Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Glutathione conjugated polyethylenimine on the surface of Fe3O4 magnetic nanoparticles as a theranostic agent for targeted and controlled curcumin delivery

Abstract Theranostics with the ability to simultaneous monitoring of treatment progress and controlled delivery of therapeutic agents has become as an emerging therapeutic paradigm in cancer therapy. In this study, we have developed a novel surface functionalized iron oxide nanoparticle using polyethyleneimine and glutathione for targeted curcumin (CUR) delivery and acceptable pH sensitive character. The developed magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) were physicochemically characterized by FT-IR, XRD, FE-SEM and TEM. The MNPs was obtained in spherical shape with diameter of 50 nm. CUR was efficiently loaded into the MNPs and then in vitro release analyses were evaluated and showed that the prepared MNPs could release higher amount of CUR in acidic medium compared to neutral medium due to the pH sensitive property of the coated polymer. MTT assay confirmed the superior toxicity of CUR loaded MNPs compared to the control nanoparticles. Higher cellular uptake of the MNPs than negative control cells was demonstrated in SK-N-MC cell line. In vitro assessment of MRI properties showed that synthesized MNPs could be used as MRI imaging agent. Furthermore, according to hemolysis assay, the developed formulation exhibited suitable hemocompatibility. In vivo blood circulation analysis of the MNPs also exhibited enhanced serum bioavailability up to 2.5 fold for CUR loaded MNPs compared with free CUR.
Angry Versus Furious: A Comparison Between Valence and Arousal in Dimensional Models of Emotions

ABSTRACT The present study compared the roles of valence and arousal, proposed by the dimensional models of emotions, in recognizing emotional expressions. It was hypothesized that the dimension of valence, due to its functional significance, would be more salient in the recognition of emotional expressions than the dimension of arousal would be. The results of the current study supported this hypothesis. The participants in all age groups were more accurate and quicker in recognizing an emotion when the expression was paired up with another emotional expression that was different in the polarity of the valence dimension than with this similar polarity difference in the arousal dimension. The insignificant difference in recognizing the positive and negative emotional expressions in the group of elders also rejected the Socio-Emotional Selectivity Theory.
Paper Income Inequality and Export Prices Across Countries

This paper provides first firm-level evidence on the links between income inequality within a destination country and the patterns of trade and export prices. We identify a theoretical mechanism behind these links, which relates income inequality to product quality and prices using a simple demand composition effect. Theory suggests that a more unequal distribution of income in a country leads to higher average prices, though the effect is non-linear and disappears for countries exceeding a certain level of income. The predictions are confirmed using detailed firm-level data. Controlling for income per capita, prices are systematically higher in more unequal destination countries, and the strength of this effect depends on income per capita. Our results are robust to different measures of income inequality, hold only for differentiated goods and in particular for products with a high degree of vertical differentiation. Key-words: exports prices, income distribution, product quality, markups. JEL classification: F12, F14, L11. ∗We thank Eddy Bekkers, Carsten Eckel, Peter Eppinger, Hannes Kammerer, Hélène Latzer, Kalina Manova, Marc Muendler, Monika Schnitzer, Emanuel Ornelas, Alexander Tarasov, Gonzague Vannoorenberghe and the participants of the Midwest International Economics Group (MI-USA), ETSG-Birmingham, LACEA/LAMES Sao Paulo, Göttingen International Economics Workshop and seminars in Mannheim and Munich for helpful comments. †Department of Economics, University of Munich. Ludwigstrasse 28, 80539 Munich, Germany. Email: Lisandra.Flach@econ.lmu. de ‡Department of Economics, University of Mannheim. L7, 3-5, 68131 Mannheim, Germany. Email: janeba@uni-mannheim.de
Relationship Between Visceral Infarction and Ischemic Stroke Subtype

Background and Purpose— Most cryptogenic strokes are thought to have an embolic source. We sought to determine whether cryptogenic strokes are associated with visceral infarcts, which are usually embolic. Methods— Among patients prospectively enrolled in CAESAR (Cornell Acute Stroke Academic Registry), we selected those with a contrast-enhanced abdominal computed tomographic scan within 1 year of admission. Our exposure variable was adjudicated stroke subtype per the Trial of ORG 10172 in Acute Stroke Treatment classification. Our outcome was renal or splenic infarction as assessed by a single radiologist blinded to stroke subtype. We used Fisher exact test and multiple logistic regression to compare the prevalence of visceral infarcts among cardioembolic strokes, strokes of undetermined etiology, and noncardioembolic strokes (large- or small-vessel strokes). Results— Among 227 patients with ischemic stroke and a contrast-enhanced abdominal computed tomographic scan, 59 had a visceral infarct (35 renal and 27 splenic). The prevalence of visceral infarction was significantly different among cardioembolic strokes (34.2%; 95% confidence interval [CI], 23.7%–44.6%), strokes of undetermined etiology (23.9%; 95% CI, 15.0%–32.8%), and strokes from large-artery atherosclerosis or small-vessel occlusion (12.5%; 95% CI, 1.8%–23.2%; P=0.03). In multiple logistic regression models adjusted for demographics and vascular comorbidities, we found significant associations with visceral infarction for both cardioembolic stroke (odds ratio, 3.5; 95% CI, 1.2–9.9) and stroke of undetermined source (odds ratio, 3.3; 95% CI, 1.1–10.5) as compared with noncardioembolic stroke. Conclusions— The prevalence of visceral infarction differed significantly across ischemic stroke subtypes. Cardioembolic and cryptogenic strokes were associated with a higher prevalence of visceral infarcts than noncardioembolic strokes.
Analyzing fault prediction usefulness from cost perspective using source code metrics

Software fault prediction techniques are useful for the purpose of optimizing test resource allocation. Software fault prediction based on source code metrics and machine learning models consists of using static program features as input predictors to estimate the fault proneness of a class or module. We conduct a comparison of five machine learning algorithms on their fault prediction performance based on experiments on 56 open source projects. Several researchers have argued on the application of software engineering economics and testing cost for the purpose of evaluating a software quality assurance activity. We evaluate the performance and usefulness of fault prediction models within the context of a cost evaluation framework and present the results of our experiments. We propose a novel approach using decision trees to predict the usefulness of fault prediction based on distributional characteristics of source code metrics by fusing information from the output of the fault prediction usefulness using cost evaluation framework and distributional source code metrics.
Dextranase from Arthrobacter oxydans KQ11-1 inhibits biofilm formation by polysaccharide hydrolysis

Abstract Dental plaque is a biofilm of water-soluble and water-insoluble polysaccharides, produced primarily by Streptococcus mutans. Dextranase can inhibit biofilm formation. Here, a dextranase gene from the marine microorganism Arthrobacter oxydans KQ11-1 is described, and cloned and expressed using E. coli DH5α competent cells. The recombinant enzyme was then purified and its properties were characterized. The optimal temperature and pH were determined to be 60°C and 6.5, respectively. High-performance liquid chromatography data show that the final hydrolysis products were glucose, maltose, maltotriose, and maltotetraose. Thus, dextranase can inhibit the adhesive ability of S. mutans. The minimum biofilm inhibition and reduction concentrations (MBIC50 and MBRC50) of dextranase were 2 U ml−1 and 5 U ml−1, respectively. Scanning electron microscopy and confocal laser scanning microscope (CLSM) observations confirmed that dextranase inhibited biofilm formation and removed previously formed biofilms.
Transition-Metal-Controlled Inorganic Ligand-Supported Non-Precious Metal Catalysts for the Aerobic Oxidation of Amines to Imines.

Most state-of-art transition-metal catalysts usually require organic ligands, which are essential for controlling the reactivity and selectivity of reactions catalyzed by transition metals. However, organic ligands often suffer from severe problems including cost, toxicity, air/moisture sensitivity, and being commercially unavailable. Herein, we show a simple, mild, and efficient aerobic oxidation procedure of amines using inorganic ligand-supported non-precious metal catalysts 1, (NH4 )n [MMo6 O18 (OH)6 ] (M=Cu2+ ; Fe3+ ; Co3+ ; Ni2+ ; Zn2+ , n=3 or 4), synthesized by a simple one-step method in water at 100 °C, demonstrating that the catalytic activity and selectivity can be significantly improved by changing the central metal atom. In the presence of these catalysts, the catalytic oxidation of primary and secondary amines, as well as the coupling of alcohols and amines, can smoothly proceed to afford various imines with O2 (1 atm) as the sole oxidant. In particular, the catalysts 1 have transition-metal ion core, and the planar arrangement of the six MoVI centers at their highest oxidation states around the central heterometal can greatly enhance the Lewis acidity of catalytically active sites, and also enable the electrons in the center to delocalize onto the six edge-sharing MO6 units, in the same way as ligands in traditional organometallic complexes. The versatility of this methodology maybe opens a path to catalytic oxidation through inorganic ligand-coordinated metal catalysis.
Lake edge detection using Canny algorithm and Otsu thresholding

Change that is happened to the lake can have implication to its surrounding. Monitoring the change can be done remotely by using remote sensing images. To do it automatically, we first need to detect the lake region in the images, then gain the edges between water and land area. This research aims to implement the Canny edge detection method, combining with Otsu thresholding to detect the edges. Otsu thresholding is used to gain threshold value for Canny Method. In result, some edges are well detected, but some others are missed. Some of the false detected edges are gained from thresholding process, where shadow or dark pixel area which have nearly same color as water, are also detected as water.
Psychosocial Support Issues Affecting Older Patients: A Cross-sectional Paramedic Perspective

This research aimed to gain an understanding of the psychosocial support needs of older patients in the out-of-hospital setting from the perspective of paramedics. Specifically, we investigate if and how paramedics are able to meet the needs of older adults, and the barriers preventing them from achieving this. This study was a cross-sectional study utilizing a sequential design with both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. All participants agreed or strongly agreed that older patients have needs beyond the physical and that they would like to do more for older patients. Paramedics discussed that psychosocial support issues are rarely in isolation and straightforward but were often coupled with broader, longer term physical health and social support issues. They would like to be able to do more for patients but feel hamstrung by lack of time, resources, and know-how.
Control of complex biomechanical systems

Humans show stunning performance on a variety of manipulation tasks. However, little is known about the computation that the human brain performs to accomplish these tasks. Recently, anatomically correct tendon-driven models of the human hand have been developed, but controlling them remains an issue. In this thesis, we present a computationally efficient feedback controller, capable of dealing with the complexity of these models. We demonstrate its abilities by successfully performing tracking and reaching tasks for an elaborated model of the human index finger. The controller, called One-Step-Ahead controller, is designed in a hierarchical fashion, with the high-level controller determining the desired trajectory and the low-level controller transforming it into muscle activations by solving a constrained linear least squares problem. It was proposed to use equilibrium controls as a feedforward command, and learn the controller’s parameters online by stabilizing the plant at various configurations. The conducted experiments suggest the feasibility of the proposed learning approach for the index finger model.
Differential influences of allometry, phylogeny and environment on the rostral shape diversity of extinct South American notoungulates

Understanding the mechanisms responsible for phenotypic diversification, and the associated underlying constraints and ecological factors represents a central issue in evolutionary biology. Mammals present a wide variety of sizes and shapes, and are characterized by a high number of morphological convergences that are hypothesized to reflect similar environmental pressures. Extinct South American notoungulates evolved in isolation from northern mammalian faunas in highly disparate environments. They present a wide array of skeletal phenotypes and convergences, such as ever-growing dentition. Here, we focused on the origins of the rostral diversity of notoungulates by quantifying the shape of 26 genera using three-dimensional geometric morphometric analysis. We tested the influence of allometry and phylogeny on rostral shape and evaluated rates of evolutionary change in the different clades. We found strong allometric and phylogenetic signals concerning the rostral shape of notoungulates. Despite convergent forms, we observed a diffuse diversification of rostral shape, with no significant evidence of influence by large-scaled environmental variation. This contrasts with the increase in dental crown height that occurred in four late-diverging families in response to similar environmental pressures. These results illustrate the importance of considering both biological components and evolutionary rates to better understand some aspects of phenotypic diversity.
Overview of the Moral Status of iPS Cells

The production of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells in 2006 by Takahashi and Yamanaka was a major breakthrough in stem cell research. IPS cells technology holds great promise for cell therapy, disease modelling, and drug testing, but it poses ethical questions concerning the moral status of somatic cells, which can re-gain pluripotency (iPS cells). This article provides an overview of the arguments that substantiate the debate on the moral assessment of iPS cells: potentiality argument; relational properties/standard view; and genetic basis for moral status.
MICA—A toolbox for masked independent component analysis of fMRI data

Independent component analysis (ICA) is a widely used technique for investigating functional connectivity (fc) in functional magnetic resonance imaging data. Masked independent component analysis (mICA), that is, ICA restricted to a defined region of interest, has been shown to detect local fc networks in particular brain regions, including the cerebellum, brainstem, posterior cingulate cortex, operculo‐insular cortex, hippocampus, and spinal cord. Here, we present the mICA toolbox, an open‐source GUI toolbox based on FSL command line tools that performs mICA and related analyses in an integrated way. Functions include automated mask generation from atlases, essential preprocessing, mICA‐based parcellation, back‐reconstruction of whole‐brain fc networks from local ones, and reproducibility analysis. Automated slice‐wise calculation and cropping are additional functions that reduce computational time and memory requirements for large analyses. To validate our toolbox, we tested these different functions on the cerebellum, hippocampus, and brainstem, using resting‐state and task‐based data from the Human Connectome Project. In the cerebellum, mICA detected six local networks together with their whole‐brain counterparts, closely replicating previous results. MICA‐based parcellation of the hippocampus showed a longitudinally discrete configuration with greater heterogeneity in the anterior hippocampus, consistent with animal and human literature. Finally, brainstem mICA detected motor and sensory nuclei involved in the motor task of tongue movement, thereby replicating and extending earlier results. Hum Brain Mapp 37:3544–3556, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
A Gender-Responsive Treatment Facility in Correctional Services: The Development of Psychological Gymnasium for Women Offenders

With increasing evidence suggesting a disparity in female and male offenders in terms of rehabilitative needs, growing concern has been placed on the development of gender-specific services for female offenders. As such, a prison-based psychological gymnasium (PSY GYM), with distinctive features in integrating cognitive-behavioral and positive-psychology concepts to address female offenders’ needs, was set up in 2011. The present study aims to introduce the concept as well as present findings to evaluate the overall effectiveness of PSY GYM. Nineteen Chinese female offenders participated in a 6- to 8-month intensive training program at the Lo Wu Correctional Institution (LWCI) of the Hong Kong Correctional Services Department in Hong Kong. Psychometric inventories were used to assess their psychological distress and positive growth following the program. Participants showed significant reduction in their depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms, and in their tendency to pay attention to negative information. Furthermore, their sense of hope, gratitude, and tendency to pay attention to positive information had remarkably increased. This indicated the effectiveness of PSY GYM in facilitating successful rehabilitation for female offenders.
A Temporal Permission Analysis and Enforcement Framework for Android

Permission-induced attacks, i.e., security breaches enabled by permission misuse, are among the most critical and frequent issues threatening the security of Android devices. By ignoring the temporal aspects of an attack during the analysis and enforcement, the state-of-the-art approaches aimed at protecting the users against such attacks are prone to have low-coverage in detection and high-disruption in prevention of permission-induced attacks. To address the aforementioned shortcomings, we present TERMINATOR, a temporal permission analysis and enforcement framework for Android. Leveraging temporal logic model checking, TERMINATOR's analyzer identifies permission-induced threats with respect to dynamic permission states of the apps. At runtime, TERMINATOR's enforcer selectively leases (i.e., temporarily grants) permissions to apps when the system is in a safe state, and revokes the permissions when the system moves to an unsafe state realizing the identified threats. The results of our experiments, conducted over thousands of apps, indicate that TERMINATOR is able to provide an effective, yet non-disruptive defense against permission-induced attacks. We also show that our approach, which does not require modification to the Android framework or apps' implementation logic, is highly reliable and widely applicable.
Progressive learning strategies for multi-class classification

The progressive learning paradigm is inspired from human learning theory which enables a classifier to learn multiple new classes on the fly by adapting, growing and restructuring the network automatically to facilitate learning of the newly introduced classes while maintaining the knowledge of previously learnt classes. In this paper, we propose different progressive learning strategies for multi-class classification and analyze their performance metrics. The ability to learn completely new classes anytime makes the progressive learning classifiers highly suitable for several real-world applications in which the number of classes is often unknown apriori and new classes evolve over time. Several standard datasets are used to evaluate the performance of the different progressive learning strategies and are also compared with other existing online learning approaches.
Phase I Study of the Anti-CD22 Antibody–Drug Conjugate Pinatuzumab Vedotin with/without Rituximab in Patients with Relapsed/Refractory B-cell Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma

Purpose: Pinatuzumab vedotin is an antibody–drug conjugate with the potent antimicrotubule agent monomethyl auristatin E (MMAE) conjugated to an anti-CD22 antibody via a protease-cleavable linker. This phase I study determined its recommended phase II dose (RP2D) and evaluated its safety, tolerability, and antitumor activity alone and with rituximab in relapsed/refractory (r/r) non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). Experimental Design: Patients received escalating doses of pinatuzumab vedotin every 21 days. Clinical activity at the RP2D alone or with rituximab was evaluated in r/r diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) and r/r indolent NHL (iNHL) patients. Results: Seventy-five patients received single-agent pinatuzumab vedotin. The RP2D was 2.4 mg/kg, based on dose-limiting toxicities (DLT) of grade 4 neutropenia >7 days in 1 of 3 patients and grade 4 neutropenia <7 days in 2 of 3 patients treated at 3.2 mg/kg (maximum assessed dose). No DLTs occurred at 2.4 mg/kg. At the RP2D, neutropenia was the most common grade ≥3 adverse event. Peripheral neuropathy–related grade ≥2 adverse events most frequently resulted in treatment discontinuation. Rituximab cotreatment did not impact safety, tolerability, or pharmacokinetics of pinatuzumab vedotin. Unconjugated MMAE exposure was much lower than antibody-conjugated MMAE exposure, without accumulation with repeat dosing. At the RP2D, objective responses were observed in DLBCL (9/25) and iNHL (7/14) patients; 2 of 8 patients treated with pinatuzumab vedotin (RP2D) and rituximab had complete responses. CLL patients showed no objective responses. Conclusions: The RP2D of pinatuzumab vedotin alone and with rituximab was 2.4 mg/kg, which was well tolerated, with encouraging clinical activity in r/r NHL. Clin Cancer Res; 23(5); 1167–76. ©2016 AACR.