Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spatial location and emotion modulate voice perception

ABSTRACT How do we perceive voices coming from different spatial locations, and how is this affected by emotion? The current study probed the interplay between space and emotion during voice perception. Thirty participants listened to nonverbal vocalizations coming from different locations around the head (left vs. right; front vs. back), and differing in valence (neutral, positive [amusement] or negative [anger]). They were instructed to identify the location of the vocalizations (Experiment 1) and to evaluate their emotional qualities (Experiment 2). Emotion-space interactions were observed, but only in Experiment 1: emotional vocalizations were better localised than neutral ones when they were presented from the back and the right side. In Experiment 2, emotion recognition accuracy was increased for positive vs. negative and neutral vocalizations, and perceived arousal was increased for emotional vs. neutral vocalizations, but this was independent of spatial location. These findings indicate that emotional salience affects how we perceive the spatial location of voices. They additionally suggest that the interaction between spatial (“where”) and emotional (“what”) properties of the voice differs as a function of task.
Real-Time Social Stress Response and Subsequent Alcohol Use Initiation Among Female Adolescents

Adolescents who are particularly sensitive to social stress may be vulnerable to earlier alcohol consumption and related problems. Although a small literature supports this contention, previous studies mostly relied on retrospective self-report. The current study used discrete-time survival analysis (DTSA) to test whether real-time social stress responding (via laboratory induction) and social anxiety symptoms predicted 12-month alcohol onset in an alcohol-naïve sample of young female adolescents. Anxiety elicited by the task was expected to predict greater and earlier rates of alcohol incidence, particularly among girls with higher levels of self-reported social anxiety symptoms. Participants were 104 community-recruited girls (ages 12–15 years) who completed a modified Trier Social Stress Test and questionnaires; follow-up calls were conducted at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months after the laboratory visit. Self-reported anxiety was assessed in response to the stressor following acclimation (baseline), instruction (anticipation), and speech (posttask). By 12 months, 30.8% of the sample had consumed a full alcoholic beverage. The DTSA revealed that girls with higher levels of social anxiety and greater elevations in anticipatory (but not posttask) anxiety compared to baseline had earlier alcohol initiation. This is the first study to examine the role of both laboratory-induced anxious responding and retrospective reports of social anxiety as prospective predictors of alcohol incidence. These preliminary findings suggest that adolescent girls who are more sensitive to social stress may be at risk for experimenting with alcohol earlier than their peers.
Bioactive Compounds, Nutritional Value, and Potential Health Benefits of Indigenous Durian (Durio Zibethinus Murr.): A Review

Durian (Durio zibethinus Murr.) is an energy-dense seasonal tropical fruit grown in Southeast Asia. It is one of the most expensive fruits in the region. It has a creamy texture and a sweet-bitter taste. The unique durian flavour is attributable to the presence of fat, sugar, and volatile compounds such as esters and sulphur-containing compounds such as thioacetals, thioesters, and thiolanes, as well as alcohols. This review shows that durian is also rich in flavonoids (i.e., flavanols, anthocyanins), ascorbic acid, and carotenoids. However, limited studies exist regarding the variation in bioactive and volatile components of different durian varieties from Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. Experimental animal models have shown that durian beneficially reduces blood glucose and cholesterol levels. Durian extract possesses anti-proliferative and probiotics effects in in vitro models. These effects warrant further investigation in human interventional studies for the development of functional food.
Electroacupuncture in rats normalizes the diabetes‐induced alterations in the septo‐hippocampal cholinergic system

Diabetes induces early sufferance in the cholinergic septo‐hippocampal system, characterized by deficits in learning and memory, reduced hippocampal plasticity and abnormal pro‐nerve growth factor (proNGF) release from hippocampal cells, all linked to dysfunctions in the muscarinic cholinergic modulation of hippocampal physiology. These alterations are associated with dysregulation of several cholinergic markers, such as the NGF receptor system and the acetylcholine biosynthetic enzyme choline‐acetyl transferase (ChAT), in the medial septum and its target, the hippocampus. Controlled and repeated sensory stimulation by electroacupuncture has been proven effective in counteracting the consequences of diabetes on cholinergic system physiology in the brain. Here, we used a well‐established Type 1 diabetes model, obtained by injecting young adult male rats with streptozotocin, to induce sufferance in the septo‐hippocampal system. We then evaluated the effects of a 3‐week treatment with low‐frequency electroacupuncture on: (a) the expression and protein distribution of proNGF in the hippocampus, (b) the tissue distribution and content of NGF receptors in the medial septum, (c) the neuronal cholinergic and glial phenotype in the septo‐hippocampal circuitry. Twice‐a‐week treatment with low‐frequency electroacupuncture normalized, in both hippocampus and medial septum, the ratio between the neurotrophic NGF and its neurotoxic counterpart, the precursor proNGF. Electroacupuncture regulated the balance between the two major proNGF variants (proNGF‐A and proNGF‐B) at both gene expression and protein synthesis levels. In addition, electroacupuncture recovered to basal level the pro‐neurotrophic NGF receptor tropomyosin receptor kinase‐A content, down‐regulated in medial septum cholinergic neurons by diabetes. Electroacupuncture also regulated ChAT content in medial septum neurons and its anterograde transport toward the hippocampus. Our data indicate that repeated sensory stimulation can positively affect brain circuits involved in learning and memory, reverting early impairment induced by diabetes development. Electroacupuncture could exert its effects on the septo‐hippocampal cholinergic neurotransmission in diabetic rats, not only by rescuing the hippocampal muscarinic responsivity, as previously described, but also normalizing acetylcholine biosynthesis and NGF metabolism in the hippocampus.
A Precise Method for Analysis of Elemental Distribution Inside Solute Clusters

Abstract A procedure to analyze the elemental concentration distribution inside solute clusters after detection of clusters from atom probe tomography data set was proposed. We developed a code which can directly illustrate an average concentration profile inside a cluster even in the case of including various sizes of ellipsoidal clusters. The profile can be with respect to absolute distance and includes errors in each data point. The reliability of the developed code was verified by analyzing an artificial cluster model which has inhomogeneous elemental distribution. It was found that the precise estimation of cluster centroids is important and that the preferable conditions for targeting clusters are a detection efficiency of over 20%, over 30 atoms in a cluster on average, and over 100 atoms for each concentration data point.
Transcriptomic Landscape of Cisplatin-Resistant Neuroblastoma Cells

The efficiency of cisplatin (CDDP) is significantly hindered by the development of resistance during the treatment course. To gain a detailed understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the development of cisplatin resistance, we comparatively analyzed established a CDDP-resistant neuroblastoma cell line (UKF-NB-4CDDP) and its susceptible parental cells (UKF-NB-4). We verified increased chemoresistance of UKF-NB-4CDDP cells by analyzing the viability, induction of apoptosis and clonal efficiency. To shed more light on this phenomenon, we employed custom cDNA microarray (containing 2234 probes) to perform parallel transcriptomic profiling of RNA and identified that 139 genes were significantly up-regulated due to CDDP chemoresistance. The analyses of molecular pathways indicated that the top up-regulation scoring functions were response to stress, abiotic stimulus, regulation of metabolic process, apoptotic processes, regulation of cell proliferation, DNA repair or regulation of catalytic activity, which was also evidenced by analysis of molecular functions revealing up-regulation of genes encoding several proteins with a wide-spectrum of enzymatic activities. Functional analysis using lysosomotropic agents chloroquine and bafilomycin A1 validated their potential to re-sensitize UKF-NB-4CDDP cells to CDDP. Taken together, the identification of alterations in specific genes and pathways that contribute to CDDP chemoresistance may potentially lead to a renewed interest in the development of novel rational therapeutics and prognostic biomarkers for the management of CDDP-resistant neuroblastoma.
Maintenance of Near Normal Bone Mass and Architecture in Lethally Irradiated Female Mice following Adoptive Transfer with as few as 750 Purified Hematopoietic Stem Cells

Deyhle Jr., R. T. , Wong, C. P., Martin, S. A. , McDougall, M. Q. , Olson, D. A. , Branscum, A. J., Menn, S. A. , Iwaniec, U. T. , Hamby, D. M and Turner, R. T. Maintenance of Near Normal Bone Mass and Architecture in Lethally Irradiated Female Mice following Adoptive Transfer with as few as 750 Purified Hematopoietic Stem Cells. Radiat. Res. 191, 413–427 (2019). Total-body irradiation (TBI) followed by transfer of bone marrow cells from donors is routinely performed in immunology research and can be used to manipulate differentiation and/or function of bone cells. However, exposure to high-dose radiation can result in irreversible osteopenia, and transfer of heterogeneous cell populations can complicate interpretation of results. The goal of this research was to establish an approach for reconstituting bone marrow using small numbers of purified donor-derived hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) without negatively affecting bone metabolism. Gamma-irradiated (9 Gy) WBB6F1 mice were engrafted with bone marrow cells (5 × 106 cells) or purified HSCs (3,000 cells) obtained from GFP transgenic mice. In vivo analysis and in vitro differentiation assays performed two months later established that both methods were effective in reconstituting the hematopoietic compartment with donor-derived cells. We confirmed these findings by engrafting C57Bl/6 (B6) mice with bone marrow cells or purified HSCs from CD45.1 B6 congenic mice. We next performed adoptive transfer of purified HSCs (750 cells) into WBB6F1 and radiosensitive KitW/W-v mice and evaluated the skeleton two months later. Minimal differences were observed between controls and WBB6F1-engrafted mice that received fractionated doses of 2 × 5 Gy. Kitw/wv mice lost weight and became osteopenic after 2 × 5 Gy irradiations but these abnormalities were negligible after 5 Gy irradiation. Importantly, adoptive transfer of wild-type cells into Kitw/wv mice restored normal Kit expression in bone marrow. Together, these findings provide strong evidence for efficient engraftment with purified HSCs after lethal TBI with minimal collateral damage to bone. This approach will be useful for investigating mechanisms by which hematopoietic lineage cells regulate bone metabolism.
Characterization of permethrin resistance in a Musca domestica strain: resistance development, cross-resistance potential and realized heritability.

BACKGROUND Permethrin (a pyrethroid) has been recommended for the management of a number of insect pests, including Musca domestica. Recently, resistance to permethrin has been reported from the Punjab province, Pakistan, which necessitates the need to manage the resistance problem. For this reason, a field strain of M. domestica was selected with permethrin for ten consecutive generations (G1-G10) to determine the risk assessment, the rapidity with which permethrin resistance can develop, and the presence or absence of the cross-resistance phenomenon. RESULTS The results revealed that permethrin resistance increased very quickly in response to selection experiments. The resistance ratio (RR) value increased by 16.04- to 605.92-fold and the LD50 value increased by 100.22 to 3787.08 ng fly-1 after selection experiments. Moreover, the increase in LD50 value remained stable when the selected strain (Perm-SEL) was cultured in the absence of permethrin for the next five generations (G11-G15). The results revealed the possibility of minor cross-resistance in the Perm-SEL strain with β-cyfluthrin and deltamethrin, and lack of cross-resistance with imidacloprid and spinosad. The realized heritability (h2 ) value for the Perm-SEL strain was 0.23. Assuming a mean slope value of 1.27 and an h2 value of 0.23, then ten to four generations would be estimated for a 10-fold increase in the LD50 values at 50-90% selection intensity, respectively. CONCLUSION The results of present study revealed high risk for permethrin resistance development under continuous selection pressure. Permethrin resistance developed very quickly under laboratory conditions, which might reflect the likelihood of resistance evolution in field conditions if permethrin selection pressure holds for a long time. © 2019 Society of Chemical Industry.
Mucociliary function of the eustachian tube in the eustachian tube dysfunction

Abstract Background: Most of the tests to evaluate the eustachian tube (ET) function are focused on the ventilation function of the ET. Aim: Here we evaluate mucociliary function of the ET in patients with ET dysfunction. Materials and methods: Ten patients with ET dysfunction were enrolled into the study. Six patients had chronic tympanic membrane retraction and four patients had chronic middle ear effusion (MEE). All patients had intact tympanic membranes. Tympanometry and clinical examinations were done to all patients. Mucociliary function was evaluated with technetium labeled albumin and blue dye. Tympanometry and clinical examinations were done to six patients with chronic tympanic membrane retraction and four patients with chronic middle ear effusion (MEE). Mucociliary function of the ET was evaluated with technetium labeled albumin and blue dye placed into middle ear through an intact tympanic membrane and followed from nasopharynx ET orifice (blue dye) and with gamma camera (technetium). Results: Blue dye was observed in tubal orifice in six (6 of 10) patients during 30 min observation. Five of those patients (5 of 6) had tympanic membrane retraction and one patient (1 of 6) had MEE. Tracer activity decreased from middle ear in six (6 of 10) patients. Four of those patients had tympanic membrane retraction and two had MEE. Conclusion: Mucociliary function of the ET seems to be better in patients with tympanic membrane retraction than patients with middle ear effusion. Significance: Mucociliary function of the ET is an important function for middle ear aeration, blue dye test is easily available to be used also in clinical practice.
Application of Convolutional Neural Networks for Automated Ulcer Detection in Wireless Capsule Endoscopy Images

Detection of abnormalities in wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) images is a challenging task. Typically, these images suffer from low contrast, complex background, variations in lesion shape and color, which affect the accuracy of their segmentation and subsequent classification. This research proposes an automated system for detection and classification of ulcers in WCE images, based on state-of-the-art deep learning networks. Deep learning techniques, and in particular, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have recently become popular in the analysis and recognition of medical images. The medical image datasets used in this study were obtained from WCE video frames. In this work, two milestone CNN architectures, namely the AlexNet and the GoogLeNet are extensively evaluated in object classification into ulcer or non-ulcer. Furthermore, we examine and analyze the images identified as containing ulcer objects to evaluate the efficiency of the utilized CNNs. Extensive experiments show that CNNs deliver superior performance, surpassing traditional machine learning methods by large margins, which supports their effectiveness as automated diagnosis tools.
Dietary Nutrients Involved in One-Carbon Metabolism and Colonic Mucosa-Associated Gut Microbiome in Individuals with an Endoscopically Normal Colon

One carbon (1C) metabolism nutrients influence epigenetic regulation and they are supplied by diet and synthesized by gut microbiota. We examined the association between dietary consumption of methyl donors (methionine, betaine and choline) and B vitamins (folate, B2, B6, and B12) and the community composition and structure of the colonic mucosa-associated gut microbiota determined by 16S rRNA gene sequencing in 97 colonic biopsies of 35 men. We used the food frequency questionnaire to assess daily consumption of nutrients, and the UPARSE and SILVA databases for operational taxonomic unit classification. The difference in bacterial diversity and taxonomic relative abundance were compared between low versus high consumption of these nutrients. False discover rate (FDR) adjusted p value < 0.05 indicated statistical significance. The bacterial richness and composition differed significantly by the consumption of folate and B vitamins (p < 0.001). Compared with higher consumption, a lower consumption of these nutrients was associated with a lower abundance of Akkermansia (folate), Roseburia (vitamin B2), and Faecalibacterium (vitamins B2, B6, and B12) but a higher abundance of Erysipelatoclostridium (vitamin B2) (FDR p values < 0.05). The community composition and structure of the colonic bacteria differed significantly by dietary consumption of folate and B vitamins.
The Vital Worker: Towards Sustainable Performance at Work

Vitality at work is an important factor for organizations to build a healthier, more engaged, sustainable, and productive workforce. The organizational and societal relevance of vitality at work is high, particularly with regard to an aging and more diverse workforce. This Special Issue focusses on what might be called sustainable performance at work: Maximizing work performance as well as worker health and well-being through employee vitality. Currently, there are still many gaps of knowledge with regard to the relationship between employee vitality and sustainable performance at work. Examples of knowledge gaps are concerned with potential determinants of vitality at work for different occupational groups (such as older workers, ethnic minority workers, and handicapped workers), pathways linking vitality to sustainable performance, or health effects of interventions targeting employee vitality and/or sustainable performance at work. With this Special Issue, we hope to provide readers with solid new findings extending the current state of knowledge about employee vitality and sustainable work performance.
Genetic polymorphisms in DNA repair genes and their association with cervical cancer

ABSTRACT Background and objective: Carcinoma of cervix is the second most common cancer among women worldwide. The DNA repair network plays an important role in the maintenance of genetic stability, protection against DNA damage and carcinogenesis. Alterations in repair genes XRCC1, XRCC2 and XRCC3 and been reported in certain cancers. We hypothesised an association between XRCC1+399A/G, XRCC2+31467G/A and XRCC3+18067C/T polymorphisms and the risk of cervical cancer. Subjects and methods: This study included 525 subjects (265 controls and 260 cervical cancer cases). Genotypes were determined by polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP). Results: Women with GA and AA genotypes of XRCC1+399A/G showed 2.4–3.8 fold higher risk of cervical cancer (P = 0.001). The +399A* allele was significantly linked with cervical cancer (P = 0.002). However, XRCC2+31479G/A and XRCC3+18067C/T polymorphisms did not show any statistically significant associations. Conclusion: The XRCC1+399A/G SNP is linked with cervical cancer. We suggest that this variant can be utilized as a prognostic marker for determination of cervical cancer susceptibility.
The logic of ionic homeostasis: Cations are for voltage, but not for volume

Neuronal activity is associated with transmembrane ionic redistribution, which can lead to an osmotic imbalance. Accordingly, activity-dependent changes of the membrane potential are sometimes accompanied by changes in intracellular and/or extracellular volume. Experimental data that include distributions of ions and volume during neuronal activity are rare and rather inconsistent partly due to the technical difficulty of performing such measurements. However, progress in understanding the interrelations among ions, voltage and volume has been achieved recently by computational modelling, particularly “charge-difference” modelling. In this work a charge-difference computational model was used for further understanding of the specific roles for cations and anions. Our simulations show that without anion conductances the transmembrane movements of cations are always osmotically balanced, regardless of the stoichiometry of the pump or the ratio of Na+ and K+ conductances. Yet any changes in cation conductance or pump activity are associated with changes of the membrane potential, even when a hypothetically electroneutral pump is used in calculations and K+ and Na+ conductances are equal. On the other hand, when a Cl- conductance is present, the only way to keep the Cl-equilibrium potential in accordance with the changed membrane potential is to adjust cell volume. Importantly, this voltage-evoked Cl--dependent volume change does not affect intracellular cation concentrations or the amount of energy that is necessary to support the system. Taking other factors into consideration (i.e. the presence of internal impermeant poly-anions, the activity of cation-Cl- cotransporters, and the buildup of intra- and extracellular osmolytes, both charged and electroneutral) adds complexity, but does not change the main principles.
The diagnostic performance of renal function-adjusted D-dimer testing in individuals suspected of having venous thromboembolism

Renal impairment, a source of chronic hypercoagulability[1][1] and inflammation,[2][2] is known to reduce the specificity of the D-dimer test in the diagnosis of venous thromboembolism (VTE). [3][3] This leads to many false positives in such patients and consequently to additional costs, as well as