Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
T cells expressing the gamma delta T-cell receptor potentiate coxsackievirus B3-induced myocarditis

Initial studies determined whether intraperitoneal (i.p.) injection of BALB/c mice with 0.1, 1.0, and 10 mg of adriamycin (a cardiotoxic anthracycline antibiotic) for times ranging between 1 and 9 weeks prior to i.p. injection of 10(5) PFU of coxsackievirus B3 (CVB3) would alter the severity of virus-induced myocarditis. Prior adriamycin exposure enhanced pathogenicity of a poorly pathogenic CVB3 variant (H310A1) but had no effect on myocarditis produced by the pathogenic variant (H3). Cardiac virus concentrations were equivalent in H3- and H310A1-infected mice irrespective of adriamycin treatment. BALB/c mice treated with either 0.1 ml of complete Freund's adjuvant (CFA), 10 mg of adriamycin, or 10(5) PFU of H3 and H310A1 i.p. developed cytolytic Thy 1.2+ lymphocytes (CTL) to H3-infected myocytes 7 days later. CFA-, adriamycin-, and H3-treated mice developed CTL expressing the gamma delta+ T-cell receptors, while H310A1-infected animals did not. Only H3- and H310A1-infected mice developed alpha beta+ CTL. Treatment of BALB/c mice with 0.1 ml of CFA 5 days prior to H310A1 infection dramatically increased myocarditis. Selective depletion of gamma delta+ T cells abrogated this effect. The ability of gamma delta+ T cells to augment the pathogenicity of H310A1 infection was confirmed by adoptive transfer of CFA-stimulated T cells depleted of either gamma delta- or gamma delta+ cells into H310A1-infected recipients.
Neopterin concentrations in synovial fluid may reflect disease severity in patients with osteoarthritis

Abstract We aimed to detect neopterin concentrations in serum and synovial fluid (SF) of knee osteoarthritis (OA) patients and to clarify their relationship with clinical severity of the disease. We cross-sectionally enrolled 176 knee OA patients and 63 age- and sex-matched controls. We measured neopterin concentrations by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and investigated the correlation between serum/SF neopterin concentrations and Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) grades as well as Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Arthritis Index (WOMAC) scores in OA patients. Our results demonstrated that increased SF neopterin concentrations were independently correlated with greater symptomatic and radiographic severity in OA patients. These results suggested a crucial role of neopterin activation in the development and progression of knee OA. Assessment of neopterin levels in SF is a potential biomarker to evaluate disease severity in OA patients.
Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Perfect Command Following and Disturbance Rejection in Fractional Order Systems

Abstract The aim of this paper is to present a modified explanation of the classic internal model principle for certain class of finite-dimensional, time-invariant, deterministic fractional-order systems commonly known as fractional systems of commensurate order. The necessary and sufficient conditions for perfect command tracking and disturbance rejection are provided. The difficulty of applying the classic internal model principle to fractional-order systems is due to the difference between integer-order and fractional-order systems from the zero-pole cancellation point of view. The notion of zero-pole cancellation is discussed for the systems under consideration in a well posed mathematical framework. It is also shown that fractional elements can be used for command tracking and disturbance rejection purposes which provides more flexibility for controller design applications. Two illustrative examples confirm the applicability of the proposed theorems.
A 1V Full-band Cascoded UWB LNA with Resistive Feedback

A 3.1-10.6 GHz ultra-wideband (UWB) low-voltage low-noise amplifier (LNA) employing only one-stage cascode topology is presented. The voltage-current feedback is used to enhance the bandwidth. The research is based on the TSMC 0.18 mum CMOS processes. A two-section LC resonance configuration is used to arrive at the input and output matching. Measurement results show the following performances: maximum power gain of 9.18 dB, gain flatness of below plusmn0.58 dB for every band group, minimum noise figure of 4.1 dB, the input-referred third-order intercept point (IIP3) of 7.25 dBm and the input-referred 1-dB compression point (P1dB) of -2.5 dBm. The power consumption is 23.5 mW under a 1.0 V supply voltage. The chip area is 0.995 mm times 0.780 mm.
Bulk and size‐segregated aerosol composition observed during INDOEX 1999: Overview of meteorology and continental impacts

Throughout the Northern Hemisphere, aerosol loading was greater than in the Southern Hemisphere. Samples collected in air that had passed over India showed evidence of fossil fuel combustion, biomass burning, and eolian material, with elemental carbon (EC) dominating radiation absorption and the following relative contributions to the total mass of aerosol particles: ash 29%, nss-sulfate 22%, sea salt 15%, nitrate 9%, organic material 8%, ammonium 6%, and EC 5%. Careful examination of the coarse mode revealed substantial concentrations of nitrate, adequate to acidify sea salt aerosols north of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Air that had passed over Arabia showed little evidence of biomass burning but had more acidity, mineral dust, and higher nitrate to sulfate ratios than air from India. High concentrations of mineral dust played a major role in radiation absorption; mean contributions to aerosol mass in Arabian air were: ash 38%, nss-sulfate 10%, sea salt 33%, nitrate 5%, organic material 4%, ammonium 1%, and EC 1%. From the ship we measured an average bulk aerosol concentration of 20 m gm � 3 in the marine boundary layer of the northern Indian Ocean. INDEX TERMS: 0365 Atmospheric Composition and Structure: Troposphere—composition and chemistry; 0305 Atmospheric Composition and Structure: Aerosols and particles (0345, 4801); 0322 Atmospheric Composition and Structure: Constituent sources and sinks; KEYWORDS: aerosol, nitrate, sulfate, ammonium
Equal Sub-Area-Based DV-Hop

This paper proposes an improved DV-hop localization algorithm named an Equal Sub-Area-Based DV-Hop (ESAB-DV-Hop) which achieves less error than an original algorithm. The proposed algorithm derived from the DV-hop method, by dividing the network area to sub-areas and setting the nodes with unknown locations to calculate their positions from anchor nodes in the same sub-area. Simulation results show that the localization accuracy of the improved DV-hop method is better than the original algorithm by 17% and by 15% compared to a recent algorithm that solves the same problem when the total number of the nodes equals 100, the communication range is 20 m and the anchors ratio is 20%.
Preferential biomagnification of aryl hydrocarbon hydroxylase‐ inducing polychlorinated biphenyl congeners in the Lake Michigan, USA, lower food web

Preferential biomagnification of 14 dioxin‐like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) was determined in lower‐trophic‐level organisms of the Lake Michigan, USA, food web. Bioaccumulation of these coplanar, aryl hydrocarbon hydroxylase (AHH)‐ inducing PCB congeners and total PCBs in phytoplankton, zooplankton, Mysis relicta, and Diporeia sp. were studied for two locations in Lake Michigan over time. The results indicate that both total PCB and AHH‐inducing PCBs biomagnify with increasing food web trophic level, with biomagnification of the AHH‐inducing PCBs occurring to a greater degree. The biomagnification factors (BMFs) of the AHH‐inducing PCBs suggest that they are highly conserved relative to other PCB congeners. The concentrations expressed as dioxin toxic equivalencies (TEQ concentrations) indicate that the biomagnification of AHH PCBs causes greater concentrations, and thus greater toxicity risk, with increasing trophic level.
Toward semantic interoperability for software systems

“In an ill-structured domain you cannot, by definition, have a pre-compiled schema in your mind for every circumstance and context you may find . you must be able to flexibly select and arrange knowledge sources to most efficaciously pursue the needs of a given situation. ” [57] In order to interact and collaborate effectively, agents, whether human or software, must be able to communicate through common understandings and compatible conceptualisations. Ontological differences that occur either from pre-existing assumptions or as side-effects of the process of specification are a fundamental obstacle that must be overcome before communication can occur. Similarly, the integration of information from heterogeneous sources is an unsolved problem. Efforts have been made to assist integration, through both methods and mechanisms, but automated integration remains an unachieved goal. Communication and information integration are problems of meaning and interaction, or semantic interoperability. This thesis contributes to the study of semantic interoperability by identifying, developing and evaluating three approaches to the integration of information. These approaches have in common that they are lightweight in nature, pragmatic in philosophy and general in application. The first work presented is an effort to integrate a massive, formal ontology and knowledge-base with semi-structured, informal heterogeneous information sources via a heuristic-driven, adaptable information agent. The goal of the work was to demonstrate a process by which task-specific knowledge can be identified and incorporated into the massive knowledge-base in such a way that it can be generally re-used. The practical outcome of this effort was a framework that illustrates a feasible approach to providing the massive knowledge-base with an ontologically-sound mechanism for automatically generating task-specific information agents to dynamically retrieve information from semi-structured information sources without requiring machine-readable meta-data. The second work presented is based on reviving a previously published and neglected algorithm for inferring semantic correspondences between fields of tables from
A novel Escherichia coli‐derived mutation detected with the Big Blue® cII mutant selectable assay

Transgenic mouse mutation detection systems allow investigation of the origins and mechanisms of mutation associated with exogenous and endogenous mutagen exposures in individual tissues and cell types. In the past, selection assays for transgenic mutants have been contaminated with nonmurine‐derived mutations and assay validation is critical to ensure murine in vivo origins of mutations. This is critical in studies of spontaneous mutations and extrapolation to endogenous mammalian genes. Herein, we provide one measure of the contribution of Escherichia coli (E. coli)‐derived mutations to the Big Blue® cII transgene mutant selection assay. We report the first direct evidence of an E. coli‐derived cII mutation identified among mutations recovered in the cII selective assay. An E. coli transposable 5 (Tn5) element IS50R inverted repeat (1,534 bp) was identified at base pair 414 in the cII transgene and the insertion generated a 9 bp target site duplication typical of this type of transposition. The bacterial transposition occurred only once in the assay of 25 × 106 plaque forming units and sequencing of 1,177 cII mutants. The observed frequency of this type of mutation is 4 × 10−8 in retrieved λ phage and 8.5 × 10−4 in harvested cII mutants and thus a very rare occurrence in typical analyses of spontaneous in vivo mutations. Given that the frequency of transposition is equal to, or an order of magnitude higher, than the frequency of point mutations in E. coli, this article provides excellent validation for the murine origins of mutations detected using the cII mutant selection assay. Environ. Mol. Mutagen. 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Building Program Generators for High-Performance Spiral on Scala

The development of high performance libraries on modern hardware is extremely di cult and often requires reimplementation or retuning with every new processor generation. Program generators that produce such libraries automatically from a high level description are an appealing solution but only few exist to date. The di culty is in both the design of the generator but also its actual implementation, which often results in an ad-hoc collection of standalone programs and scripts that are hard to extend, maintain, or reuse. In this paper we ask whether there is a programming language environment suitable for building such generators. We argue in two steps that Scala with lightweight modular staging (LMS) is such an environment. First, we extract from existing generators the requirements that a suitable environment should ful ll. The list includes elegant support for internal DSLs, DSL rewriting, performance transformations like unrolling with scalar replacement, selective precomputation, and specialization, and support for multiple data representations. Inside Scala with LMS, we then implement a subset of the Spiral program generator, chosen to cover these requirements. For each requirement, we then identify the supporting language features. Finally, we benchmark against FFTW to show the quality of the generated code.
Data-driven based predictive control for networked nonlinear systems with energy-limited DoS attacks

This paper focuses on the security issue of tracking control for a class of networked nonlinear systems under energy-limited Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. An event-triggered mechanism is considered into the system to save communication resources. By using the model-free adaptive control (MFAC) algorithm, we introduced a data-driven based predictive control method to solve the packets loss caused by DoS attacks. The given simulation shown the method we proposed was effective in deal with the energy-limited DoS attacks and reduce the communication burden.
Psychological adjustment and psychosocial stress among Japanese couples with a history of recurrent pregnancy loss.

BACKGROUND Little is known about the effects of recurrent pregnancy loss (RPL) on the psychological adjustment of couples. The aim of this study was to elucidate psychological adjustment and RPL-associated psychosocial stress affecting Japanese couples with a history of RPL, focusing on gender differences and quality of the marital relationship. METHODS The study included 76 RPL couples who visited the outpatient clinic of a tertiary hospital. They completed self-administered questionnaires that assessed RPL-associated stress, quality of their marital relationship (Quality Marriage Index, QMI), depression (Beck Depression Index) and anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory). RESULTS Women showed significantly higher levels of depression, anxiety and RPL-associated personal and social stress compared with men. Although there were no differences in QMI scores and RPL-associated marital stress between men and women, women with a low perception of marital relationship quality (low QMI) had significantly higher levels of depression and anxiety compared with women with a moderate or high QMI. In contrast, depression and anxiety scores did not differ according to the quality of the marital relationship among men. Of 76 couples, 26 men (34%) and 45 women (59%) who had considered professional mental health consultations regarding their RPL status but had not yet initiated the process were more depressed and anxious than 48 men and 24 women, respectively, who had never considered such consultation. CONCLUSIONS Women were significantly more distressed than men. Poor quality of the marital relationship was significantly associated with impaired psychological adjustment among women, but not among men. These gender discrepancies may foster a mutual worsening of psychological adjustment and marital relationships in RPL couples. The need to seek help not only in women but also in a substantial portion of men suggests the importance of couple-based psychological care in the management of RPL.
Normative Data on the Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale in a Developing Country

The study was designed to provide normative data for Ugandan sample of third through seventh grade children (n = 711) on Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale. Girls (n = 352) scored significantly higher than boys (n — 359) on the anxiety scale. Significant differences on the Lie scale were associated with grade. Comparison of the present mean scores of Ugandan school children with those reported by various American authors underlines the importance of considering ecological differences in future cross-cultural studies with this scale. The collection of further normative data is also suggested.
Evolution of glycosaminoglycans and their glycosyltransferases: Implications for the extracellular matrices of animals and the capsules of pathogenic bacteria

Glycosaminoglycans (linear polysaccharides with a repeating disaccharide backbone containing an amino sugar) are essential components of extracellular matrices of animals. These complex molecules play important structural, adhesion, and signaling roles in mammals. Direct detection of glycosaminoglycans has been reported in a variety of organisms, but perhaps more definitive tests for the glycosyltransferase genes should be utilized to clarify the distribution of glycosaminoglycans in metazoans. Recently, glycosyltransferases that form the hyaluronan, heparin/heparan, or chondroitin backbone were identified at the molecular level. The three types of glycosyltransferases appear to have evolved independently based on sequence comparisons and other characteristics. All metazoans appear to possess heparin/heparan. Chondroitin is found in some worms, arthropods, and higher animals. Hyaluronan is found only in two of the three main branches of chordates. The presence of several types of glycosaminoglycans in the body allows multiple communication channels and adhesion systems to operate simultaneously. Certain pathogenic bacteria produce extracellular coatings, called capsules, which are composed of glycosaminoglycans that increase their virulence during infection. The capsule helps shield the microbe from the host defenses and/or modulates host physiology. The bacterial and animal polysaccharides are chemically identical or at least very similar. Therefore, no immune response is generated, in contrast to the vast majority of capsular polymers from other bacteria. In microbial systems, it appears that in most cases functional convergent evolution of glycosaminoglycan glycosyltransferases occurred, rather than direct horizontal gene transfer from their vertebrate hosts. Anat Rec 268:317–326, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Evaluation of Hip Kinematics Influence on the Performance of a Quadrupedal Robot Leg

As a major inspiration of biologically inspired systems, multi-legged robots have been developed due to their superior stability feature resulting from their large support polygon. The leg design of a majority of such robots is motivated by the skeleton of vertebrates such as dogs, or that of invertebrates such as spiders. Despite a wide variety of multi-pedal robots on the basis of the two aforesaid leg designs, a thorough comparison of the two underlying design principles remains to be done. This work addresses this problem and presents a comparative study for the two mammal-like and spider-like designs by looking at the joint torque profile, the responsive motion of the legs, and the thrust force applied by the robot. To this end, a set of performance indexes are defined based on the gravity compensation torque, the dynamic manipulability polytope and the force polytope, and evaluated in various leg configurations of the two designs.
Pathologic calcification of adult vascular smooth muscle cells differs on their crest or mesodermal embryonic origin

Vascular calcifications can occur in the elderly and in patients suffering from various diseases. Interestingly, depending on the pathology, different regions of the arterial system can be affected. Embryonic observations have clearly indicated that vascular smooth muscle cell (VSMC) origin is notably heterogeneous. For instance, in the aorta, VSMCs colonizing the aortic arch region derive from cardiac neural crest cells, whereas those populating the descending aorta derive from the mesoderm. We examined here whether the embryonic origin of aortic VSMCs would correlate with their ability to mineralize. Under hyperphosphatemic conditions that induce vascular calcifications, we performed ex vivo aortic explant cultures as well as in vitro VSMC cultures from wild‐type mice. Our data showed that VSMC embryonic origin affects their ability to mineralize. Indeed, the aortic arch media made up of VSMCs of neural crest origin calcifies significantly earlier than the descending aorta composed of VSMCs, which are mesoderm‐derived. Similar results were obtained with cultured VSMCs harvested from both aortic regions. We also demonstrated that in a mouse model deficient in matrix Gla protein, a potent calcification inhibitor, developing extensive and spontaneous medial calcifications of the aorta, lesions initiate in the aortic arch. Subsequently, calcifications progress outside the aortic arch region and ultimately spread all over the entire arterial tree, including the descending aorta. Altogether, our results support an unsuspected correlation between VSMCs of embryonic origin and the timing of appearance of calcifications. © 2011 American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.
Analysis of the Value-Creating Ability of EVA-Based Investment Banks

The ultimate aim of investment banks is to optimize the allocation of capital and resources through capital market and create new value. Practices have shown that any economic activity is a process in pursuit of value creation and value-added, and so are investment banks. Economic value added (EVA), a new indicator set up by American Stern & Stewart in the 1980s to weigh value-creating ability, is now already applied by western financial circles to different degree. The empirical research of the value-creating ability of China's investment banks by means of EVA has shown that the whole value-creating ability of China's investment banks is still low. In the future, China's investment banks should seek different value added channels in the five-level value-added chain.
Complete sequence and polymorphisms of female Ruditapes philippinarum (Mollusca: Bivalvia) mitochondria genome

Abstract Mitogenome of female Ruditapes philippinarum organism was sequenced, and genomic variation and phylogeny were examined in this study. Length of the mitogenome was 22 089 bp showing 94.28% of sequence identity with previously reported sequence. Total 707 single nucleotide polymorphisms, SNPs, were detected and 50 residues were non-synonymous SNPs among the 202 SNPs in protein-coding genes. Deleted genomic fragments with of 265 bp and 322 bp were observed in non-coding regions, ND2 to ND4L and ND4L to tRNAIle, respectively. Phylogenic analysis confirmed that used organisms were female R. philippinarum, and the species has closer evolutionary distance with genus Paphia rather than genus Meretrix. Our finding will be help to set an insight for population and evolutionary genomics of Veneroida clams as well as application to marine industry.