Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of New Zealand Blackcurrant Extract on Physiological Responses at Rest and during Brisk Walking in Southeast Asian Men: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Crossover Study

New Zealand blackcurrant (NZBC) extract affects cardiovascular and metabolic responses during rest and exercise in Caucasian men. Ethnicity and nutritional habits may affect responses to nutritional ergogenic aids. We examined the effects of NZBC extract on cardiovascular, metabolic, and physiological responses during seated rest and moderate-intensity exercise in Southeast Asian men. Seventeen healthy Thai men (age: 22 ± 3 years; body mass index (BMI): 21.8 ± 1.1 kg·m−2) participated. Resting metabolic equivalent (1-MET) was measured (Oxycon™ mobile, Germany), and an incremental walking protocol was completed to establish the relationship between walking speed and MET. In a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, crossover design, cardiovascular (Physioflow, n = 12) and physiological responses (Oxycon, n = 17) were measured during both seated rest and a 30-min treadmill walk at five metabolic equivalent (5-MET), with either a seven-day intake of placebo (PL) or two capsules of NZBC extract (each 300 mg capsule contains 35% blackcurrant extract) with a 14-day washout. Paired t-tests were used with significance accepted at p < 0.05 and a trend for 0.05 > p ≤ 0.10. During 30 min of treadmill walking at 5-MET, no differences were observed for heart rate and substrate oxidation. With intake of NZBC during treadmill walking, there was a trend for increased stroke volume by 12% (PL: 83.2 ± 25.1; NZBC: 93.0 ± 24.3 mL; p = 0.072) and cardiac output increased by 12% (PL: 9.2 ± 2.6; NZBC: 10.3 ± 2.8 L·min−1; p = 0.057). Systemic vascular resistance decreased by 10% (PL: 779 ± 267; NZBC: 697 ± 245 dyn·s·cm−5; p = 0.048). NZBC extract had no effect on metabolic, physiological, and cardiovascular parameters during seated rest and exercise-induced fat oxidation in Thai men, in contrast to observations in Caucasian men. During treadmill walking, Thai men showed cardiovascular response, indicating vasodilatory effects during moderate-intensity exercise with the intake of NZBC extract. Our findings suggest that the ergogenic responses to anthocyanin intake from New Zealand blackcurrant may be ethnicity-dependent.
Effects of Macrolide Treatment during the Hospitalization of Children with Childhood Wheezing Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Children are susceptible to a variety of respiratory infections. Wheezing is a common sign presented by children with respiratory infections. Asthma, bronchiolitis, and bronchitis are common causes of childhood wheezing disease (CWD) and are regarded as overlapping disease spectra. Macrolides are common antimicrobial agents with anti-inflammatory effects. We conducted a comprehensive literature search and a systematic review of studies that investigated the influences of macrolide treatment on CWD. The primary outcomes were the impact of macrolides on hospitalization courses of patients with CWD. Data pertaining to the study population, macrolide treatment, hospital courses, and recurrences were analyzed. Twenty-three studies with a combined study population of 2210 patients were included in the systematic review. Any kind of benefit from macrolide treatment was observed in approximately two-thirds of the studies (15/23). Eight studies were included in the meta-analysis to investigate the influence of macrolides on the length of stay (LOS), duration of oxygen demand (DOD), symptoms and signs of respiratory distress, and re-admission rates. Although the benefits of macrolide treatment were reported in several of the studies, no significant differences in LOS, DOD, symptoms and signs of respiratory distress, or re-admission rates were observed in patients undergoing macrolide treatment. In conclusion, any kind of benefit of macrolide treatment was observed in approximately two-thirds of the studies; however, no obvious benefits of macrolide treatment were observed in the hospitalization courses of children with CWD. The routine use of macrolides to improve the hospitalization course of children with CWD is not suggested.
The transmembrane adaptor protein NTAL limits mast cell chemotaxis toward prostaglandin E2

Mast cell chemotaxis toward prostaglandin E2 is inhibited by the transmembrane adaptor protein NTAL. Adapting to PGE2 The transmembrane adaptor proteins non–T cell activation linker (NTAL) and linker for activation of T cells (LAT) are structurally similar but nonredundant for immune cell function. Whereas LAT promotes mast cell degranulation in response to antibody-antigen complexes, NTAL inhibits this process. Halova et al. found that NTAL, but not LAT, inhibited the chemotaxis of mouse bone marrow–derived mast cells to the signaling lipid PGE2. NTAL reduced the phosphorylation of AKT and ezrin family proteins in PGE2-stimulated mast cells. Experiments with truncation and point mutants of NTAL indicated that C-terminal phosphorylation sites were critical for its inhibitory activity. These data suggest that NTAL not only inhibits mast cell degranulation after antigen stimulation but also limits mast cell migration in response to PGE2. Chemotaxis of mast cells is one of the crucial steps in their development and function. Non–T cell activation linker (NTAL) is a transmembrane adaptor protein that inhibits the activation of mast cells and B cells in a phosphorylation-dependent manner. Here, we studied the role of NTAL in the migration of mouse mast cells stimulated by prostaglandin E2 (PGE2). Although PGE2 does not induce the tyrosine phosphorylation of NTAL, unlike IgE immune complex antigens, we found that loss of NTAL increased the chemotaxis of mast cells toward PGE2. Stimulation of mast cells that lacked NTAL with PGE2 enhanced the phosphorylation of AKT and the production of phosphatidylinositol 3,4,5-trisphosphate. In resting NTAL-deficient mast cells, phosphorylation of an inhibitory threonine in ERM family proteins accompanied increased activation of β1-containing integrins, which are features often associated with increased invasiveness in tumors. Rescue experiments indicated that only full-length, wild-type NTAL restored the chemotaxis of NTAL-deficient cells toward PGE2. Together, these data suggest that NTAL is a key inhibitor of mast cell chemotaxis toward PGE2, which may act through the RHOA/ERM/β1-integrin and PI3K/AKT axes.
Regulation of Leptin Methylation Not via Apoptosis by Melatonin in the Rescue of Chronic Programming Liver Steatosis

We examined the mechanisms of chronic liver steatosis after prenatal dexamethasone exposure and whether melatonin rescues adult offspring with liver steatosis. Melatonin rescued prenatal dexamethasone-exposed livers with steatosis in young rats. Sprague-Dawley rats pregnant at gestational day 14–21 were administered with intraperitoneal dexamethasone (DEX) or prenatal dexamethasone and melatonin between gestational day 14 and postnatal day ~120 (DEX+MEL). Chronic programming effects in the liver were assessed at day ~120. Liver steatosis increased in the DEX compared with that in the vehicle group and decreased in the DEX+MEL group (p < 0.05), with no changes in cellular apoptosis. Expression of leptin and its receptor decreased in the DEX (p < 0.05) and increased in the DEX+MEL group (p < 0.05), as revealed by RT-PCR and Western blotting. Tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) and interleukin (IL)-6 expression increased in the DEX group compared with that in the vehicle group and decreased in the DEX+MEL group (p < 0.05). Liver DNA methyltransferase activity and leptin methylation increased in the DEX group (p < 0.05) and decreased in the DEX+MEL group (p < 0.05), with no changes in HDAC activity. Thus, prenatal dexamethasone induces liver steatosis at ~120 days via altered leptin expression and liver inflammation without leptin resistance. Melatonin reverses leptin methylation and expression and decreases inflammation and chronic liver steatosis not via apoptosis or histone deacetylation (HDAC).
Mining Large-Scale Knowledge Graphs to Discover Inference Paths for Query Expansion in NLIDB

In this paper, we present an approach to mine large-scale knowledge graphs to discover inference paths for query expansion in NLIDB (Natural Language Interface to Databases). Addressing this problem is important in order for NLIDB applications to effectively handle relevant concepts in the domain of interest that do not correspond to any structured fields in the target database. We also present preliminary observations on the performance of our approach applied to Freebase, and conclude with discussions on next steps to further evaluate and extend our approach.
Structure of human cortisol-producing cytochrome P450 11B1 bound to the breast cancer drug fadrozole provides insights for drug design

Human cytochrome P450 11B1 (CYP11B1) is responsible for the final step generating the steroid hormone cortisol, which controls stress and immune responses and glucose homeostasis. CYP11B1 is a promising drug target to manage Cushing's disease, a disorder arising from excessive cortisol production. However, the design of selective inhibitors has been hampered because structural information for CYP11B1 is unavailable and the enzyme has high amino acid sequence identity (93%) to a closely related enzyme, the aldosterone-producing CYP11B2. Here we report the X-ray crystal structure of human CYP11B1 (at 2.1 Å resolution) in complex with fadrozole, a racemic compound normally used to treat breast cancer by inhibiting estrogen-producing CYP19A1. Comparison of fadrozole-bound CYP11B1 with fadrozole-bound CYP11B2 revealed that despite conservation of the active-site residues, the overall structures and active sites had structural rearrangements consistent with distinct protein functions and inhibition. Whereas fadrozole binds to both CYP11B enzymes by coordinating the heme iron, CYP11B2 binds to the R enantiomer of fadrozole, and CYP11B1 binds to the S enantiomer, each with distinct orientations and interactions. These results provide insights into the cross-reactivity of drugs across multiple steroidogenic cytochrome P450 enzymes, provide a structural basis for understanding human steroidogenesis, and pave the way for the design of more selective inhibitors of each human CYP11B enzyme.
Genetic diversity mirrors trophic ecology in coral reef fish feeding guilds

Genetic diversity is essential for species persistence because it provides the raw material for evolution. For marine organisms, short pelagic larval duration (PLD) and small population size are characteristics generally assumed to associate with low genetic diversity. The ecological diversity of organisms may also affect genetic diversity with an expected corollary that more restricted habitat and dietary requirements could lead to a reduced genetic diversity because of pronounced genetic structuring. Here, we tested whether groups of species with narrower trophic niches displayed lower genetic diversity than those with broader niches. In order to test those predictions, we used different trophic guilds (i.e., groups of species having similar trophic habits) of coral reef damselfishes in Moorea (French Polynesia) for which we determined their genetic diversity using restriction site‐associated DNA sequencing (RADseq) and their trophic ecology with stomach contents and stable isotope data. We found that pelagic feeders‐ the guild picking zooplankton in the water column‐ exhibited the lowest genetic diversity despite having the longest PLD and the largest population size. This guild had also the lowest variation in habitat characteristics and dietary composition compared to benthic feeders (i.e., those mainly grazing on algae) and the intermediate group (i.e., those feeding on zooplankton, filamentous algae and small benthic invertebrates). Our findings highlight the association between trophic ecology and genetic diversity that should be more commonly investigated in population genetics.
The Emergency Department as an Opportunity for Naloxone Distribution

Introduction Substance use disorders, including opioid use disorders, are a major public health concern in the United States. Between 2005 and 2014, the rate of opioid-related emergency department (ED) visits nearly doubled, from 89.1 per 100,000 persons in 2005 to 177.7 per 100,000 persons in 2014. Thus, the ED presents a distinctive opportunity for harm-reduction strategies such as distribution of naloxone to patients who are at risk for an opioid overdose. Methods We conducted a systematic review of all existing literature related to naloxone distribution from the ED. We included only those articles published in peer-reviewed journals that described results relating to naloxone distribution from the ED. Results Of the 2,286 articles we identified from the search, five met the inclusion criteria and had direct relevance to naloxone distribution from the ED setting. Across the studies, we found variation in the methods of implementation and evaluation of take-home naloxone programs in the ED. In the three studies that attempted patient follow-up, success was low, limiting the evidence for the programs’ effectiveness. Overall, in the included studies there is evidence that distributing take-home naloxone from the ED has the potential for harm reduction; however, the uptake of the practice remained low. Barriers to implementation included time allocated for training hospital staff and the burden on workflow. Conclusion This systematic review of the best evidence available supports the ED as a potential setting for naloxone distribution for overdose reversal in the community. The variability of the implementation methods across the studies highlights the need for future research to determine the most effective practices.
Emerging memory technologies for neuromorphic computing

In this paper, we reviewed the recent trends on neuromorphic computing using emerging memory technologies. Two representative learning algorithms used to implement a hardware-based neural network are described as a bio-inspired learning algorithm and software-based learning algorithm, in particular back-propagation. The requirements of the synaptic device to apply each algorithm were analyzed. Then, we reviewed the research trends of synaptic devices to implement an artificial neural network.
Deep CNNs with Robust LBP Guiding Pooling for Face Recognition

Pooling layer in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is designed to reduce dimensions and computational complexity. Unfortunately, CNN is easily disturbed by noise in images when extracting features from input images. The traditional pooling layer directly samples the input feature maps without considering whether they are affected by noise, which brings about accumulated noise in the subsequent feature maps as well as undesirable network outputs. To address this issue, a robust Local Binary Pattern (LBP) Guiding Pooling (G-RLBP) mechanism is proposed in this paper to down sample the input feature maps and lower the noise impact simultaneously. The proposed G-RLBP method calculates the weighted average of all pixels in the sliding window of this pooling layer as the final results based on their corresponding probabilities of being affected by noise, thus lowers the noise impact from input images at the first several layers of the CNNs. The experimental results show that the carefully designed G-RLBP layer can successfully lower the noise impact and improve the recognition rates of the CNN models over the traditional pooling layer. The performance gain of the G-RLBP is quite remarkable when the images are severely affected by noise.
Sudden Events Change Old Visual Objects Into New Ones: A Possible Role for Phasic Activation of Locus Coeruleus

We report a novel visual phenomenon called the rejuvenation effect. It causes an “old” object that has been on view for some time to acquire the properties of a suddenly appearing new object. In each experiment, a square outline was displayed continuously on one side of fixation. The target (an asterisk) was presented either inside the square or on the opposite side of fixation. On half of the trials, a transient visual or auditory event preceded the target. In Experiment 1a (N = 139), response times were faster when the target appeared inside the square, but only when it was preceded by a transient event, consistent with the network-reset theory of locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) phasic activation. Three further experiments confirmed the predictions of network-reset theory, including the absence of rejuvenation in participants with atypical LC-NE functioning (individuals with symptoms of autism spectrum disorder). These findings provide new perspectives on what causes a visual object to be perceived as new.
Mycorrhizal divergence and selection against immigrant seeds in forest and dune populations of the partially mycoheterotrophic Pyrola rotundifolia

Plant populations occupying different habitats may diverge from each other over time and gradually accumulate genetic and morphological differences, ultimately resulting in ecotype or even species formation. In plant species that critically rely on mycorrhizal fungi, differences in mycorrhizal communities can contribute to ecological isolation by reducing or even inhibiting germination of immigrant seeds. In this study, we investigated whether the mycorrhizal communities available in the soil and associating with the roots of seedlings and adult plants of the partially mycoheterotrophic Pyrola rotundifolia differed between populations growing in sand dunes and forests. In addition, reciprocal germination experiments were performed to test whether native seeds showed higher germination than immigrant seeds. Our results showed that the mycorrhizal communities differed significantly between forest and dune populations, and that within populations seedlings and adults also associated with different mycorrhizal communities. In both forest and dune populations, mycorrhizal communities were dominated by members of the Thelephoraceae, but dune populations showed a higher incidence of members of the Inocybaceae, whereas forest populations showed a high abundance of members of the Russulaceae. Reciprocal germination experiments showed that native seeds showed a higher germination success than immigrant seeds and this effect was most pronounced in dune populations. Overall, these results demonstrate that plants of P. rotundifolia growing in dune and forest habitats associate with different mycorrhizal communities and that reduced germination of non‐native seeds may contribute to reproductive isolation. We conclude that selection against immigrants may constitute an important reproductive barrier at early stages of the speciation process.
Fusion of aerial lidar and images for road segmentation with deep CNN

In this paper we attempt to fuse both airborne Lidar and high resolution images (0.5 feet per pixel) to identify road networks in a large geographic region. We perform pixel-wise segmentation to classify each pixel as road or non-road based on color and depth features in a larger neighborhood context. This constitutes a bimodal setting because the RGB pixels represent the color space and the depth values come from three dimensional Lidar readings. We present multiple strategies for fusing Lidar and images. We describe a cost-effective, modular, deep convolution network design, TriSeg which gives better IoU metric for the aerial road segmentation problem than the state of the art RGB only architectures. We report on many other architectures as well as release our dataset for further research: https://bitbucket.org/biswas/fusion_lidar_images.
A Multimodal Approach towards Emotion Recognition of Music using Audio and Lyrical Content

We propose MoodNet - A Deep Convolutional Neural Network based architecture to effectively predict the emotion associated with a piece of music given its audio and lyrical content.We evaluate different architectures consisting of varying number of two-dimensional convolutional and subsampling layers,followed by dense layers.We use Mel-Spectrograms to represent the audio content and word embeddings-specifically 100 dimensional word vectors, to represent the textual content represented by the lyrics.We feed input data from both modalities to our MoodNet architecture.The output from both the modalities are then fused as a fully connected layer and softmax classfier is used to predict the category of emotion.Using F1-score as our metric,our results show excellent performance of MoodNet over the two datasets we experimented on-The MIREX Multimodal dataset and the Million Song Dataset.Our experiments reflect the hypothesis that more complex models perform better with more training data.We also observe that lyrics outperform audio as a better expressed modality and conclude that combining and using features from multiple modalities for prediction tasks result in superior performance in comparison to using a single modality as input.
Edge-preserving tomographic reconstruction with nonlocal regularization

We propose a new objective function for the image reconstruction problem, where the image is comprised of piecewise smooth regions separated by sharp boundaries. We use alternating minimization to minimize our objective function. We use the level set technique to minimize with regard to the boundary. The advantage of this new approach is shown through the bias/variance analysis of a hot spot.
Teen Social Networks and Depressive Symptoms-Substance Use Associations: Developmental and Demographic Variation.

OBJECTIVE The current study examined whether an adolescent's standing within a school-bounded social network moderated the association between depressive symptoms and substance use across adolescence as a function of developmental and demographic factors (gender, parental education, and race/ethnicity). METHOD The sample of 6,776 adolescents participated in up to seven waves of data collection spanning 6th to 12th grade. RESULTS Results of latent growth models showed that lower integration into the social network exacerbates risk for depression-related substance use in youth, particularly around the high school transition, but social status acted as both a risk factor and a protective factor at different points in development for different youth. Findings also varied as a function of youth gender and parental education status. CONCLUSIONS Together these findings suggest that lower integration into the social network exacerbates risk for depression-related substance use in youth, particularly around the high school transition in general as well as just before the high school transition in those with lower parental education or just after the high school transition in males. Thus, the risky impact of social isolation appears more consistent across this period. Social status, however, showed a more varied pattern and further study is needed to understand the sometimes risky and sometimes protective effects of social status on depression-related substance use.