Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MGRL: Predicting Drug-Disease Associations Based on Multi-Graph Representation Learning

Drug repositioning is an application-based solution based on mining existing drugs to find new targets, quickly discovering new drug-disease associations, and reducing the risk of drug discovery in traditional medicine and biology. Therefore, it is of great significance to design a computational model with high efficiency and accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel computational method MGRL to predict drug-disease associations based on multi-graph representation learning. More specifically, MGRL first uses the graph convolution network to learn the graph representation of drugs and diseases from their self-attributes. Then, the graph embedding algorithm is used to represent the relationships between drugs and diseases. Finally, the two kinds of graph representation learning features were put into the random forest classifier for training. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to construct a multi-graph to extract the characteristics of drugs and diseases to predict drug-disease associations. The experiments show that the MGRL can achieve a higher AUC of 0.8506 based on five-fold cross-validation, which is significantly better than other existing methods. Case study results show the reliability of the proposed method, which is of great significance for practical applications.
Connection of Quasi-Resonant Amplification to the Delay in Atmospheric Residence Times Over India

Mean monthly Atmospheric Residence Times (ART), deduced from the global climate models of Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5) under RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 emission scenarios over Indian landmass, show a perceptible increase by the end of the 21st century. India, being a tropical country, faces prolonged ART, particularly during the June month of Southwest monsoon season (June to September) which will be an indicative measure of the increased frequency of extreme weather events. Here we show a possible connection of quasi-resonant amplification (QRA) to the recent (August 2018) Kerala heavy rains that resulted in severe floods and claimed more than 400 mortalities. Remarkable delay in residence times over India during June is shown to have an association with QRA evidenced by the higher magnitudes of amplitudes at the wavenumbers six and seven from the 19 global climate models of CMIP5 under the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios.
The Challenge of Ambient Air–Processed Organometallic Halide Perovskite: Technology Transfer From Spin Coating to Meniscus Blade Coating of Perovskite Thin Films

The development of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) has been extensively studied in the past decade, and the power conversion efficiency (PCE) has reached a record of 25.2%. Despite impressively high PCE, the fabrication process mainly relied on a well-controlled environment, an inert gas–filled glovebox, and devices of small areas were demonstrated. This impedes the technology transfer from laboratory scale spin coating to manufacturing ambient air scalable processes. Furthermore, the nucleation and crystal growth processes of the perovskite thin films are different when the films are prepared in different environmental conditions. In this review, we summarize the recent advances of ambient air–processed organometallic halide perovskite thin films. Focuses are made on the impact of ambient air conditions, typically adventitious moisture, on the crystallization of perovskites thin films. The challenges and strategies in the technology transfer from the glovebox or ambient air spin coating to scalable meniscus blade coating are also discussed to shed light on the manufacture of ambient air–processed PSCs.
Participation of Short-Chain Fatty Acids and Their Receptors in Gut Inflammation and Colon Cancer

Short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) are the main metabolites produced by the bacterial fermentation of dietary fiber, and they play a critical role in the maintenance of intestinal health. SCFAs are also essential for modulating different processes, and they have anti-inflammatory properties and immunomodulatory effects. As the inflammatory process predisposes the development of cancer and promotes all stages of tumorigenesis, an antitumor effect has also been associated with SCFAs. This is strongly supported by epidemiological studies showing that a diet rich in fiber is linked to a reduced risk of colon cancer and has significant clinical benefits in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). SCFAs may signal through the metabolite-sensing G protein-coupled receptors free fatty acid receptor 3 [FFAR3 or G protein-coupled receptor 41 (GPR41)], FFAR2 (GPR43), and GPR109A (also known as hydroxycarboxylic acid receptor 2 or HCAR2) expressed in the gut epithelium and immune cells. This review summarizes the existing knowledge regarding the SCFA-mediated suppression of inflammation and carcinogenesis in IBD and colon cancer.
Current Methods to Investigate Nociception and Pain in Zebrafish

Pain is an unpleasant, negative emotion and its debilitating effects are complex to manage. Mammalian models have long dominated research on nociception and pain, but there is increasing evidence for comparable processes in fish. The need to improve existing pain models for drug research and the obligation for 3R refinement of fish procedures facilitated the development of numerous new assays of nociception and pain in fish. The zebrafish is already a well-established animal model in many other research areas like toxicity testing, as model for diseases or regeneration and has great potential in pain research, too. Methods of electrophysiology, molecular biology, analysis of reflexive or non-reflexive behavior and fluorescent imaging are routinely applied but it is the combination of these tools what makes the zebrafish model so powerful. Simultaneously, observing complex behavior in free-swimming larvae, as well as their neuronal activity at the cellular level, opens new avenues for pain research. This review aims to supply a toolbox for researchers by summarizing current methods to study nociception and pain in zebrafish. We identify treatments with the best algogenic potential, be it chemical, thermal or electric stimuli and discuss options of analgesia to counter effects of nociception and pain by opioids, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) or local anesthetics. In addition, we critically evaluate these practices, identify gaps of knowledge and outline potential future developments.
Formal Thought Disorder and Self-Disorder: An Empirical Study

Background: Formal thought disorder was constitutively linked to the original concept of schizophrenia and has since been one of central features supporting its diagnosis. Bleuler considered formal thought disorder as a fundamental symptom of schizophrenia among other fundamental symptoms, including ego disorders. The contemporary concept of self-disorder represents a more developed, nuanced, and systematic approach to disturbances of self-experience than the Bleulerian concept of ego disorders. As fundamental symptoms, on Bleuler's account, are persistently present in every case, an association between these symptoms could be expected. The purpose of this study was to examine the association between self-disorder and formal thought disorder. Methods: A sample of 94 diagnostically heterogeneous patients was examined for formal thought disorder using clinical rating and a proverb test. The proverb test was analyzed for two different aspects of formal thought disorder: literal responses and bizarre responses. The sample was comprehensively assessed for psychopathology, including self-disorder as measured with the Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience scale. Results: The patients, who provided bizarre responses, had a higher level of self-disorder, more negative symptoms, lower level of social functioning, and lower level of intelligence. Bizarre answers aggregated in patients diagnosed within the schizophrenia spectrum compared with patients outside the schizophrenia spectrum. We found moderate correlations between the two measures of formal thought disorder (clinically rated and bizarre responses) and self-disorder (0.454 [p < 0.01] and 0.328 [p < 0.01]). Literal responses did not differ between diagnostic groups and also did not correlate with bizarre responses. Specificity of bizarre responses for a diagnosis within schizophrenia spectrum was 86.89%, whereas sensitivity was 40.85%. Conclusion: The close relation between formal thought disorder and self-disorder further adds to the notion of self-disorder as a unifying psychopathological core beneath the apparently heterogeneous symptoms of schizophrenia.
A Reciprocal Excitatory Reflex Between Extensors Reproduces the Prolongation of Stance Phase in Walking Cats: Analysis on a Robotic Platform

Spinal reflex is essential to the robust locomotion of quadruped animals. To investigate the reflex mechanisms, we developed a quadruped robot platform that emulates the neuromuscular dynamics of animals. The leg is designed to be highly back-drivable, and four Hill-type muscles and neuronal pathways are simulated on each leg using software. By searching for the reflex circuit that contributes to the generation of steady gait in cats through robotic experiments, we found a simple reflex circuit that could produce leg trajectories and a steady gait. In addition, this circuit can reproduce the experimental behavior observed in cats. As a major contribution of this study, we show that the underlying structure of the reflex circuit is the reciprocal coupling between extensor muscles via excitatory neural pathways. In the walking experiments on the robot, a steady gait and experimental behaviors of walking cats emerged from the reflex circuit without any central pattern generators. Furthermore, to take advantage of walking experiments using a neurophysiological robotic platform, we conducted experiments in which a part of the proposed reflex circuit was disconnected for a certain period of time during walking. The results showed that the prolongation of the stance phase caused by the reciprocal excitatory reflex contributed greatly to the generation of a steady gait.
What Predicts Quality of Learners’ Study Efforts? Implicit Beliefs and Interest Are Related to Mastery Goals but Not to Use of Effective Study Strategies

What goes into motivating students to take effective action? Ideally, students are not only motivated to invest time into their studying, but that they use their time in effective and productive ways. In the present study, we surveyed college undergraduates (N = 366) about how they engage in one of their college courses. Specifically, we explored how their motivation-related implicit beliefs (ease and difficulty mindsets, intelligence mindset; Dweck, 2000; Fisher and Oyserman, 2017) interact with perceived course interest and course importance to predict their achievement goal orientation for the course and the quality of their study strategies. We used a person-centered latent profiles analysis approach categorize meaningful profiles of implicit beliefs. Those who were likely to highly endorse motivation-increasing implicit beliefs and who found a course interesting were also more likely to hold mastery-approach goals; the relationship, however, was more complicated for performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals. Implicit beliefs profiles themselves did not directly relate to strategy use, but goal orientation did. In particular, mastery-approach goal orientation was uniquely related to all three of the effective study strategies subscales (e.g., elaborative, standard testing, generative testing). Mastery-avoidance was related to less use of elaborative strategies, and performance-goals were not related to any type strategy use. Perceived course importance was positively related to increased passive and elaborative strategies, but not the standard testing or generative testing strategies. We discuss implications for interventions.
Sleep Deprivation Deteriorates Heart Rate Variability and Photoplethysmography

Introduction Sleep deprivation has deleterious effects on cardiovascular health. Using wearable health trackers, non-invasive physiological signals, such as heart rate variability (HRV), photoplethysmography (PPG), and baroreflex sensitivity (BRS) can be analyzed for detection of the effects of partial sleep deprivation on cardiovascular responses. Methods Fifteen participants underwent 1 week of baseline recording (BSL, usual day activity and sleep) followed by 3 days with 3 h of sleep per night (SDP), followed by 1 week of recovery with sleep ad lib (RCV). HRV was recorded using an orthostatic test every morning [root mean square of the successive differences (RMSSD), power in the low-frequency (LF) and high-frequency (HF) bands, and normalized power nLF and nHF were computed]; PPG and polysomnography (PSG) were recorded overnight. Continuous blood pressure and psychomotor vigilance task were also recorded. A questionnaire of subjective fatigue, sleepiness, and mood states was filled regularly. Results RMSSD and HF decreased while nLF increased during SDP, indicating a decrease in parasympathetic activity and a potential increase in sympathetic activity. PPG parameters indicated a decrease in amplitude and duration of the waveforms of the systolic and diastolic periods, which is compatible with increases in sympathetic activity and vascular tone. PSG showed a rebound of sleep duration, efficiency, and deep sleep in RCV compared to BSL. BRS remained unchanged while vigilance decreased during SDP. Questionnaires showed an increased subjective fatigue and sleepiness during SDP. Conclusion HRV and PPG are two markers easily measured with wearable devices and modified by partial sleep deprivation, contradictory to BRS. Both markers showed a decrease in parasympathetic activity, known as detrimental to cardiovascular health.
A Probabilistic Public Key Encryption Switching Protocol for Secure Cloud Storage Applications

—The high demand for customer-centric applications such as secure cloud storage laid the foundation for the development of user-centric security protocols with multiple security features in recent years. But, the current state-of-art techniques primarily emphasized only one type of security feature i.e., either homomorphism or non-malleability. In order to ﬁll this gap and provide a common platform for both homomorphic and non-malleable cloud applications, we have introduced a new public key based probabilistic encryption switching (i.e., homomorphism to/from non-malleability property switching during the encryption phase without changing the underlying security structure) scheme by introducing a novel Contiguous Chain Bit Pair Encryption (CC-BPE) and Discrete Chain Bit Pair Encryption (DC-BPE) techniques for plaintext bits encryption and using quadratic residuosity based trapdoor function of Freeman et al. [13] for intermediate ciphertext connections. The proposed scheme generates O ( m +2 log N ) bits of ciphertext where m ∈ N and m < n , n ∈ N is the plaintext size, N is the RSA composite. This security extension would be helpful to cover both homomorphism and non-malleability cloud applications. The superior performance of the proposed scheme has been tested in comparison to existing methods and is reported in this paper.
Newborn care technology investments for LMIC settings: a CPAP approach

Kasali BA, et al. BMJ Innov 2021;0:1–4. doi:10.1136/bmjinnov-2020-000598 Maternal, Newborn and Child Health Discovery and Tools, Global Health Division, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, Washington, USA Maternal, Newborn and Child Health Discovery and Tools, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, Washington, USA Division of Neonatology, Seattle Children’s Hospital, Seattle, Washington, USA Department of Pediatrics, Division of Neonatology, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington, USA
Candidate Obfuscation of Null Quantum Circuits and Witness Encryption for QMA

We present a construction of indistinguishability obfuscation for null quantum circuits (null-iO) with respect to a classical oracle, assuming the quantum hardness of the learning with errors (LWE) problem. Heuristically instantiating the classical oracle with quantum-secure indistinguishability obfuscation for classical circuits gives us the ﬁrst candidate construction of null-iO for quantum circuits. This scheme establishes the feasibility of a series of new cryptographic primitives that, prior to our work, were unknown to exist even making heuristic assumptions. Speciﬁcally, we obtain (in some cases additionally assuming indistinguishability obfuscation for classical circuits):
T5: Hashing Five Inputs with Three Compression Calls

Given 2 n -to- n compression functions h 1 , h 2 , h 3 , we build a new 5 n -to- n compression function T 5 , using only 3 compression calls: T 5 ( m 1 , m 2 , m 3 , m 4 , m 5 ) := h 3 ( h 1 ( m 1 , m 2 ) ⊕ m 5 , h 2 ( m 3 , m 4 ) ⊕ m 5 ) ⊕ m 5 We prove that this construction matches Stam’s bound, by providing ˜ O ( q 2 / 2 n ) collision security and O ( q 3 / 2 2 n + nq/ 2 n ) preimage security (the latter term dominates in the region of interest, when q < 2 n/ 2 ). In particular, it provides birthday security for hashing 5 inputs using three 2 n -to- n compression calls, instead of only 4 inputs in prior constructions. Thus, we get a sequential variant of the Merkle-Damg ˚ ard (MD) hashing, where t message blocks are hashed using only 3 t/ 4 calls to the 2 n - to-n compression functions; a 25% saving over traditional hash function constructions. This time reduces to t/ 4 (resp. t/ 2) sequential calls using 3 (resp. 2) parallel execution units; saving a factor of 4 (resp. 2) over the traditional MD-hashing, where parallelism does not help to process one message. Wealso get a novel variant of a Merkle tree, where t message blocks can be processed using 0 . 75( t − 1) compression function calls and depth 0 . 86 log 2 t , thereby saving 25% in the number of calls and 14% in the update time over Merkle trees. We provide two modes for a local opening of a particular message block: conservative and aggressive. The former retains the birthday security, but provides longer proofs and local veri ﬁ - cation time than the traditional Merkle tree. For the aggressive variant, we reduce the proof length to a 29% overhead compared to Merkle trees (1 . 29 log 2 t vs log 2 t ), but the veri ﬁ cation time is now 14% faster (0 . 86 log 2 t vs log 2 t ). However, birthday security is only shown under a plausible conjecture related to the 3-XOR problem, and only for the (common, but not universal) setting where the root of the Merkle tree is known to correspond to a valid t -block message.
Privacy, Secrecy, and Storage With Nested Randomized Polar Subcode Constructions

We consider a set of security and privacy problems under reliability and storage constraints that can be tackled by using codes and particularly focus on the secret-key agreement problem. Polar subcodes (PSCs) are polar codes (PCs) with dynamically-frozen symbols and have a larger code minimum distance than PCs with only statically-frozen symbols. A randomized nested PSC construction, where the low-rate code is a PSC and the high-rate code is a PC, is proposed for successive cancellation list (SCL) and sequential decoders. This code construction aims to perform lossy compression with side information, i.e., Wyner-Ziv (WZ) coding. Nested PSCs are used in the key agreement problem with physical identifiers and two terminals since WZ-coding constructions significantly improve on Slepian-Wolf coding constructions such as fuzzy extractors. Significant gains in terms of the secret-key vs. storage rate ratio as compared to nested PCs with the same list sizes are illustrated to show that nested PSCs significantly improve on all existing code constructions. The performance of the nested PSCs is shown to improve with larger list sizes, unlike the nested PCs considered. A design procedure to efficiently construct nested PSCs and possible improvements to the nested PSC designs are also provided.
The role of depression in the prediction of a "late" remission in first-episode psychosis

Objective: The identi ﬁ cation of predictors of psychosis remission could guide early clinical decision-making for treatment of ﬁ rst-episode schizophrenia (FES). Methods: We analyzed two non-independent subsamples of patients with FES ages 18 – 40 years from the OPTi-MiSE study dataset to investigate the demographic and clinical factors that might help to differentiate “ late ” re-mitters (i.e., not in remission at week 2 or 4, but achieving remission within a 10-week follow-up period) from non-remitters within the same period. Results: Subsample 1 included 216 individuals (55 females, mean age 25.9 years) treated with amisulpride in an open-labeldesignwhowerenotinremissionatweek2.Earlysymptomaticresponsebetweenbaselineandweek 2 (odds ratio (OR) = 4.186, 95% con ﬁ dence interval (CI) = 2.082 – 8.416, p < 0.001) and older age (OR = 1.081, 95% CI = 1.026 – 1.138, p = 0.003) were the only variables signi ﬁ cantly associated with a higher probability of psychosis remission at week 4. Subsample 2 was composed of the 72 participants (19 females, mean age 25.1 years) who were not in remission at week 4 and completed a 6-week double-blind randomized trial comparing continuationofamisulpridewithswitchtoolanzapine.Depressionatbaseline(asmeasuredwiththeCalgaryDe-pression Scale for Schizophrenia) was signi ﬁ cantly associated with a nearly 3-fold lower likelihood of psychosis remission during the 10-week follow-up (hazard ratio = 2.865, 95% CI = 1.187 – 6.916, p = 0.019). Conclusion: Our results reinforce the importance of assessing depressive symptoms in people with FES and support the relevance of anearly response(as earlyas2 weeks)asa predictorof clinicaloutcomeinthis population. Clinical trials registration: ClinicalTrials.gov identi ﬁ er: NCT01248195, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/
Blindly Follow: SITS CRT and FHE for DCLSMPC of DUFSM

A Statistical Information Theoretic Secure (SITS) system utilizing the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT), coupled with Fully Ho-momorphic Encryption (FHE) for Distributed Communication-less Secure Multiparty Computation (DCLSMPC) of any Distributed Unknown Finite State Machine (DUFSM) is presented. Namely, secret shares of the input(s) and output(s) are passed to/from the computing parties, while there is no communication between them throughout the computation. We propose a novel approach of transition table representation and polynomial representation for arithmetic circuits evaluation, joined with a CRT secret sharing scheme and FHE to achieve SITS communication-less within computational secure execution of DUFSM. We address the severe limitation of FHE implementation over a single server to cope with a malicious or Byzantine server. We use several distributed memory-eﬃcient solutions that are signiﬁcantly better than the majority vote in replicated state machines, where each participant maintains an FHE replica. A Distributed Unknown Finite State Machine (DUFSM) is achieved when the transition table is secret shared or when the (possible zero value) coeﬃ-cients of the polynomial are secret shared, implying communication-less SMPC of an unknown ﬁnite state machine.