Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using the Child Behavior Checklist and the Teacher’s Report Form for identification of children with autism spectrum disorders

This study evaluated the ability of the Child Behavior Checklist and the Teacher’s Report Form to identify children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), using a sample of children with ASD (n = 458), referred children without ASD (n = 1109) and children from the general population (n = 999). A ten items ASD scale was constructed using half of the sample and the ability of this scale to discriminate between children with ASD and the other children was tested for the CBCL and the TRF separately and together in the other half of the sample. Using a cut-off score of 8 the combined CBCL/TRF ASD scale demonstrated high predictive values (NPV 95%, PPV 73%) in identifying children with ASD and children in the general population sample. This might be an acceptable percentage of false positives in general screening, considering the chance that these children might have other behavioural, emotional, and developmental problems which also need psychiatric evaluation. In the referred population, using a cut-off of 13, PPV was 49% and NPV was 85%. The high NPV indicates that in a referred population the scale is especially good at identifying children who do not need evaluation with a more ASD-specific instrument.
Repeat hydrography in the Mediterranean Sea, data from the Meteor cruise 84/3 in 2011

Abstract. Here we report on data from an oceanographic cruise on the German research vessel Meteor covering large parts of the Mediterranean Sea during spring of 2011. The main objective of this cruise was to conduct measurements of physical, chemical and biological variables on a section across the Mediterranean Sea with the goal of producing a synoptic picture of the distribution of relevant physical and biogeochemical properties, in order to compare those to historic data sets. During the cruise, a comprehensive data set of relevant variables following the guide lines for repeat hydrography outlined by the GO-SHIP group ( http://www.go-ship.org/ ) was collected. The measurements include salinity and temperature (CTD), an over-determined carbonate system, inorganic nutrients, oxygen, transient tracers (CFC-12, SF6), helium isotopes and tritium, and carbon isotopes. The cruise sampled all major basins of the Mediterranean Sea following roughly an east-to-west section from the coast of Lebanon through to the Strait of Gibraltar, and to the coast of Portugal. Also a south-to-north section from the Ionian Sea to the Adriatic Sea was carried out. Additionally, sampling in the Aegean, Adriatic and Tyrrhenian Seas were carried out. The sections roughly followed lines and positions that have been sampled previously during other programs, thus providing the opportunity for comparative investigations of the temporal development of various parameters.
Drosophila UbcD1 encodes a highly conserved ubiquitin‐conjugating enzyme involved in selective protein degradation.

Ubiquitin‐dependent selective protein degradation serves to eliminate abnormal proteins and provides controlled short half‐lives to certain cellular proteins, including proteins of regulatory function such as phytochrome, yeast MAT alpha 2 repressor, p53 and cyclin. Moreover, ubiquitin‐dependent proteolysis is thought to play an essential role during development and in programmed cell death. We have cloned a gene from Drosophila melanogaster, UbcD1, coding for a protein with striking sequence similarity to the yeast ubiquitin‐conjugating enzymes UBC4 and UBC5. These closely related yeast enzymes are known to be central components of a major proteolytic pathway of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. By doing a precise open reading frame replacement in the yeast genome we could show that the Drosophila UbcD1 enzyme can functionally substitute for yeast UBC4. UbcD1 driven by the UBC4 promoter rescues growth defects and temperature sensitivity of yeast ubc4 ubc5 double mutant cells. Moreover, expression of UbcD1 restores proteolysis proficiency in the ubc4 ubc5 double mutant, indicating that the Drosophila enzyme also mediates protein degradation. This structural and functional conservation suggests that the UbcD1‐UBC4‐UBC5 class of enzymes defines a major proteolytic pathway in probably all eukaryotes.
INHIBITORY ACTIONS OF LEAD ON STEROIDOGENESIS IN MA-10 MOUSE LEYDIG TUMOR CELLS

The inhibitory actions of Pb on StAR protein expression and steroidogenic enzymes on steroidogenesis were analyzed by both linear and 2nd order polynomial models in MA-10 mouse Leydig tumor cells. Lead acetate, ranging from 10−8 M to 10−5 M, caused inhibitory effects on StAR protein expression and steroidogenic enzymes. The correlation coefficients R2 (linear vs. 2nd order polynomial) were 0.93 vs. 0.96 for human chorionic gonadotropin-stimulated progesterone production, 0.38 vs. 0.79 for dibutyryl cAMP-stimulated progesterone production, 0.03 vs. 0.99 for the expression of StAR protein, 0.6 vs. 0.92 for P450 side-chain cleavage enzyme activity, and 0.52 vs. 0.96 for 3β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase activity. Thus, 2nd order polynomial model showed higher correlation coefficients than the linear model for predicting inhibitory actions of Pb on StAR protein expression and the activities of steroidogenic enzymes after exposure of Pb on steroidogenesis in MA-10 cells.
A Comparison Study of the Interaction of Progesterone and Testosterone Drugs with Human Serum Albumin: A Fluorescence Quenching Study

The interaction of steroid hormones (testosterone and progesterone) with human serum albumin in phosphate buffer at pH 7.5 and at 25 °C have been studied using a fluorescence spectrophotometer. The results showed that fluorescence emission spectra were quenched with the increase of steroid molar ratios in fixed amount of HSA. The result indicated that progesterone and testosterone hormones have an ability to quench the intrinsic fluorescence of HSA through a static quenching procedure. Two mathematical models Stern–Volmer and Scatchard for analysis of fluorescence spectra were used. Progesterone binding to HSA was increased by a factor of 2.6 greater than that detected for the interaction of testosterone with HSA. The values of Stern-Volmer constants were determined to be (2.0  10 4 L mol -1 ) for progesterone–HSA complex and (7.7  10 3 L mol -1 ) for testosterone–HSA complex, Respectively. Whereas, the Scatchard constants were (2.1  10 4 L mol -1 ) and (7.9  10 3 L mol -1 ) for progesterone–HSA and testosterone–HSA complexes, respectively.
Exonic STK11 deletions are not a rare cause of Peutz-Jeghers syndrome

Background: Peutz-Jeghers syndrome (PJS) is a rare, autosomal dominant cancer predisposition syndrome characterised by oro-facial pigmentation and hamartomatous polyposis of the gastrointestinal tract. A causal germline mutation in STK11 can be identified in 30% to 80% of PJS patients. Methods: Here we report the comprehensive mutational analysis of STK11 in 38 PJS probands applying conventional PCR based mutation detection methods and the recently introduced MLPA (multiplex ligation dependent probe amplification) technique developed for the identification of exonic deletions/duplications. Results: Nineteen of 38 probands (50%) had detectable point mutations or small scale deletions/insertions and six probands (16%) had genomic deletions encompassing one or more STK11 exons. Conclusions: These findings demonstrate that exonic STK11 deletions are a common cause of PJS and provide a strong rationale for conducting a primary screen for such mutations in patients.
The Spatial and Temporal Evolution of the Glow in an RF Discharge

The temporal and spatial evolution of the glow in a 1.0- and 2.6-MHz radio-frequency (RF) excited discharge has been photographed with a high-speed framing camera. Evidence is presented showing electrons with a ballistic behavior in the body of the glow and a time delay between the maximum optical intensity of the glow and the maximum RF voltage. The effect of the dc self-bias on the glow is also shown. The implications of these observations on the dynamics of the ion motion in the plasma are discussed.
Implementation of comsol in simuLink S-functions, revisited

Comsol has standard facilities to export models to SimuLink. Normally, the standard export works well if the solvers, available in SimuLink, can handle the problem. However, if a model in Comsol needs special solvers, for example airflow or other non-linear problems, the standard export to SimuLink is often not suitable, because the standard solvers of SimuLink cannot handle such a problem efficiently. This can cause long simulation duration times and even leads to no solution at all. The paper presents a possible solution to this problem by implementing Comsol code in the discrete section of a SimuLink S-Function The advantage of this approach is that the special solvers of Comsol can be used in the SimuLink environment. This can lead to significant improvement of the simulation duration time.
Empirical Evaluation of Kernel PCA Approximation Methods in Classification Tasks

Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) is a popular dimensionality reduction technique with a wide range of applications. However, it suffers from the problem of poor scalability. Various approximation methods have been proposed in the past to overcome this problem. The Nystr\"om method, Randomized Nonlinear Component Analysis (RNCA) and Streaming Kernel Principal Component Analysis (SKPCA) were proposed to deal with the scalability issue of KPCA. Despite having theoretical guarantees, their performance in real world learning tasks have not been explored previously. In this work the evaluation of SKPCA, RNCA and Nystr\"om method for the task of classification is done for several real world datasets. The results obtained indicate that SKPCA based features gave much better classification accuracy when compared to the other methods for a very large dataset.
Tracing fine-grained provenance in stream processing systems using a reverse mapping method

Applications that require continuous processing of high-volume data streams have grown in prevalence and importance. These kinds of system often process streaming data in real-time or near real-time and provide instantaneous responses in order to support a precise and on time decision. In such systems it is difficult to know exactly how a particular result is generated. However, such information is extremely important for the validation and veri? cation of stream processing results. Therefore, it is crucial that stream processing systems have a mechanism for tracking provenance - the information pertaining to the process that produced result data - at the level of individual stream elements which we refer to as fine-grained provenance tracking for streams. The traceability of stream processing systems allows for users to validate individual stream elements, to verify the computation that took place and to understand the chain of reasoning that was used in the production of a stream processing result. Several recent solutions to provenance tracking in stream processing systems mainly focus on coarse-grained stream provenance in which the level of granularity for capturing provenance information is not detailed enough to address our problem. This thesis proposes a novel fine-grained provenance solution for streams that exploits a reverse mapping method to precisely capture dependency relationships for every individual stream element. It is also designed to support a stream-specific provenance query mechanism, which performs provenance queries dynamically over streams of provenance assertions without requiring the assertions to be stored persistently. The dissertation makes four major contributions to the state of the art. First is a provenance model for streams that allows for the provenance of individual stream elements to be obtained. Second is a provenance query method which utilizes a reverse mapping method - stream ancestor functions - in order to obtain the provenance of a particular stream processing result. The third contribution is a stream-specific provenance query mechanism that enables provenance queries to be computed on-the-fly without requiring provenance assertions to be stored persistently. The fourth contribution is the performance characteristics of our stream provenance solution. It is shown that the storage overhead for provenance collection can be reduced significantly by using our storage reduction technique and the marginal cost of storage consumption is constant based on the number of input stream events. A 4% overhead for the persistent provenance approach and a 7% overhead for the stream-specific query approach are observed as the impact of provenance recording on system performance. In addition, our stream-specific query approach offers low latency processing (0.3 ms per additional component) with reasonable memory consumption.
The relationship of personality traits to depression in a geriatric population.

In later life, adverse life events, disability, health problems, inadequate social support, and personality traits hypothesized to be important risk factors for depression. Sample included 35 older (65-84) physical rehabilitation patients in a large metropolitan hospital. Statistical analysis included Pearson Product Moment correlations and multiple regression results. Perceived physical health, instrumental ADLs, life satisfaction, extraversion, and conscientiousness are inversely related to depressive symptom severity; neuroticism is positively related to depressive symptom severity. Regression models predicted depressive symptom severity, PANAS negative effect and PANAS positive affect. Neuroticism, insrumental ADLs, and age are significant predictors of depressive symptom severity; neuroticism and age are signficant predictors of PANAS negative affect, while extraversion is a significant predictor of PANAS positive affect. Personality factors, level of functioning, and age are important factors relating to mood. Limitations of this study include: small sample size with special characteristics (high level of SES); incomplete personal and family history of psychiatric problems; and lack of clinical comparison sample.
Potential of pharmacists to help reduce the burden of poorly managed cardiovascular risk.

INTRODUCTION Rural areas require better use of existing health professionals to ensure capacity to deliver improved cardiovascular outcomes. Community pharmacists (CPs) are accessible to most communities and can potentially undertake expanded roles in prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD). OBJECTIVE This study aims to establish frequency of contact with general practitioners (GPs) and CPs by patients at high risk of CVD or with inadequately controlled CVD risk factors. DESIGN, SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS Population survey using randomly selected individuals from the Wimmera region electoral roll and incorporating a physical health check and self-administered health questionnaire. Overall, 1500 were invited to participate. RESULTS The participation rate was 51% when ineligible individuals were excluded. Nine out of 10 participants visited one or both types of practitioner in the previous 12 months. Substantially more participants visited GPs compared with CPs (88.5% versus 66.8%). With the exception of excess alcohol intake, the median number of opportunities to intervene for every inadequately controlled CVD risk factor and among high risk patient groups at least doubled for the professions combined when compared with GP visits alone. CONCLUSION Opportunities exist to intervene more frequently with target groups by engaging CPs more effectively but would require a significant attitude shift towards CPs. Mechanisms for greater pharmacist integration into primary care teams should be investigated.
Dectin-1 Fc Targeting of Aspergillus fumigatus Beta-Glucans Augments Innate Defense against Invasive Pulmonary Aspergillosis

ABSTRACT Invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA) has significantly increased over the last decade. Here, a fusion protein consisting of the Dectin-1 extracellular domain linked to the Fc portion of murine immunoglobulin G1 augmented alveolar macrophage killing of Aspergillus fumigatus and shifted mortality associated with IPA via attenuation of A. fumigatus growth in the lung.
The Ebola Virus Matrix Protein VP40 Selectively Induces Vesiculation from Phosphatidylserine-enriched Membranes*

Background: Ebola virus VP40 matrix protein is able to produce virus-like particles from cells. Results: VP40 induces negative membrane curvature and scission from in vitro membranes. Conclusion: Phosphatidylserine plays an important role in VP40-induced vesiculation. Significance: Elucidation of VP40 interactions with lipids could lead to a better understanding of the Ebola virus replication cycle. Ebola virus is from the Filoviridae family of viruses and is one of the most virulent pathogens known with ∼60% clinical fatality. The Ebola virus negative sense RNA genome encodes seven proteins including viral matrix protein 40 (VP40), which is the most abundant protein found in the virions. Within infected cells VP40 localizes at the inner leaflet of the plasma membrane (PM), binds lipids, and regulates formation of new virus particles. Expression of VP40 in mammalian cells is sufficient to form virus-like particles that are nearly indistinguishable from the authentic virions. However, how VP40 interacts with the PM and forms virus-like particles is for the most part unknown. To investigate VP40 lipid specificity in a model of viral egress we employed giant unilamellar vesicles with different lipid compositions. The results demonstrate VP40 selectively induces vesiculation from membranes containing phosphatidylserine (PS) at concentrations of PS that are representative of the PM inner leaflet content. The formation of intraluminal vesicles was not significantly detected in the presence of other important PM lipids including cholesterol and polyvalent phosphoinositides, further demonstrating PS selectivity. Taken together, these studies suggest that PM phosphatidylserine may be an important component of Ebola virus budding and that VP40 may be able to mediate PM scission.
Returning on empty: extreme blood O2 depletion underlies dive capacity of emperor penguins

SUMMARY Blood gas analyses from emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) at rest, and intravascular PO2 profiles from free-diving birds were obtained in order to examine hypoxemic tolerance and utilization of the blood O2 store during dives. Analysis of blood samples from penguins at rest revealed arterial PO2s and O2 contents of 68±7 mmHg (1 mmHg= 133.3 Pa) and 22.5±1.3 ml O2 dl–1 (N=3) and venous values of 41±10 mmHg and 17.4±2.9 ml O2 dl–1 (N=9). Corresponding arterial and venous Hb saturations for a hemoglobin (Hb) concentration of 18 g dl–1 were >91% and 70%, respectively. Analysis of PO2 profiles obtained from birds equipped with intravascular PO2 electrodes and backpack recorders during dives revealed that (1) the decline of the final blood PO2 of a dive in relation to dive duration was variable, (2) final venous PO2 values spanned a 40-mmHg range at the previously measured aerobic dive limit (ADL; dive duration associated with onset of post-dive blood lactate accumulation), (3) final arterial, venous and previously measured air sac PO2 values were indistinguishable in longer dives, and (4) final venous PO2 values of longer dives were as low as 1–6 mmHg during dives. Although blood O2 is not depleted at the ADL, nearly complete depletion of the blood O2 store occurs in longer dives. This extreme hypoxemic tolerance, which would be catastrophic in many birds and mammals, necessitates biochemical and molecular adaptations, including a shift in the O2–Hb dissociation curve of the emperor penguin in comparison to those of most birds. A relatively higher-affinity Hb is consistent with blood PO2 values and O2 contents of penguins at rest.
Antiretrovirals Induce Direct Endothelial Dysfunction In Vivo

Summary: HIV-associated cardiovascular diseases have been widely described, but clinical studies aimed at establishing cause-effect relationships between HIV-associated cardiovascular disease and either the HIV infection or antiretroviral therapy have been problematic. Endothelial dysfunction is a sensitive marker and early event in atherosclerosis, and many have suggested that protease inhibitors promote endothelial dysfunction indirectly by inducing elevations in circulating lipids. To determine whether nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors and/or protease inhibitors induce endothelial dysfunction, and to test whether this effect is dependent upon drug-mediated alteration in plasma lipid concentrations, we treated male Sprague-Dawley rats with pharmacological doses of azidothymidine (AZT), indinavir, or AZT plus indinavir through their drinking water for 1 month and assessed endothelial function in aortic rings using an isometric force measurement. Circulating levels of plasma lipids and endothelin-1, a marker for endothelial injury and/or dysfunction, were also determined. We found that AZT and AZT plus indinavir treatments dramatically reduced endothelium-dependent vessel relaxation. However, AZT treatment did not significantly alter plasma levels of cholesterol or triglyceride. In addition, plasma endothelin-1 levels were elevated in rats treated with AZT plus indinavir. Indinavir treatment alone increased plasma cholesterol levels but had no effect on endothelial function. These findings suggest that in addition to modulating plasma lipid levels, antiretrovirals, particularly AZT and perhaps other nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, may have direct effects on the vascular endothelium. Together with other increased risk factors for atherosclerosis in HIV patients, AZT-induced endothelial dysfunction may contribute to the cardiovascular diseases associated with HIV antiretroviral therapy.
Many-body localization phase transition

We use exact diagonalization to explore the many-body localization transition in a random-field spin-1/2 chain. We examine the correlations within each many-body eigenstate, looking at all high-energy states and thus effectively working at infinite temperature. For weak random field the eigenstates are thermal, as expected in this nonlocalized, "ergodic" phase. For strong random field the eigenstates are localized, with only short-range entanglement. We roughly locate the localization transition and examine some of its finite-size scaling, finding that this quantum phase transition at nonzero temperature might be showing infinite-randomness scaling with a dynamic critical exponent $z\rightarrow\infty$.