Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Two simple, reliable and valid tests of proximal muscle function, and their application to the management of idiopathic inflammatory myositis.

OBJECTIVE To develop objective, isotonic, reliable and valid tests of upper (UL) and lower (LL) limb proximal muscle function for use in the management of idiopathic inflammatory myositis (IIM). METHODS The '1 kg arm lift' test was devised to assess UL function and the '30 s chair stand' test was used for LL function. The tests were performed in 30 control subjects to determine short (24 h) and long (2 week) interval test-retest reliability. Thirty-two patients with IIM were assessed over a period of 2 yr. RESULTS In the control group both tests showed excellent test-retest reliability; Spearman correlation >0.8 for both tests over both time intervals. Twenty-four of the 32 IIM patients remained in remission over a mean period of 20.7 months throughout which scores varied by <5 for the '1 kg arm lift' test and <3 for the '30 s chair stand' test from each patient's mean score. Eight patients relapsed with scores falling by >5 for the '1 kg arm lift' test and by >3 for the '30 s chair stand' test from the mean remission score in each case. Both UL and LL scores correlated inversely with serum creatinine kinase. CONCLUSION Two isotonic tests of proximal muscle function are described. They exhibit excellent test-retest reliability and demonstrate construct validity in IIM. Both tests are responsive to changes in disease activity, offer physiological and practical advantages over existing tests of muscle function and are suitable for use in clinical practice.
Observation of single-mode operation in a free-electron laser.

Time-structure and frequency-spectrum measurements of the UC Santa Barbara free-electron-laser oscillator show that for periods shorter than 5 microsec. The laser operates in a stable single-cavity mode having a strikingly small fractional frequency bandwidth of 10/sup 8/. This constitutes the first demonstration of high-temporal-coherence operation of a free-electron laser. For periods longer than 5 microsec, the laser-frequency changes in unexpected quantized steps, which may be explained in terms of a homogeneously broadened gain profile coupled to a small monotonic drift in electron-beam energy.
Cellular Trafficking of G Protein-coupled Receptor/β-Arrestin Endocytic Complexes*

β-Arrestins are multifunctional proteins identified on the basis of their ability to bind and uncouple G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR) from heterotrimeric G proteins. In addition, β-arrestins play a central role in mediating GPCR endocytosis, a key regulatory step in receptor resensitization. In this study, we visualize the intracellular trafficking of β-arrestin2 in response to activation of several distinct GPCRs including the β2-adrenergic receptor (β2AR), angiotensin II type 1A receptor (AT1AR), dopamine D1A receptor (D1AR), endothelin type A receptor (ETAR), and neurotensin receptor (NTR). Our results reveal that in response to β2AR activation, β-arrestin2 translocation to the plasma membrane shares the same pharmacological profile as described for receptor activation and sequestration, consistent with a role for β-arrestin as the agonist-driven switch initiating receptor endocytosis. Whereas redistributed β-arrestins are confined to the periphery of cells and do not traffic along with activated β2AR, D1AR, and ETAR in endocytic vesicles, activation of AT1AR and NTR triggers a clear time-dependent redistribution of β-arrestins to intracellular vesicular compartments where they colocalize with internalized receptors. Activation of a chimeric AT1AR with the β2AR carboxyl-terminal tail results in a β-arrestin membrane localization pattern similar to that observed in response to β2AR activation. In contrast, the corresponding chimeric β2AR with the AT1AR carboxyl-terminal tail gains the ability to translocate β-arrestin to intracellular vesicles. These results demonstrate that the cellular trafficking of β-arrestin proteins is differentially regulated by the activation of distinct GPCRs. Furthermore, they suggest that the carboxyl-tail of the receptors might be involved in determining the stability of receptor/βarrestin complexes and cellular distribution of β-arrestins.
The direct effect of HCG upon pituitary gonadotrophin secretion.

In order to demonstrate the direct effect of HCG upon the hypothalamus regulating pituitary gonadotrophin secretion, HCG was implanted into the median eminence (ME) or the anterior pituitary of mature ovariectomized or intact female rats, and changes of FSH and LH in plasma and pituitary were investigated using Igarashi-McCann method and Parlow-McCann- Yokota method, NIAMD-rat FSH and LH radioimmunoassay, respectively. HCG implantation into the ME in ovariectomized rats, significantly decreased plasma FSH levels in two out of three experiments and pituitary FSH content in all the three experiments. Plasma LH levels in the HCG implanted rats decreased in two out of three experiments, while pituitary LH content remained unchanged in three experiments. HCG implantation into the ME in intact mature female rats significantly decreased plasma and pituitary FSH, and plasma LH levels, but did not change pituitary LH content. HCG implantation into the anterior pituitary in the ovariectomized or intact mature femal.
Monepantel: the most studied new anthelmintic drug of recent years

SUMMARY Monepantel (MOP), a new anthelmintic drug from a group of amino-acetonitrile derivatives, has been intensively studied during last years. Many authors examined this new drug from different perspectives, e.g. efficacy against different species and stages of parasites, mode of action, metabolism, pharmacokinetics, toxicity, resistance, ecotoxicity, etc. MOP is an anthelmintic for livestock (currently only sheep and goats), with molecular mode of action which is different to all other anthelmintics. MOP has a broad-spectrum of activity against gastrointestinal nematodes of sheep, including adults and L4 larvae of the most important species. The key feature of MOP is its full effectiveness against strains of nematodes resistant to benzimidazoles, levamisole, macrocyclic lactones and closantel. After oral administration, MOP is quickly absorbed into the bloodstream and quickly metabolized to MOP sulfone that has a similar efficacy as the parent molecule. Several other MOP metabolites formed in ovine hepatocytes were described. MOP and its metabolites are considered to be non-toxic to environment and its components, such as soil microflora, aquatic organisms, dung organisms, vegetation, etc. The aim of the presented review was not to collect all reported data but to bring an overview of various approaches in the study of MOP and to evaluate their principal results.
Astrocytic Factors Deactivate Antigen Presenting Cells that Invade the Central Nervous System

We hypothesized that CNS tissue has the potential to deactivate invading monocytes/macrophages in order to maintain the immune privilege of the brain, and furthermore, that astrocytes are the cells that initiate monocyte/macrophage deactivation. To test this hypothesis, fluorescent prelabeled rat spleen macrophages with typical amoeboid morphology were transferred into organotypic hip‐pocampal slice cultures (OHSCs), where they gradually developed a ramified morphology similar to the appearance of resting microglial cells. This morphological transformation also occurred if macrophages or monocytes were co‐cultured with mixed glial cultures or with astrocytoma cells, and ramification was accompanied by reduced expression of adhesion molecules leukocyte function antigen (LFA)‐1, intercellular adhesion molecule (ICAM)‐1, and major histocompatibility complex (MHC)‐class‐II molecules. Moreover, treatment of macrophages with astrocyte culture supernatant effectively down‐regulated the LPS‐induced expression of adhesion‐ and MHC‐class‐II‐molecules. Astrocyte supernatant‐induced inhibition of adhesion and MHC‐class‐II‐molecule expression was mimicked by transforming growth factor (TGF)‐β1, furthermore, this inhibitory effect was diminished by simultaneous treatment with neutralizing anti‐TGF‐β‐antibodies. In conclusion, our results suggest that astrocyte‐derived, soluble factors that are present in the CNS microenvironment deactivate invading macrophages, thus contributing to the maintenance of CNS immune‐privilege following impairment of blood‐brain‐barrier (BBB) integrity.
Frequency adaptive control of a smart transformer-fed distribution grid

An advanced service provided by the Smart Transformer (ST) is the decoupling between the Medium Voltage (MV) and Low Voltage (LV) grids. In the LV side, the ST can modify the waveform's frequency in order to interact with the droop controllers of the local generators to control the power demand among the sources without affecting the MV grid. However, most of the existing controllers for power converters cannot guarantee good performances under variable frequency conditions. To address this issue, a frequency adaptive control scheme based on the Fractional-Order Repetitive Control (FORC) as well as Frequency Locked Loop (FLL) is proposed in this paper. This proposed scheme provides fast online parameter tuning capability in order to be highly adaptive to variable frequencies, and it can be implemented either in a ST converter or in distributed generators. In this work simulation and experimental results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed scheme.
Integrating Open Data: (How) Can Description Logics Help me?

At last year’s DL workshop Alon Halevy told us about Web tables and how Google makes sense of tabular data on the Web together with Web knowledge graphs [2]. Somewhat surprinsing, a still more unconquered area for Web data extraction seems to be the realm of Open Data: rather than extracting structured data from the surface Web, another emerging source of data on the Web are lots of structured data sets being published openly on various Open Data Portals (e.g. http://www.publicdata.eu/, http://data.gov.gr/ http://data.gov.uk/, http://www.data.gov/, http://data.gv.at/, http://open.wien.at/, just to name a few). However, despite already oering structured data, these Open Data portals often oer only limited search functionality, and intergrating and using Open Data from these portals involves various challenges, such as data quality problems [3], heterogeneity within metadata descriptions, dynamics, or lack of semantic descriptions of the data. Driven by a practical use case, the Open City Data pipeline project [1], we will report on experiences and obstacles for collecting and integrating Open Data across various data sets. We wil discuss how both methods from knowledge representation and reasoning as well as from statistics and data mining can be used to tackle some issues we encountered.
Characterization of a new sodium channel mutation at arginine 1448 associated with moderate paramyotonia congenita in humans

1 Paramyotonia congenita is a temperature‐sensitive skeletal muscle disorder caused by missense mutations that occur in the adult skeletal muscle voltage‐gated sodium channel. We report here the identification of a new genetic mutation in a family with the paramyotonia congenita phenotype. 2 Single‐strand conformation polymorphism analysis and DNA sequencing showed that the defect was linked to a single nucleotide substitution causing an amino acid change from an arginine to a serine at position 1448 in the human sodium channel α‐subunit. 3 Expression of the altered protein in human embryonic kidney (HEK) 293 cells revealed several defects in channel function: (i) the rate of fast inactivation was slower in the mutant channel compared with wild‐type, (ii) steady‐state fast inactivation was shifted towards hyperpolarizing potentials, (iii) the R1448S channels deactivated much more slowly, and (iv) the mutant channels recovered from the fast inactivated state more rapidly. 4 By contrast, the activation curve, steady‐state slow inactivation and the rate of onset and recovery from slow inactivation were not altered by the R1448S mutation. 5 These data show that the defects observed in the sodium channel function could well explain the onset of the paramyotonia congenita in this family and emphasize the role of segment S4 of domain IV in sodium channel inactivation.
SAFE: A Sentiment Analysis Framework for E-Learning

The spread of social networks allows sharing opinions on different aspects of life and daily millions of messages appear on the web. This textual information can be a rich source of data for opinion mining and sentiment analysis: the computational study of opinions, sentiments and emotions expressed in a text. Its main aim is the identiﬁcation of the agreement or disagreement statements that deal with positive or negative feelings in comments or reviews. In this paper, we investigate the adoption, in the field of the e-learning, of a probabilistic approach based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) as Sentiment grabber. By this approach, for a set of documents belonging to a same knowledge domain, a graph, the Mixed Graph of Terms, can be automatically extracted. The paper shows how this graph contains a set of weighted word pairs, which are discriminative for sentiment classiﬁcation. In this way, the system can detect the feeling of students on some topics and teacher can better tune his/her teaching approach. In fact, the proposed method has been tested on datasets coming from e-learning platforms. A preliminary experimental campaign shows how the proposed approach is effective and satisfactory.
Influence of an Intraoperative Perilymph Gusher on Cochlear Implant Performance in Children With Labyrinthine Malformations

Objectives To assess the effect of an intraoperative perilymph fluid gusher during cochlear implantation on speech perception abilities in pediatric patients with labyrinthine anomalies. Setting Tertiary care academic referral center. Methods Seventy subjects with labyrinthine malformations who received a cochlear implant were identified in our pediatric cochlear implant database. In 30 cases, an intraoperative perilymph fluid gusher was encountered during surgery. Fifteen children with GJB2 positive hereditary hearing loss served as controls. Multiple speech perception measures were obtained with the cochlear implant. The best score for each subject over time was determined as a speech reception index in quiet. This index was compared among groups and malformation types. Results The speech reception index in quiet demonstrated overall good performance scores of cochlear implantation in children with incomplete partitioning/enlarged vestibular aqueduct type malformations. Children with hypoplastic malformations, on the other hand, showed variable outcomes with many children demonstrating only limited long-term speech discrimination abilities. The presence or absence of a perilymph gusher did not significantly influence results after cochlear implantation. Conclusion This report documents the variable outcomes of pediatric cochlear implantation in children with inner ear malformations. More importantly, anatomic parameters, such as the classification of the anomaly and the presence of a viable cochlear nerve, seem to influence performance measures substantially. The presence of a perilymph gusher did not influence outcomes in both hypoplastic and incomplete partitioning/enlarged vestibular aqueduct type malformations. Level of Evidence 2b Individual retrospective cohort study.
A Comparative Analysis of Active and Passive Pixel CMOS Image Sensors

CMOS imagers performance becomes critical whenever illumination reaches very low and very high optical energy levels because of the reduced signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and blooming immmunity, respectively. In this paper we present a comparative analysis with respect to the above issues of the two major architectures used in implementing optical sensor arrays in CMOS technology: the Active Pixel Sensors (APS) and Passive Pixel Sensor (PPS) schemes. Based on both physical simulation and circuit analysis, the trade-offs between the two architectures with respect to the design constraints are highlited.
Flow dynamics and solute transport in unsaturated rock fractures

Rock fractures play an important role in flow and contaminant transport in fractured aquifers, production of oil from petroleum reservoirs, and steam generation from geothermal reservoirs. In this dissertation, phenomenological aspects of flow in unsaturated fractures were studied in visualization experiments conducted on a transparent replica of a natural, rough-walled rock fracture for inlet conditions of constant pressure and flow rate over a range of angles of inclination. The experiments demonstrated that infiltrating liquid proceeds through unsaturated rock fractures along non-uniform, localized preferential flow paths. Even in the presence of constant boundary conditions, intermittent flow was a persistent flow feature observed, where portions of the flow channel underwent cycles of snapping and reforming. Two modes of intermittent flow were observed, the pulsating blob mode and the rivulet snapping mode. A conceptual model for the rivulet snapping mode was proposed and examined using idealized, variable-aperture fractures. The frequency of intermittent flow events was measured in several experiments and related to the capillary and Bond numbers to characterize this flow behavior.
Fault models and test methods for subthreshold SRAMs

Due to the increasing demand of an extra-low-power system, a great amount of research effort has been spent in the past to develop an effective and economic subthreshold-SRAM design. However, the test methods regarding those newly developed subthreshold-SRAM designs have not yet been fully discussed. In this paper, we first categorize the subthreshold-SRAM designs into three types, study the faulty behavior of different open defects for each type of designs, and then identify the faults which may or may not be covered by a traditional SRAM test method. For those hard-to-detect faults, we will further discuss the corresponding test method according to different each type of subthreshold-SRAM designs. At last, a discussion about the temperature at test will also be provided.
Infants' Insight into the Mind: How Deep?

Understanding that others may act based on false beliefs is considered a uniquely human ability. Children are thought to develop an understanding of false beliefs around 4 years of age, which implicates a tie to a cultural process involving language. However, as Perner and Ruffman discuss in their Perspective, a new study (Onishi and Baillargeon) suggests that infants as young as 15 months may have insight into whether a person acts on the basis of a mistaken view (false belief) about the world. Perner and Ruffman argue that the behavior of 15-month olds in this study does not mean that they necessarily understand belief.
Association between respiratory syncytial viral disease and the subsequent risk of the first episode of severe asthma in different subgroups of high-risk Australian children: a whole-of-population-based cohort study

Objective To determine the contribution of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) to the subsequent development of severe asthma in different subgroups of children at risk of severe RSV disease. Settings The study was conducted in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Participants The study comprised all children born in NSW between 2000 and 2010 with complete follow-up till 31 December 2011. The cohort was divided into three subgroups: (1) non-Indigenous high-risk children: non-Indigenous children born preterm or born with a low birth weight; (2) Indigenous children: children of mothers whose Indigenous status was recorded as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander and (3) non-Indigenous standard risk children: all other non-Indigenous term children. Primary outcome measure Risk of development of severe asthma in different subgroups of children who had RSV hospitalisation in the first 2 years of life compared with those who did not. Design We performed a retrospective cohort analysis using population-based linked administrative data. Extended Cox model was used to determine HR and 95% CI around the HR for first asthma hospitalisation in different subgroups of children. Results The cohort comprised 847 516 children born between 2000 and 2010. In the adjusted Cox model, the HR of first asthma hospitalisation was higher and comparable across all subgroups of children who had RSV hospitalisation compared with those who did not. The HR (95% CI) was highest in children aged 2–3 years; 4.3 (95% CI 3.8 to 4.9) for high-risk, 4.0 (95% CI 3.3 to 4.8) for Indigenous and 3.9 (95% CI 3.7 to 4.1) for non-Indigenous standard risk children. This risk persisted beyond 7 years of age. Conclusion This large study confirms a comparable increased risk of first asthma hospitalisation following RSV disease in the first 2 years of life across different subgroups children at risk.
Stability and Bifurcation in a State-Dependent Delayed Predator-Prey System

In this paper, we consider a class of predator–prey equations with state-dependent delayed feedback. Firstly, we investigate the local stability of the positive equilibrium and the existence of the Hopf bifurcation. Then we use perturbation methods to determine the sub/supercriticality of Hopf bifurcation and hence the stability of Hopf bifurcating periodic solutions. Finally, numerical simulations supporting our theoretical results are also provided.
Robust Output Feedback Model Predictive Control for Constrained Linear Systems under Uncertainty Based on Feed Forward and Positive Invariant Feedback Control

This paper provides a novel solution to the problem of robust output feedback model predictive control of constrained, linear, discrete-time systems in the presence of additive but bounded state and output disturbances. The overall controller consists of two components, a stable state estimator and a tube based, robustly stabilizing model predictive controller. The proposed robust output-feedback controller requires the on-line solution of a quadratic program, which is only marginally more complex then a standard model predictive control formulation. The closed loop system renders a specified invariant set robustly exponentially stable
Effects of seasonal changes in cotton plants on the evolution of resistance to pyramided cotton producing the Bt toxins Cry1Ac and Cry1F in Helicoverpa zea.

BACKGROUND In pests with inherently low susceptibility to Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxins, seasonal declines in the concentration of Bt toxins in transgenic crops could accelerate evolution of resistance by increasing the dominance of resistance. Here, we evaluated Helicoverpa zea survival on young and old cotton plants that produced the Bt toxins Cry1Ac and Cry1F or did not produce Bt toxins. RESULTS Using a strain selected for resistance to Cry1Ac in the laboratory, its parent strain that was not selected in the laboratory, and their F1 progeny, we showed that resistance to Cry1Ac + Cry1F cotton was partially dominant on young and old plants. On Cry1Ac + Cry1F cotton, redundant killing was incomplete on young plants but nearly complete on old plants. No significant fitness costs on non-Bt cotton occurred on young plants, but large recessive costs affected survival on old plants. Simulation models incorporating the empirical data showed that the seasonal changes in fitness could delay resistance to Cry1Ac + Cry1F cotton by inducing low equilibrium frequencies of resistance alleles when refuges are sufficiently large. CONCLUSION Our results suggest that including effects of seasonal changes in fitness of pests on Bt crops and refuge plants can enhance resistance risk assessment and resistance management. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry.