Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Involvement of Reactive Metabolites of Diclofenac in Cytotoxicity in Sandwich-Cultured Rat Hepatocytes

Background and Objectives: Diclofenac (DIC) is metabolized to reactive metabolites such as diclofenac acyl-β-d-glucuronide (DIC-AG). It is possible that such reactive metabolites could cause tissue damage by formation of covalent protein adducts and other modification of cellular proteins or by induction of immune responses against its covalent protein adducts. However, the detailed mechanisms of idiosyncratic drug-induced liver injury (DILI) have been unclear. The objective is to clarify the involvement of DIC-AG and 4′hydroxydiclofenac (4′OH-DIC) in acute DILI. Methods: We examined the effects of inhibiting DIC-AG and 4′OH-DIC production on covalent protein adduct formation and lactate dehydrogenase leakage using sandwich-cultured rat hepatocytes (SCRHs). Results: After pretreatment of SCRH with (−)-borneol (BOR, a uridine diphosphate (UDP)-glucuronosyltransferase inhibitor) or sulfaphenazole (SUL, a cytochrome P450 2C9 inhibitor) for 30 minutes, intracellular concentrations of DIC, DIC-AG, and 4′OH-DIC were determined after further treating cells with 300 μM DIC for 3 hours. The decreased levels of reactive metabolites caused by BOR or SUL pretreatment resulted in decreased lactate dehydrogenase leakage from SCRH, although the formation of covalent protein adducts was not affected. Conclusion: These results suggested that both DIC-AG and 4′OH-DIC may be involved in acute cytotoxicity by DIC.
HRT and cardiovascular disease

© 2004 Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists 211 recommendations that are later rescinded and only serve to lead to a loss of faith in the treatment. We do not feel that ‘the absence of evidence to the contrary’ is a strong enough indication for the inclusion of hysterectomy in the procedure. Indeed if the only indication to perform hysterectomy is the desire to avoid systemic use of progestogen then it may be wise to advocate the insertion of a Mirena device at the time of surgery which would allow the use of oestrogen only HRT.As has been highlighted, hysterectomy is not without morbidity, and it is also associated with a longer stay in hospital: we average a stay of one night for prophylactic oophorectomy although some institutions perform this procedure as a day case. This contrasts with a stay of three days for laparoscopic hysterectomy or five days for abdominal surgery.
Automatic Fuzzy Clustering Using Modified Differential Evolution for Image Classification

The problem of classifying an image into different homogeneous regions is viewed as the task of clustering the pixels in the intensity space. In particular, satellite images contain landcover types, some of which cover significantly large areas while some (e.g., bridges and roads) occupy relatively much smaller regions. Automatically detecting regions or clusters of such widely varying sizes is a challenging task. In this paper, a new real-coded modified differential evolution based automatic fuzzy clustering algorithm is proposed which automatically evolves the number of clusters as well as the proper partitioning from a data set. Here, the assignment of points to different clusters is done based on a Xie-Beni index where the Euclidean distance is taken into consideration. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is first demonstrated for two numeric remote sensing data described in terms of feature vectors and then in identifying different landcover regions in remote sensing imagery. The superiority of the new method is demonstrated by comparing it with other existing techniques like automatic clustering using improved differential evolution, classical differential evolution based automatic fuzzy clustering, variable length genetic algorithm based fuzzy clustering, and well known fuzzy C-means algorithm both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Field trial of a software defined network (SDN) using carrier Ethernet and segment routing in a tier-1 provider

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has brought a paradigmatic shift in the networking industry and has led to significant benefits in the data-center and enterprise network domains. The service provider networks that form the largest segment of networking industry, are now evaluating SDN technologies for adoption. In this paper, we present a SDN framework for service provider networks and report the first field trial of SDN in a tier-1 service provider domain. The proposed SDN framework is built using Carrier Ethernet and augmented with recently proposed Segment Routing paradigm manifested through Software Defined-Carrier Ethernet Switch Routers (SD-CESRs). Carrier Ethernet on account of its distinct, programmable control plane and Segment Routing through its source routing capabilities facilitates SDN implementation. The SD-CESRs are deployed in a tier-1 service provider network in the metropolis of Mumbai. The SDN framework is extended through specific APIs to enhance revenue bearing services portfolio of the service provider and performance results from the field are shown to validate the benefits of SDN adoption.
Observations on Concurrent Contraction of Flexor Muscles in the Flexion Reflex

The “flexion reflex,” flexing the limb (hind) at hip, knee and ankle, is elicitable from any one of a number of the various afferent nerves of the limb. It reveals to inspection little difference whichever be the particular afferent nerve stimulated. That the flexion evoked cannot, however, be strictly the same under excitation of the several different nerves has been already shown (5). To examine further the differences it thus presents as evoked from the several nerves we have taken simultaneous myograms from paired flexor muscles under provocation of the reflex from various different afferent limb-nerves. The muscle pairs selected have been (1) a hip-flexor and a knee-flexor (tensor fasciae femoris and semitendinosus) together, (2) a hip-flexor and an ankle-flexor (tensor fasciae femoris and tibialis anticus) together, and (3) a knee-flexor and an ankle-flexor (semitendinosus and tibialis anticus) together. I. — Method . The preparation (cat) has, after spinal transection in the anterior lumbar region and immediately subsequent decerebration under deep anaesthesia, been made ready for the myograph by appropriate isolation of the test muscles. The method of fixation and attachment to the myograph has been as described in previous communications, except that for tibialis anticus the freed tendon has been passed round a small light pulley allowing in its case a horizontal pull on the myograph. The resting tension of the two muscles has been adjusted for near equality. In using tensor f. femoris for the myograph distinction was made between its long anterior portion, tens. f. fem. longus, and its short posterior portion, tens. f. fem. brevis. Most of the observations with it were made on the former, the tens. f. f. brevis being cut away, though not always to equal extent. The myograph employed is of isometric pattern and records optically: its description is given as an Appendix to this paper; it is a further modification of the myograph described in a previous communication (6). The afferent nerve, bared and cut, has been stimulated by single or double-shock series of various frequency delivered from a coreless coil fed by a 2-volt battery.
Moiré nanosphere lithography: use colloidal moiré patterns as masks

Nanosphere lithography (NSL) uses self-assembled layers of monodisperse micro-/nano-spheres as masks to fabricate plasmonic metal nanoparticles. Different variants of NSL have been proposed with the combination with dry etching and/or angled-deposition. These techniques have employed to fabricate a wide variety of plasmonic nanoparticles or nanostructures. Here we report another promising extension - moiré nanosphere lithography (MNSL), which incorporates in-plane twisting between neighboring monolayers, to extend the patterning capability of conventional NSL. In conventional NSL, the masks, either a monolayer or bilayer, are formed by spontaneous self-assembly. Therefore, the resulted colloidal crystal configurations are limited. In this work we used sequential stacking of polystyrene nanosphere monolayers to form a bilayer crystal at the air/water interfaces. During this layer-by-layer stacking process, a crystal domain in the top layer gains the freedom to positon itself in a relative angle to that in the bottom layer allowing for the formation of moiré patterns. Subsequent O2 plasma etching results in a variety of complex nanostructures that have not been reported before. Using etched moiré patterns as masks, we further fabricated the corresponding gold nanostructures and characterized their scattering optical properties. We believe this facile technique provides a new strategy to fabricate novel and complex plasmonic nanostructures or metasurfaces.
Optimized GSE packet scheduling over DVB-S2

The evolution of satellite communication towards packet-based communication and the adoption of modern physical layer techniques, such as Adaptive Coding and Modulation, raise new issues, brought by this variability, for scheduling algorithms. This paper addresses the problem of GSE packets scheduling over DVB-S2 with QoS support by adopting a utility-based scheduling strategy. Utility functions are considered as a mean to encompass parameters from several layers into a single scheduling process. By making use of a first-order approximation, a low complexity scheduling algorithm is derived from the utility functions optimization problem, adaptable to a wide range of functions. The algorithm determines the characteristics of the next BBFrame to be send, and which GSE packets it should contain. We focus particularly on delay as a joint metric to represent QoS requirements, and assess the performance of our algorithm and the relevance of our assumptions using comparative simulations.
Prevalence of Caprine Subclinical Mastitis in Mymensingh Area, Bangladesh and Characterization of Associated Bacterial Agents and the Risk Factors

The prevalence of caprine subclinical mastitis in Mymensingh area was assessed by California Mastitis Test (CMT). Milk samples were also analyzed for the isolation and identification of bacterial agents that might be associated with caprine subclinical mastitis including their antibiotic sensitivity pattern against commonly used antibiotics. In addition, the influ-ence of certain risk factors such as age of animal, parity, length of lactation period, type of farming system and type of housing floor, on the prevalence of caprine subclinical mastitis was also evaluated. Milk samples were collected from 59 goats (113 udder halves). The overall prevalence of caprine subclinical mastitis as determined by CMT was 18.64%. On an udder half basis the prevalence was 15.04%. Certain risk factors associated with caprine subclinical mastitis were identified. The prevalence was higher in older animals, with greater parity and longer lactation period. The prevalence was also higher in farms where goats were raised under traditional farming system with earthen floors. The predominant bacterial species isolated from milk that were collected from the subclinical mastitis positive cases were Staphylococcus aureus, S. epidermidis and Bacillus subtilis, that showed various degrees of sensitivity to the antibiotics used in the study. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.3329/mh.v1i1. 13705 Microbes and Health Vol.1(1) June 2012 pp.1-5
Parallel I/O

In the past few years, many applications in high performance computing have shifted from being CPU bound to be I/O bound, as in the area of high-energy physics, multimedia, geophysics, and so on. Thus, the performance cannot be simply scaled up by increasing the number of CPUs, but it is often necessary to increase the bandwidth of the I/O subsystem. This situation is commonly known as the I/O bottleneck in high performance computing. The result was a strong research stimulus on parallel I/O topics. However, the focus was on massive parallel processor (MPP) systems, mainly neglecting clusters of processing units, such as workstations or personal computers. Besides the cumulative processing power, a cluster system provides a large data storage capacity. Usually, each unit has at least one attached disk, which is accessible from the system. Using the network interconnect of the cluster, these disks can build a huge common storage medium. I/O in parallel computing traditionally uses a small number of I/O nodes, which are connected to some storage media (for the sake of brevity, these media will be referred to as “disks” in the following, though other types of media such as tapes or CDs may be used). I/O nodes can be either dedicated or nondedicated. Dedicated nodes process I/O operations only, while nondedicated nodes perform some parts of the computation as well. For a disk read, the I/O nodes read the requested data from the disk and scatter them to the computing nodes that issued the request. Similarly, data are gathered from the computing nodes and written to disk for write operations. Typically, an I/O node uses several disks in parallel (e.g., a RAID system) to increase I/O bandwidth and to ensure data integrity. To improve I/O throughput for these systems, some classical strategies (e.g., two-phase I/O [del Rosario, Bordawekar, and Choudhary, 1993], data sieving [Choudhary et al., 1994], and collective I/O [Bordawekar, 1997]) have been worked out. But the fact that many processors have to share a relatively small number of disks still leads to a severe I/O bottleneck. The advent of cluster computing, which is rapidly becoming more and more popular among scientists (as can be easily seen in the ever-increasing number of cluster systems among the top 500 computers [http://www. top500.org]), has induced some interesting possibilities to reduce the I/O bottleneck. Because each processing unit normally has a local disk, only the data that have to be shared by different processing units need to be sent across the network interconnect. Moreover, increasing the capacity of overall storage can be done in a cost-
Interference-aware dual-hop cooperative relaying in a poisson field of interferers

In this paper, we study amplify-and-forward dual-hop cooperative relaying protocols in the presence of Rayleigh fading, additive noise at the relay, as well as additive noise and symmetric alpha-stable interference at the destination. A quasi-static interference scenario is considered, which arises, e.g., when the same interferers are active during broadcast and relaying phases. At the destination, a maximal ratio combining demodulator is developed and studied, by assuming that the aggregate interference can be estimated, i.e., interference-aware design. A closed-form expression of the end-to-end moment generating function is provided and the achievable diversity order is studied. Two main results emerge from the paper: 1) if the ratio of the transmit-powers of cooperative and interfering networks is a constant, the diversity order is equal to 1 and 2) if the transmit-power of the interfering network is a constant, the diversity order is equal to 1 + 1/bI, where bI > 1 is the amplitude path-loss exponent. In the latter case, thus, second-order diversity is achieved asymptotically, as the amplitude path-loss exponent tends to one. Mathematical frameworks and findings are validated with the aid of Monte Carlo simulations.
Improving Performance by Reducing the Memory Footprint of Scientific Applications

Over the last two decades, processor speeds have improved much faster than memory speeds. As a result, memory access delay is a major performance bottleneck in today's systems. Compilers often fail to choreograph data and computation automatically to avoid memory access delay; we have developed an annotation-driven source-to-source transformation tool for this purpose. This tool uses a set of compiler transformations that improve temporal reuse in scientific applications (1) by reducing the size of temporary arrays and (2) by overlaying storage for multiple temporary arrays that are not live at the same time. We also describe two supporting transformations, statement motion and loop alignment, that improve the effectiveness of storage reduction. Our experiments with a numerical kernel and two weather codes show that our storage reduction optimizations amplify the benefits of loop transformations and double performance achievable with loop transformations alone.
Complete attenuation of genetically engineered Plasmodium falciparum sporozoites in human subjects

A genetically attenuated Plasmodium falciparum strain called Pf GAP3KO is completely attenuated, safe, and immunogenic in adults. A triple punch knocks out the malaria parasite Vaccination with weakened infectious forms of the malaria parasite is the most promising approach to protect against malaria infection. However, creating genetically defined and weakened parasite strains that are safe for vaccination remains challenging. In a new study, Kublin et al. show that genetic engineering of the malaria parasite by the precise removal of three genes creates a parasite strain that infects humans and is well tolerated but cannot cause malaria. These genetically attenuated parasites thus appear safe for vaccination and stimulate the human immune system to generate responses that have the potential to block infection. Immunization of humans with whole sporozoites confers complete, sterilizing immunity against malaria infection. However, achieving consistent safety while maintaining immunogenicity of whole parasite vaccines remains a formidable challenge. We generated a genetically attenuated Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) malaria parasite by deleting three genes expressed in the pre-erythrocytic stage (Pf p52−/p36−/sap1−). We then tested the safety and immunogenicity of the genetically engineered (Pf GAP3KO) sporozoites in human volunteers. Pf GAP3KO sporozoites were delivered to 10 volunteers using infected mosquito bites with a single exposure consisting of 150 to 200 bites per subject. All subjects remained blood stage–negative and developed inhibitory antibodies to sporozoites. GAP3KO rodent malaria parasites engendered complete, protracted immunity against infectious sporozoite challenge in mice. The results warrant further clinical testing of Pf GAP3KO and its potential development into a vaccine strain.
MDM2 inhibition rescues neurogenic and cognitive deficits in a mouse model of fragile X syndrome

The MDM2 inhibitor Nutlin-3 rescues neurogenic and cognitive deficits in mice with fragile X syndrome. MDM2 inhibitor rescues fragile X deficits Mutation of the FMRP protein in humans leads to fragile X syndrome, the most common inherited intellectual disability. Li et al. now show that FMRP controls the activities of neural stem cells in the adult mouse brain, which is critical for production of new neurons and learning and cognition. They discovered that FMRP regulates neural stem cells through controlling the expression of the E3 ubiquitin ligase MDM2. They found that treatment with an inhibitor of MDM2 called Nutlin-3 rebalanced neural stem cell activities and rescued cognitive deficits in a mouse model of fragile X syndrome. Fragile X syndrome, the most common form of inherited intellectual disability, is caused by loss of the fragile X mental retardation protein (FMRP). However, the mechanism remains unclear, and effective treatment is lacking. We show that loss of FMRP leads to activation of adult mouse neural stem cells (NSCs) and a subsequent reduction in the production of neurons. We identified the ubiquitin ligase mouse double minute 2 homolog (MDM2) as a target of FMRP. FMRP regulates Mdm2 mRNA stability, and loss of FMRP resulted in elevated MDM2 mRNA and protein. Further, we found that increased MDM2 expression led to reduced P53 expression in adult mouse NSCs, leading to alterations in NSC proliferation and differentiation. Treatment with Nutlin-3, a small molecule undergoing clinical trials for treating cancer, specifically inhibited the interaction of MDM2 with P53, and rescued neurogenic and cognitive deficits in FMRP-deficient mice. Our data reveal a potential regulatory role for FMRP in the balance between adult NSC activation and quiescence, and identify a potential new treatment for fragile X syndrome.
Hyperspectral Unmixing via $L_{1/2}$ Sparsity-Constrained Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Hyperspectral unmixing is a crucial preprocessing step for material classification and recognition. In the last decade, nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) and its extensions have been intensively studied to unmix hyperspectral imagery and recover the material end-members. As an important constraint for NMF, sparsity has been modeled making use of the <i>L</i><sub>1</sub> regularizer. Unfortunately, the <i>L</i><sub>1</sub> regularizer cannot enforce further sparsity when the full additivity constraint of material abundances is used, hence limiting the practical efficacy of NMF methods in hyperspectral unmixing. In this paper, we extend the NMF method by incorporating the <i>L</i><sub>1/2</sub> sparsity constraint, which we name <i>L</i><sub>1/2</sub> -NMF. The <i>L</i><sub>1/2</sub> regularizer not only induces sparsity but is also a better choice among <i>Lq</i>(0 <; <i>q</i> <; 1) regularizers. We propose an iterative estimation algorithm for <i>L</i><sub>1/2</sub>-NMF, which provides sparser and more accurate results than those delivered using the <i>L</i><sub>1</sub> norm. We illustrate the utility of our method on synthetic and real hyperspectral data and compare our results to those yielded by other state-of-the-art methods.
Software-as-a-Service for the Virtualization of Mobile Network Gateways

Network functions virtualization is one of the most promising networking technology trends for mobile operators. Such functions often are considered as virtualized version of physical devices. They follow the same implementation, deployment, and operation and management model as such physical entities. However, some key characteristics of the underlying cloud technologies, such as the elastic provisioning of resources, the different hardware failure rates and the increasing programmability of the underlying network enable new design paradigms. Thus, virtual network functions should leverage on IT technologies like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to reduce operational costs and enable new business models. We introduce a classification of different design paradigms, detail how a SaaS implementation can be performed for mobile network gateways, and provide a comparison of the operation cost implications of employing such paradigms to create network nodes in a mobile network.
Extraction of Building Roof Contours From LiDAR Data Using a Markov-Random-Field-Based Approach

This paper proposes a method for the automatic extraction of building roof contours from a digital surface model (DSM) by regularizing light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data. The method uses two steps. First, to detect aboveground objects (buildings, trees, etc.), the DSM is segmented through a recursive splitting technique followed by a region-merging process. Vectorization and polygonization are used to obtain polyline representations of the detected aboveground objects. Second, building roof contours are identified from among the aboveground objects by optimizing a Markov-random-field-based energy function that embodies roof contour attributes and spatial constraints. The optimal configuration of building roof contours is found by minimizing the energy function using a simulated annealing algorithm. Experiments carried out with the LiDAR-based DSM show that the proposed method works properly, as it provides roof contour information with approximately 90% shape accuracy and no verified false positives.