Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sexual Selection and Interacting Phenotypes in Experimental Evolution: A Study of Drosophila Pseudoobscura Mating Behavior

Abstract Sexual selection requires social interactions, particularly between the sexes. When trait expression is influenced by social interactions, such traits are called interacting phenotypes and only recently have the evolutionary consequences of interacting phenotypes been considered. Here we investigated how variation in relative fitness, or the opportunity for sexual selection, affected the evolutionary trajectories of interacting phenotypes. We used experimentally evolved populations of the naturally promiscuous Drosophila pseudoobscura, in which the numbers of potential interactions between the sexes, and therefore relative fitness, were manipulated by altering natural levels of female promiscuity. We considered two different mating interactions between the sexes: mating speed and copulation duration. We investigated the evolutionary trajectories of means and (co)variances (P) and also the influence of genetic drift on the evolutionary response of these interactions. Our sexual selection treatments did not affect the means of either mating speed or copulation duration, but they did affect P. We found that the means of both traits differed among replicates within each selection treatment whereas the Ps did not. Changes as a consequence of genetic drift were excluded. Our results show that although variable potential strengths of sexual interactions influence the evolution of interacting phenotypes, the influence may be nonlinear.
Exploring the potential of brain-inspired computing

The gap between brains and computers regarding both their cognitive capability and power efficiency is remarkably huge. Brains process information massively in parallel and its constituents are intrinsically self-organizing, while in digital computers the execution of instructions is deterministic and rather serial. The recent progress in the development of dedicated hardware systems implementing physical models of neurons and synapses enables to efficiently emulate spiking neural networks. In this work, we verify the design and explore the potential for brain-inspired computing of such an analog neuromorphic system, called Spikey. We demonstrate the versatility of this highly configurable substrate by the implementation of a rich repertoire of network models, including models for signal propagation and enhancement, general purpose classifiers, cortical models and decorrelating feedback systems. Network emulations on Spikey are highly accelerated and consume less than 1 nJ per synaptic transmission. The Spikey system, hence, outperforms modern desktop computers in terms of fast and efficient network simulations closing the gap to brains. During this thesis the stability, performance and user-friendliness of the Spikey system was improved integrating it into the neuroscientific tool chain and making it available for the community. The implementation of networks suitable to solve everyday tasks, like object or speech recognition, qualifies this technology to be an alternative to conventional computers. Considering the compactness, computational capability and power efficiency, neuromorphic systems may qualify as a valuable complement to classical computation.
Distributed Representations of Lexical Sets and Prototypes in Causal Alternation Verbs

Lexical sets contain the words filling an argument slot of a verb, and are in part determined by selectional preferences. The purpose of this paper is to unravel the properties of lexical sets through distributional semantics. We investigate 1) whether lexical set behave as prototypical categories with a centre and a periphery; 2) whether they are polymorphic, i.e. composed by subcategories; 3) whether the distance between lexical sets of different arguments is explanatory of verb properties. In particular, our case study are lexical sets of causative-inchoative verbs in Italian. Having studied several vector models, we find that 1) based on spatial distance from the centroid, object fillers are scattered uniformly across the category, whereas intransitive subject fillers lie on its edge; 2) a correlation exists between the amount of verb senses and that of clusters discovered automatically, especially for intransitive subjects; 3) the distance between the centroids of object and intransitive subject is correlated with other properties of verbs, such as their cross-lingual tendency to appear in the intransitive pattern rather than transitive one. This paper is noncommittal with respect to the hypothesis that this connection is underpinned by a semantic reason, namely the spontaneity of the event denoted by the verb.
WLAN location determination model based on the artificial neural networks

Along with increasing popularity of wireless LAN, problem of location determination for mobile users becomes more important. The strengths of RF signals arriving from several access points can be used for location determination of the mobile terminal. In indoor environments the received signal level is very complex function of the distance. The solution can be found in the area of artificial neural networks. The neural networks can be learned to classify data. Labeled data examples of signal strengths at known locations must be collected by the measurement. This data will serve for the training of the network with appropriate training algorithm. The trained network is capable to determine location on the base of new signal strengths as a process of generalization. The advantage of the method is that it doesn't need any extra hardware, while with flexible neural network model achieves lower distance errors in determining position comparable with other methods. For successful position determination only what is needed are a map of indoor space and several identified locations to train the network.
Analyzing the Importance of Marking Links to Special Targets in Mobile Web

Literature points out the importance of indicating when a link opens a different website in a new window, since this is the default behavior that users expect, but this problem has not been specifically studied in mobile devices yet. This paper explains a study that was carried out with 20 different mobile devices and 19 users. We compared the usability of opening links in the same window or in a new one, informing or not informing the user about the target, as well as the convenience of using icons or text to inform about the target of a link. Results show that 95% of the devices used for the experiment had browser multi-window support, and we conclude that mobile users prefer to be previously informed when a link opens in a new window, and that the preferred method for informing them is using an icon instead of a text.
Apoptosis--the Calcium Connection

Calcium ions are crucial to many cellular processes including apoptosis. In their Perspective, Demaurex and Distelhorst explain new work that shows how calcium ions flowing between the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and mitochondria regulate programmed cell death, highlighting the ER as a new gateway to apoptosis ( Scorrano et al.).
SAPK 2 / p 38-dependent F-Actin Reorganization Regulates Early Membrane Blebbing during Stress-induced Apoptosis

In endothelial cells, H 2 O 2 induces the rapid formation of focal adhesion complexes at the ventral face of the cells and a major reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton into dense transcytoplasmic stress fibers. This change in actin dynamics results from the activation of the mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase stress-activated protein kinase-2/p38 (SAPK2/p38), which, via MAP kinase-activated protein (MAPKAP) kinase-2/3, leads to the phosphorylation of the actin polymerization modulator heat shock protein of 27 kD (HSP27). Here we show that the concomitant activation of the extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) MAP kinase pathway by H 2 O 2 accomplishes an essential survival function during this process. When the activation of ERK was blocked with PD098059, the focal adhesion complexes formed under the plasma membrane, and the actin polymerization activity led to a rapid and intense membrane blebbing. The blebs were delimited by a thin F-actin ring and contained enhanced levels of HSP27. Later, the cells displayed hallmarks of apoptosis, such as DEVD protease activities and internucleosomal DNA fragmentation. Bleb formation but not apoptosis was blocked by extremely low concentrations of the actin polymerization inhibitor cytochalasin D or by the SAPK2 inhibitor SB203580, indicating that the two processes are not in the same linear cascade. The role of HSP27 in mediating membrane blebbing was assessed in fibroblastic cells. In control fibroblasts expressing a low level of endogenous HSP27 or in fibroblasts expressing a high level of a nonphosphorylatable HSP27, H 2 O 2 did not induce F-actin accumulation, nor did it generate membrane blebbing activity in the presence or absence of PD098059. In contrast, in fibroblasts that expressed wild-type HSP27 to a level similar to that found in endothelial cells, H 2 O 2 induced accumulation of F-actin and caused bleb formation when the ERK pathway was inhibited. Cisplatinum, which activated SAPK2 but induced little ERK activity, also induced membrane blebbing that was dependent on the expression of HSP27. In these cells, membrane blebbing was not followed by caspase activation or DNA fragmentation. We conclude that the HSP27-dependent actin polymerization–generating activity of SAPK2 associated with a misassembly of the focal adhesions is responsible for induction of membrane blebbing by stressing agents.
Thermodynamics of unfolding of an integral membrane protein in mixed micelles

Quantitative studies of membrane protein folding and unfolding can be difficult because of difficulties with efficient refolding as well as a pronounced propensity to aggregate. However, mixed micelles, consisting of the anionic detergent sodium dodecyl sulfate and the nonionic detergent dodecyl malto‐side facilitate reversible and quantitative unfolding and refolding. The 4‐transmembrane helix protein DsbB from the inner membrane of Escherichia coli unfolds in mixed micelles according to a three‐state mechanism involving an unfolding intermediate I. The temperature dependence of the kinetics of this reaction between 15° and 45°C supports that unfolding from I to the denatured state D is accompanied by a significant decrease in heat capacity. For water‐soluble proteins, the heat capacity increases upon unfolding, and this is generally interpreted as the increased binding of water to the protein as it unfolds, exposing more surface area. The decrease in DsbB's heat capacity upon unfolding is confirmed by independent thermal scans. The decrease in heat capacity is not an artifact of the use of mixed micelles, since the water soluble protein S6 shows conventional heat‐capacity changes in detergent. We speculate that it reflects the binding of SDS to parts of DsbB that are solvent‐exposed in the native DM‐bound state. This implies that the periplasmic loops of DsbB are relatively unstructured. This anomalous thermodynamic behavior has not been observed for β‐barrel membrane proteins, probably because they do not bind SDS so extensively. Thus the thermodynamic behavior of membrane proteins appears to be intimately connected to their detergent‐binding properties.
The evolution and structure of social networks

Abstract As social networks evolve, new nodes are linked to the large-scale organization already in place. We show that the combination of two simple algorithms, one the Barabasi-Albert preferential attachment proposal and the other a neighbor attachment rule, successfully generate networks exhibiting both the local and global characteristics of empirical data on social network structures. Ideally, one might hope that some coarse features of this linking process and the form of the local patterns might enable the prediction of large-scale properties. We show that this is generally not the case. This might help explain the variety of local and global patterns in empirical networks.
High-frequency cable and motor modeling of long-cable-fed induction motor drive systems

This paper proposes a novel modeling methodology for the investigation of long-cable-fed induction motor drive overvoltage. A high-frequency cable model based on improved high-order multiple-π sections is proposed. The cable model parameters are identified from the DM impedances in open circuit (OC) and short circuit (SC). An improved high-frequency motor equivalent circuit model is developed to represent the motor high-frequency behavior for the time- and frequency-domain analyses. The motor equivalent-circuit parameters for the differential mode (DM) and common mode (CM) are extracted based on the measurements. The proposed modeling methodology is verified on an experimental 2.2kW ABB motor drive benchmark system. The motor overvoltage transients predicted by the proposed model is in excellent agreement with the experimental results and represents a significant improvement compared with the conventional models.
Identification of small for gestational age by population-based and customized growth charts in newborns of obese and normal-weight primiparous women

Abstract Objective: Our hypothesis was that newborns of obese mothers would be more likely to be classified as small for gestational age (SGA) by their customized growth curves than by the standard growth curves when compared to newborns of normal-weight mothers. Methods: This is a retrospective cohort of primiparous patients delivering between 1 July 2008 and 30 June 2012. Normal-weight was defined as BMI ≤25 kg/m2 and obese as BMI ≥ 30 kg/m2. Infant birth-weight was characterized as SGA or non-SGA from the Lubchenco curve, the Fenton Preterm Growth Chart, and the customized growth curve. Results: Infants were more likely to be classified as SGA on the customized curve compared with Lubchenco curve. Odds ratio was 2.8 (CI: 1.7–4.4; p = 0.001) for obese women and was 2.9 (CI: 1.7–5.1; p < 0.001) for normal-weight women. Infants were also more likely to be classified as SGA based on the customized curve compared with the Fenton Preterm Growth Curve. The odds ratio was 2.3 (CI: 1.4–3.8; p = 0.001) for obese women and was 1.5 (CI: 1.01–2.33; p = 0.04) for normal-weight women. Conclusions: Population-based curves may mask SGA in obese women. Our study demonstrates that customized growth curves identify more SGA than population-based growth curves in obese and normal-weight women.
Nutritional Management of the Gluten-free Diet in Young People with Celiac Disease in The Netherlands

Background: For young people with celiac disease, adherence to the gluten-free diet may be difficult to achieve and gluten restriction may lead to insufficient nutrient intake and unbalanced food intake resulting in overweight. In The Netherlands, no nutritional information is available. Therefore, we evaluated the nutritional management and nutritional state in young celiac patients. Methods: The Dutch Celiac Society invited all its members aged 12 to 25 years to complete a food record and a questionnaire. Nutrient intakes were compared with the recommendations and the intake in the general population. Total immunoglobin A, endomysial antibody, tissue transglutaminase and IgA gliadin were determined, and height and weight were assessed. Results: Strict dietary compliance was reported by 75%. The fiber and iron intakes were significantly lower, and the saturated fat intake significantly higher than recommended but comparable with the general population. Most of the patients (61%) found the diet easy to follow. Regular medical controls were reported by 86% but regular dietary controls by only 7% of the patients. Mean and SD scores for height and body mass index were −0.3 ± 1.1 and −0.3 ± 0.8, respectively. Conclusions: The dietary compliance in this group is high, the nutritional state is adequate, but the nutrient intake is not. Better medical and dietary support is necessary to prevent long-term complications and to achieve an ongoing satisfying management in this group of young patients with a chronic disorder.
Wearable-free wireless fall detection system

Falls among the elderly population are a major concern for public safety since they are the dominant cause of injuries and hospitalization. Nearly a quarter of these falls can result in serious injuries that require immediate medical attention; hence, an external, privacy-preserving and device-free system is required for fall detection. Herein, we investigate the use of radars to monitor human motion and detect falls. This approach has been implemented with the use of a low-cost UWB radio operating between 3GHz-10GHz. The resulting radar data is shown to successfully enable fall detection for a person in a furnished room. This study demonstrates the enormous potential using indoor radars for motion detection, activity recognition, home-security, and fall alert systems.
Spontaneous facial micro-expression analysis using spatiotemporal local radon-based binary pattern

Micro-expressions are difficult to be observed by human beings due to its low intensity and short duration. Recently, several works have been developed to resolve the problems of micro-expression recognition caused by subtle intensity and short duration. One of them, Local binary pattern from three orthogonal planes (LBP-TOP) is primarily used to recognize micro-expression from the video recorded by high-speed camera. Several variances of LBP-TOP have also been developed to promisingly improve the performance of LBP-TOP for microexpression recognition. However, these variances of LBP-TOP including LBP-TOP cannot well extract the subtle movements of micro-expression so that they have the low performance. In this paper, we propose spontaneous local radon-based binary pattern to analyze micro-expressions with subtle facial movements. Firstly, it extracts the sparse information by using robust principal component analysis since micro-expression data are sparse in both temporal and spatial domains caused by short duration and low intensity. These sparse information can provide much motion information to dynamic feature descriptor. Furthermore, it employs radon transform to obtain the shape features from three orthogonal planes, as radon transform is robustness to the same histogram distribution of two images. Finally, one-dimensional LBP is employed in these shape features for constructing the spatiotemporal features for microexpression video. Intensive experiments are conducted on two available published micro-expression databases including SMIC and CASME2 databases for evaluating the performance of the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves promising performance in microexpression recognition.
Time-Frequency Energy Features for Articulator Position Inference on Stop Consonants

espanolLa inversion articulatoria ofrece nuevas perspectivas y aplicaciones interesantes en el campo de la voz; sin embargo, es aun un problema por resolver. El presente trabajo ofrece un metodo para la estimacion de la distribucion de la informacion articulatoria contenida en la acustica de consonantes explosivas, cuya parametrizacion se realiza mediante la transformada wavelet packet. El trabajo se centra principalmente en estimar la informacion acustica relevante, en terminos de asociacion estadistica, para la inferencia de la posicion de los organos articuladores criticos involucrados en la produccion de consonantes explosivas. Se usa el coeﬁciente de Kendall a modo de medida de relevancia. Los mapas de relevancia de tiempo-frecuencia se calculan para la base de datos MOCHA–TIMIT; de la cual, las zonas correspondientes a las consonantes explosivas son analizados. El metodo propuesto entrega un conjunto de componentes de tiempo-frecuencia intimamente relacionados al fenomeno articulatorio, lo cual ofrece un entendimiento mas profundo de la relacion existente entre los fenomenos articulatorio y acustico. Los mapas de relevancia se prueban en un sistema de inversion articulatoria basado en modelos de mezclas gausianas, donde se muestra que mejoran el desempeno de los mencionados sistemas aplicados sobre consonantes explosivas. El metodo se puede extender a otras categorias articulatorias, p.e. fricativas, con el ﬁn de adaptar el presente metodo a sistemas de inversion articulatoria sobre voz continuaPACS: 87.85NgMSC: 68T10 EnglishAcoustic-to-Articulatory inversion offers new perspectives and interesting applicationsin the speech processing field; however, it remains an open issue. This paper presents a method to estimate the distribution of the articulatory informationcontained in the stop consonants’ acoustics, whose parametrizationis achieved by using the wavelet packet transform. The main focus is on measuringthe relevant acoustic information, in terms of statistical association, forthe inference of the position of critical articulators involved in stop consonantsproduction. The rank correlation Kendall coefficient is used as the relevance measure. The maps of relevant time–frequency features are calculated for theMOCHA–TIMIT database; from which, stop consonants are extracted andanalysed. The proposed method obtains a set of time–frequency components closely related to articulatory phenemenon, which offers a deeper understanding into the relationship between the articulatory and acoustical phenomena.The relevant maps are tested into an acoustic–to–articulatory mapping systembased on Gaussian mixture models, where it is shown they are suitable for improvingthe performance of such a systems over stop consonants. The method could be extended to other manner of articulation categories, e.g. fricatives,in order to adapt present method to acoustic-to-articulatory mapping systemsover whole speech.PACS: 87.85NgMSC: 68T10
Src, cortactin and Arp2/3 complex are required for E‐cadherin‐mediated internalization of Listeria into cells

Listeria monocytogenes is a food‐borne pathogen able to invade non‐phagocytic cells. InlA, a L. monocytogenes surface protein, interacts with human E‐cadherin to promote bacterial entry. L. monocytogenes internalization is a dynamic process involving co‐ordinated actin cytoskeleton rearrangements and host cell membrane remodelling at the site of bacterial attachment. Interaction between E‐cadherin and catenins is required to promote Listeria entry, and for the establishment of adherens junctions in epithelial cells. Although several molecular factors promoting E‐cadherin‐mediated Listeria internalization have been identified, the proteins regulating the transient actin polymerization required at the bacterial entry site are unknown. Here we show that the Arp2/3 complex acts as an actin nucleator during the InlA/E‐cadherin‐dependent internalization. Using a variety of approaches including siRNA, expression of dominant negative derivatives and pharmacological inhibitors, we demonstrate the crucial role of cortactin in the activation of the Arp2/3 complex during InlA‐mediated entry. We also show the requirement of the small GTPase Rac1 and that of Src‐tyrosine kinase activity to promote Listeria internalization. Together, these data suggest a model in which Src tyrosine kinase and Rac1 promote recruitment of cortactin and activation of Arp2/3 at Listeria entry site, mimicking events that occur during adherens junction formation.