Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Alendronate-induced disruption of actin cytoskeleton and inhibition of migration/invasion are associated with cofilin downregulation in PC-3 prostate cancer cells

Bisphosphonates are used for prevention of osteoporosis and metastatic bone diseases. Anti-invasive effects on various cancer cells have also been reported, but the mechanisms involved are not well-understood. We investigated the effects of the nitrogen-containing bisphosphonate alendronate (ALN) on the regulation of actin cytoskeleton in PC-3 cells. We analyzed the ALN effect on the organization and the dynamics of actin, and on the cytoskeleton-related regulatory proteins cofilin, p21-associated kinase 2 (PAK2), paxillin and focal adhesion kinase. Immunostainings of cofilin in ALN-treated PC-3 cells and xenografts were performed, and the role of cofilin in ALN-regulated F-actin organization and migration/invasion in PC-3 cells was analyzed using cofilin knockdown and transfection. We demonstrate that disrupted F-actin organization and decreased cell motility in ALN-treated PC-3 cells were associated with decreased levels of total and phosphorylated cofilin. PAK2 levels were also lowered but adhesion-related proteins were not altered. The knockdown of cofilin similarly impaired F-actin organization and decreased invasion of PC-3 cells, whereas in the cells transfected with a cofilin expressing vector, ALN treatment did not decrease cellular cofilin levels and migration as in mock transfected cells. ALN also reduced immunohistochemical staining of cofilin in PC-3 xenografts. Our results suggest that reduction of cofilin has an important role in ALN-induced disruption of the actin cytoskeleton and inhibition of the PC-3 cell motility and invasion. These data also support the idea that the nitrogen-containing bisphosphonates could be efficacious in inhibition of prostate cancer invasion and metastasis, if delivered in a pharmacological formulation accessible to the tumors.
Multi-Modal Route Planning in Road and Transit Networks

We present algorithms for multi-modal route planning in road and public transit networks, as well as in combined networks. Therefore, we explore the nearest neighbor and shortest path problem and propose solutions based on Cover-Trees, ALT and CSA. Further, we illustrate the theory behind the algorithms, give a short overview of other techniques, present experimental results and compare the techniques with each other.
Airdrops and Privacy: A Case Study in Cross-Blockchain Analysis

Airdrops are a popular method of distributing cryptocurrencies and tokens. While often considered risk-free from the point of view of recipients, their impact on privacy is easily overlooked. We examine the Clam airdrop of 2014, a forerunner to many of today's airdrops, that distributed a new cryptocurrency to every address with a non-dust balance on the Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin blockchains. Specifically, we use address clustering to try to construct the one-to-many mappings from entities to addresses on the blockchains, individually and in combination. We show that the sharing of addresses between the blockchains is a privacy risk. We identify instances where an entity has disclosed information about their address ownership on the Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin blockchains, exclusively via their activity on the Clam blockchain.
Genetic influences on eight psychiatric disorders based on family data of 4 408 646 full and half-siblings, and genetic data of 333 748 cases and controls

Abstract Background Most studies underline the contribution of heritable factors for psychiatric disorders. However, heritability estimates depend on the population under study, diagnostic instruments, and study designs that each has its inherent assumptions, strengths, and biases. We aim to test the homogeneity in heritability estimates between two powerful, and state of the art study designs for eight psychiatric disorders. Methods We assessed heritability based on data of Swedish siblings (N = 4 408 646 full and maternal half-siblings), and based on summary data of eight samples with measured genotypes (N = 125 533 cases and 208 215 controls). All data were based on standard diagnostic criteria. Eight psychiatric disorders were studied: (1) alcohol dependence (AD), (2) anorexia nervosa, (3) attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), (4) autism spectrum disorder, (5) bipolar disorder, (6) major depressive disorder, (7) obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and (8) schizophrenia. Results Heritability estimates from sibling data varied from 0.30 for Major Depression to 0.80 for ADHD. The estimates based on the measured genotypes were lower, ranging from 0.10 for AD to 0.28 for OCD, but were significant, and correlated positively (0.19) with national sibling-based estimates. When removing OCD from the data the correlation increased to 0.50. Conclusions Given the unique character of each study design, the convergent findings for these eight psychiatric conditions suggest that heritability estimates are robust across different methods. The findings also highlight large differences in genetic and environmental influences between psychiatric disorders, providing future directions for etiological psychiatric research.
Species‐complex diversification and host‐plant associations in Bemisia tabaci: A plant‐defence, detoxification perspective revealed by RNA‐Seq analyses

Insect–plant associations and their role in diversification are mostly studied in specialists. Here, we aimed to identify macroevolution patterns in the relationships between generalists and their host plants that have the potential to promote diversification. We focused on the Bemisia tabaci species complex containing more than 35 cryptic species. Mechanisms for explaining this impressive diversification have focused so far on allopatric forces that assume a common, broad, host range. We conducted a literature survey which indicated that species in the complex differ in their host range, with only few showing a truly broad one. We then selected six species, representing different phylogenetic groups and documented host ranges. We tested whether differences in the species expression profiles of detoxification genes are shaped more by their phylogenetic relationships or by their ability to successfully utilize multiple hosts, including novel ones. Performance assays divided the six species into two groups of three, one showing higher performance on various hosts than the other (the lower performance group). The same grouping pattern appeared when the species were clustered according to their expression profiles. Only species placed in the lower performance group showed a tendency to lower the expression of multiple genes. Taken together, these findings bring evidence for the existence of a common detoxification “machinery,” shared between species that can perform well on multiple hosts. We raise the possibility that this “machinery” might have played a passive role in the diversification of the complex, by allowing successful migration to new/novel environments, leading, in some cases, to fragmentation and speciation.
Clinical effectiveness and long-term retention of abatacept in elderly rheumatoid arthritis patients: Results from a multicenter registry system

Abstract Objective: To study the clinical effectiveness and long-term retention rate of abatacept (ABA) in elderly rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients in daily clinical practice. Methods: A retrospective cohort study was performed using data from a multicenter registry. Our study population comprised 500 consecutive RA patients treated with ABA. We compared clinical effectiveness and ABA retention rates between the Young (≤62 years), Middle (62 to 72 years), and Elderly (≥72 years) groups. We also performed separate examinations to identify predictive factors for ABA discontinuation in those with versus those without concomitant methotrexate (MTX) treatment. Results: Mean age was 52.7 years in the Young group, 67.7 years in the Middle group, and 78.1 years in the Elderly group. No significant group-dependent differences were found in mean DAS28 score, categorical distribution of DAS28, and EULAR response rate across the 52 weeks. The ABA retention rates at three years as determined by the Kaplan–Meier method were similar in all three groups. Patient age was not a significant predictor of ABA discontinuation due to adverse events in patients with concomitant MTX; however, it was found to be a significant predictor for those who did not use MTX (Cox hazard model). Conclusion: ABA would be a reasonable treatment option for elderly RA patients from the viewpoints of both clinical effectiveness and long-term retention. However, physicians should watch carefully for any serious adverse reactions in elderly RA patients with intolerance to MTX.
Iron Status and Associated Malaria Risk Among African Children

Abstract Background It remains unclear whether improving iron status increases malaria risk, and few studies have looked at the effect of host iron status on subsequent malaria infection. We therefore aimed to determine whether a child’s iron status influences their subsequent risk of malaria infection in sub-Saharan Africa. Methods We assayed iron and inflammatory biomarkers from community-based cohorts of 1309 Kenyan and 1374 Ugandan children aged 0–7 years and conducted prospective surveillance for episodes of malaria. Poisson regression models were fitted to determine the effect of iron status on the incidence rate ratio (IRR) of malaria using longitudinal data covering a period of 6 months. Models were adjusted for age, sex, parasitemia, inflammation, and study site. Results At baseline, the prevalence of iron deficiency (ID) was 36.9% and 34.6% in Kenyan and Ugandan children, respectively. ID anemia (IDA) affected 23.6% of Kenyan and 17.6% of Ugandan children. Malaria risk was lower in children with ID (IRR, 0.7; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.6, 0.8; P < .001) and IDA (IRR, 0.7; 95% CI, 0.6, 0.9; P = .006). Low transferrin saturation (<10%) was similarly associated with lower malaria risk (IRR, 0.8; 95% CI, 0.6, 0.9; P = .016). However, variation in hepcidin, soluble transferrin receptors (sTfR), and hemoglobin/anemia was not associated with altered malaria risk. Conclusions ID appears to protect against malaria infection in African children when defined using ferritin and transferrin saturation, but not when defined by hepcidin, sTfR, or hemoglobin. Additional research is required to determine causality. Clinical Trials Registration ISRCTN32849447
Transdisciplinarity in Research

Background: Early career faculty experiences and perspectives on transdisciplinary research are important yet understudied. Methods: Assistant professors at 50 top-ranked social work programs completed an online survey assessing perspectives on the salience of transdisciplinary training in their field, obstacles to or negative impacts of transdisciplinary training, and current environments. Content analysis and descriptive statistics were used. Results: A large majority of all participants (N = 118) believed that transdisciplinary research is important, that greater training is needed, and that they are relatively well prepared in related skill sets. They are expected to build cross-disciplinary collaborations, yet only a small minority believed that social work researchers are nationally recognized as important collaborators, or that they are prepared to navigate tensions on research teams. Conclusions: We offer a multilevel framework of structural and training supports needed to realize transdisciplinary research in social work with relevance to other disciplines.
Shape Sensing of Flexible Manipulators With Visual Occlusion Based on Bezier Curve

Flexible manipulators are promising in minimally invasive surgery, because they can work well in complex and confined environment. The size of the manipulator is usually small, which makes it very difficult to install sensors to measure the distal tip position and manipulator shape. However, the shape information is crucial in controlling the instruments. In this paper, the shape of the manipulator is estimated by endoscopic view based on Bezier curve and the Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm. This method works even the view is partially occluded. Compared with existing none-vision based shape sensing method, no additional sensor is needed in the proposed method. The method is evaluated by both simulations and experiments. Meanwhile, the influence of the occlusion on the sensing accuracy is analyzed. The experimental results show that the shape information of the flexible manipulator both with and without payload can be well estimated by the proposed method.
A Study of Optimization of Various Parameters in the Fabrication of Screen-Printed Electrodes

Screen-printed electrode (SPE) is now a very well-established approach for the development of electrochemical sensors owing to their disposability, sensitivity, low sample volume requirement, rapid analysis time, and low-cost batch production. The main challenge associated with the fabrication of SPEs is their reproducibility. Various parameters are involved in the fabrication of SPEs. It is very important to optimize the fabrication parameters in such a way so as to ensure both interbatch as well as intrabatch reproducibility. Analyzing the cause behind the best electrochemical performance at optimized parameters is another very important area of research as it leads to the understanding and development of superior electrode materials. This paper discusses certain vital fabrication parameters, their optimization and characterizations, so as to obtain an insight into the underlying causes that might affect the electrochemical performance of SPEs.
Learning to Fingerprint the Latent Structure in Question Articulation

Algorithmic interpretation of question articulation is one of the key steps in a machine-driven question-answering system. Machine understanding of an input question is tightly related to recognition of articulation in the context of the computational capabilities of an underlying processing algorithm. In this paper, a mathematical model to capture and distinguish the latent structure in the articulation of questions is presented. It is argued that an objective-driven approach to represent this latent structure is beneficial when examples of complementary objectives are not available. We show that the latent structure can be represented as a system that maximizes a cost function related to the underlying objective. Further, we show that the optimization formulation can be approximated to building a memory of patterns represented as a trained neural auto-encoder. Experimental evaluation using many clusters of questions, each related to an objective, shows 80% recognition accuracy and a negligible false positive across these clusters of questions. We then extend the same memory to a related task where the goal is to iteratively refine clusters of questions based on latent articulation. We show that the refinement scheme called K-fingerprints achieves nearly 100% cluster recognition with negligible false positive between different clusters.
Prevalence of diabetes and its effects on stroke outcomes: A meta‐analysis and literature review

Diabetes mellitus is an established risk factor for stroke and maybe associated with poorer outcomes after stroke. The aims of the present literature review were to determine: (i) the prevalence of diabetes in acute stroke patients through a meta‐analysis; (ii) the association between diabetes and outcomes after ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke; and (iii) to review the value of glycated hemoglobin and admission glucose‐based tests in predicting stroke outcomes.
High Flowrate and Low Detection Limit Single-Particle Ultrasonic Sensor

Single particle detection by ultrasound scattering is demonstrated. Polystyrene particles with a diameter of 40 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> are individually counted using a visual spectrogram method. As an alternative a less computationally expensive algorithm for the data analysis using Hilbert transform is also demonstrated. Experiments demonstrating the particle counting capabilities of the sensor for different flow rates and concentrations are shown and linear relationships are observed as expected. The sensor differs from other particle counters by handling high flow–rates (>800 L h<sup>−1</sup>) and having an extremely low detection limit of about 0.5 particles per mL in 1s, which is orders of magnitudes better than the ones for analogues optical particle sensors.
Polygenic approaches to detect gene–environment interactions when external information is unavailable

Abstract The exploration of ‘gene–environment interactions’ (G × E) is important for disease prediction and prevention. The scientific community usually uses external information to construct a genetic risk score (GRS), and then tests the interaction between this GRS and an environmental factor (E). However, external genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are not always available, especially for non-Caucasian ethnicity. Although GRS is an analysis tool to detect G × E in GWAS, its performance remains unclear when there is no external information. Our ‘adaptive combination of Bayes factors method’ (ADABF) can aggregate G × E signals and test the significance of G × E by a polygenic test. We here explore a powerful polygenic approach for G × E when external information is unavailable, by comparing our ADABF with the GRS based on marginal effects of SNPs (GRS-M) and GRS based on SNP × E interactions (GRS-I). ADABF is the most powerful method in the absence of SNP main effects, whereas GRS-M is generally the best test when single-nucleotide polymorphisms main effects exist. GRS-I is the least powerful test due to its data-splitting strategy. Furthermore, we apply these methods to Taiwan Biobank data. ADABF and GRS-M identified gene × alcohol and gene × smoking interactions on blood pressure (BP). BP-increasing alleles elevate more BP in drinkers (smokers) than in nondrinkers (nonsmokers). This work provides guidance to choose a polygenic approach to detect G × E when external information is unavailable.
Socioeconomic Status in Adolescents: A Study of Its Relationship with Overweight and Obesity and Influence on Social Network Configuration

Socioeconomic status (SES) influences all the determinants of health, conditioning health throughout life. The aim of the present study was to explore the relationship between socioeconomic status and obesity in adolescence through an analysis of the patterns of contact between peers as a function of this parameter. A cross-sectional study was performed, analyzing a sample of 235 students aged 14 to 18 and 11 class networks. Social network analysis was used to analyze structural variables of centrality from a sociocentric perspective. We found that adolescents with a medium-low SES presented a two-fold higher probability of being overweight, but we did not detect any differences in the configuration of their social networks when compared with those of normal-weight adolescents. However, we did find significant differences in the formation of networks according to SES in the overall sample and disaggregated by gender, whereby adolescents with a high SES in general presented a higher capacity to form wider social networks. Elucidating the relationship between SES and overweight and its influence on social network formation can contribute to the design of preventative strategies against overweight and obesity in adolescents, since their social environment can provide them with several resources to combat excess weight.
Two Sides of the Same Coin: Distinct Sub-Bands in the α Rhythm Reflect Facilitation and Suppression Mechanisms during Auditory Anticipatory Attention

Abstract Anticipatory attention results in enhanced response to task-relevant stimulus, and reduced processing of unattended input, suggesting the deployment of distinct facilitatory and suppressive mechanisms. α Oscillations are a suitable candidate for supporting these mechanisms. We aimed to examine the role of α oscillations, with a special focus on peak frequencies, in facilitatory and suppressive mechanisms during auditory anticipation, within the auditory and visual regions. Magnetoencephalographic (MEG) data were collected from fourteen healthy young human adults (eight female) performing an auditory task in which spatial attention to sounds was manipulated by visual cues, either informative or not of the target side. By incorporating uninformative cues, we could delineate facilitating and suppressive mechanisms. During anticipation of a visually-cued auditory target, we observed a decrease in α power around 9 Hz in the auditory cortices; and an increase around 13 Hz in the visual regions. Only this power increase in high α significantly correlated with behavior. Importantly, within the right auditory cortex, we showed a larger increase in high α power when attending an ipsilateral sound; and a stronger decrease in low α power when attending a contralateral sound. In summary, we found facilitatory and suppressive attentional mechanisms with distinct timing in task-relevant and task-irrelevant brain areas, differentially correlated to behavior and supported by distinct α sub-bands. We provide new insight into the role of the α peak-frequency by showing that anticipatory attention is supported by distinct facilitatory and suppressive mechanisms, mediated in different low and high sub-bands of the α rhythm, respectively.
Multisource Mint Using Convolutive Transfer Function

The multichannel inverse filtering method, i.e. multiple input/output inverse theorem (MINT), is widely used. However, it is usually performed in the time domain, and based on the long room impulse responses, thus it has a high computational complexity and a large number of near-common zeros. In this paper, we propose to perform MINT in the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) domain, in which the time-domain filter is approximated by the convolutive transfer function. The oversampled STFT is used to avoid frequency aliasing, which however leads to a common zero region in the subband frequency response due to the frequency response of the STFT window. A new inverse filtering target function concerning the STFT window is proposed to overcome this problem. In addition, unlike most studies using MINT for single source dereverberation, the multisource MINT is proposed for both source separation and dereverberation.
Scene Recognition and Object Detection in a Unified Convolutional Neural Network on a Mobile Manipulator

Environment understanding, object detection and recognition are crucial skills for robots operating in the real world. In this paper, we propose a Convolutional Neural Network with multi-task objectives: object detection and scene classification in one unified architecture. The proposed network reasons globally about an image to understand the scene, hypothesize object locations, and encodes global scene features with regional object features to improve object recognition. We evaluate our network on the standard SUN RGBD dataset. Experiments show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-arts. Network predictions are further transformed into continuous robot beliefs to ensure temporal coherence and extended to 3D space for robotics applications. We embed the whole framework in Robot Operating System, and evaluate its performance on a real robot for semantic mapping and grasp detection.