-feedback control of a class of high-order stochastic nonlinear systems

This article investigates the problem of output-feedback stabilisation for a class of high-order stochastic non-linear systems in which the diffusion terms depend on unmeasurable states besides the output. By introducing a new rescaling transformation, adopting an effective observer and choosing the appropriate Lyapunov function, an output-feedback controller is constructed to ensure that the equilibrium at the origin of the closed-loop system is globally asymptotically stable in probability, the output can be regulated to the origin almost surely, and the problem of inverse optimal stabilisation in probability is solved. The efficiency of the output-feedback controller is demonstrated by several simulation examples.
Information model to support sustainable procurement

Sustainable practices which increase awareness of people in industries which deal with environmental issues need to be implemented. However, information that needs to be considered to make informed decision on sustainable procurement is located in different places and comes in different form, either internal or external of the organizations. Thus, there is a strong need to consider this information to be interrelated and put in one place for easy access. The aim of this paper is to consider all of these concerns and develop information model to support sustainable procurement. It is hope that this information model is able to guide buyers in making the most informed decisions.
Optimizing P300-speller sequences by RIP-ping groups apart

So far P300-speller design has put very little emphasis on the design of optimized flash patterns, a surprising fact given the importance of the sequence of flashes on the selection outcome. Previous work in this domain has consisted in studying consecutive flashes, to prevent the same letter or its neighbors from flashing consecutively. To this effect, the flashing letters form more random groups than the original row-column sequences for the P300 paradigm, but the groups remain fixed across repetitions. This has several important consequences, among which a lack of discrepancy between the scores of the different letters. The new approach proposed in this paper accumulates evidence for individual elements, and optimizes the sequences by relaxing the constraint that letters should belong to fixed groups across repetitions. The method is inspired by the theory of Restricted Isometry Property matrices in Compressed Sensing, and it can be applied to any display grid size, and for any target flash frequency. This leads to P300 sequences which are shown here to perform significantly better than the state of the art, in simulations and online tests.
Activation and Cross-talk between Akt, NF-κB, and Unfolded Protein Response Signaling in 1-LN Prostate Cancer Cells Consequent to Ligation of Cell Surface-associated GRP78*

Binding of activated forms of the proteinase inhibitor α2-macroglobulin (α2M*) to cell surface-associated GRP78 on 1-LN human prostate cancer cells causes their proliferation. We have now examined the interplay between Akt activation, regulation of apoptosis, the unfolded protein response, and activation of NF-κBin α2M*-induced proliferation of 1-LN cells. Exposure of cells to α2M* (50 pm) induced phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase-dependent activation of Akt by phosphorylation at Thr-308 and Ser-473 with a concomitant 60-80% increase in Akt-associated kinase activity. ERK1/2 and p38 MAPK were also activated, but there was only a marginal effect on JNK activation. Treatment of 1-LN cells with α2M* down-regulated apoptosis and promoted NF-κB activation as shown by increases of Bcl-2, p-BadSer-136, p-FOXO1Ser-253, p-GSK3βSer-9, XIAP, NF-κB, cyclin D1, GADD45β, p-ASK1Ser-83, and TRAF2 in a time of incubation-dependent manner. α2M* treatment of 1-LN cells, however, showed no increase in the activation of caspase -3, -9, or -12. Under these conditions, we observed increased unfolded protein response signaling as evidenced by elevated levels of GRP78, IRE1α, XBP-1, ATF4, ATF6, p-PERK, p-eIF2α, and GADD34 and reduced levels of GADD153. Silencing of GRP78 gene expression by RNAi suppressed activation of AktThr-308, AktSer-473, and IκB kinase α kinase. The effects of α2M* on the NF-κB activation, antiapoptotic signaling, unfolded protein response signaling, and proapoptotic signaling were also reversed by this treatment. In conclusion, α2M* promotes cellular proliferation of 1-LN prostate cancer cells by activating MAPK and Akt-dependent signaling, down-regulating apoptotic signaling, and activating unfolded protein response signaling.
Nurses’ autonomy in end-of-life situations in intensive care units

Background: The intensive care unit environment focuses on interventions and support therapies that prolong life. The exercise by nurses of their autonomy impacts on perception of the role they assume in the multidisciplinary team and on their function in the intensive care unit context. There is much international research relating to nurses’ involvement in end-of-life situations; however, there is a paucity of research in this area in Brazil. In the Brazilian medical scenario, life support limitation generated a certain reluctance of a legal nature, which has now become unjustifiable with the publication of a resolution by the Federal Medical Council. In Brazil, the lack of medical commitments to end-of-life care is evident. Objective: To understand the process by which nurses exercise autonomy in making end-of-life decisions in intensive care units. Research design: Symbolic Interactionism and Corbin and Strauss theory methodology were used for this study. Participants and research context: Data were collected through single audio-recorded qualitative interviews with 14 critical care nurses. The comparative analysis of the data has permitted the understanding of the meaning of nurse’s experience in exercising autonomy relating to end-of-life decision-making. Ethical considerations: Institutional ethics approval was obtained for data collection. Participants gave informed consent. All data were anonymized. Findings: The results revealed that nurses experience the need to exercise autonomy in intensive care units on a daily basis. Their experience expressed by the process of increase opportunities to exercise autonomy is conditioned by the pressure of the intensive care unit environment, in which nurses can grow, feel empowered, and exercise their autonomy or else can continuously depend on the decisions made by other professionals. Conclusion: Nurses exercise their autonomy through care. They work to create new spaces at the same time that they acquire new knowledge and make decisions. Because of the complexity of the end-of-life situation, nurses must adopt a proactive attitude that inserts them into the decision-making process.
Pseudomaricurvus alcaniphilus sp. nov., a marine bacterium isolated from tidal flat sediment and emended descriptions of the genus Pseudomaricurvus, Pseudomaricurvus alkylphenolicus Iwaki et al. 2014 and Maricurvus nonylphenolicus Iwaki et al. 2012.

A novel Gram-reaction-negative, rod-shaped, aerobic and motile strain, designated MEBiC06469T, was isolated from tidal flat sediment of the Taean province, South Korea. Strain MEBiC06469T produced ivory-coloured colonies on marine agar 2216 medium and could degrade carboxymethyl-cellulose. On the basis of 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity, the closest relative was Pseudomaricurvus alkylphenolicus KU41GT with 96.5 % similarity. The isolate was catalase-positive but oxidase-negative. Growth was observed at 16-38 °C (optimum, 32 °C), at pH 6.0-9.0 (optimum, pH 7.5) and in the presence of 0.0-8.0 % (w/v) NaCl (optimum, 1.5 %). The only isoprenoid quinone was Q-8.The dominant fatty acids were summed feature 3 (comprised of C15 : 0 2-OH and/or C16 : 1ω7c; 20.4 %) and C17 : 1ω8c (30.9 %), summed feature 8 (comprised of C18 : 1ω7c and/or C18 : 1ω6c; 9.5 %), C16 : 0 (9.0 %), C15 : 1ω8c (5.3 %), and C11 : 0 3-OH (5.2 %). Based on these phenotypic properties and phylogenetic data, strain MEBiC06469T should be classified as a novel species within the genus Pseudomaricurvus for which the name Pseudomaricurvus alcaniphilus sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is MEBiC06469T ( = KCCM 42976T = JCM 18313T). Emended descriptions of the genus Pseudomaricurvus, Pseudomaricurvus alkylphenolicusIwaki et al. 2014, and Maricurvus nonylphenolicusIwaki et al. 2012 are also provided.