Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Generosity pays: Selfish people have fewer children and earn less money.

Does selfishness pay in the long term? Previous research has indicated that being prosocial (or otherish) rather than selfish has positive consequences for psychological well-being, physical health, and relationships. Here we instead examine the consequences for individuals' incomes and number of children, as these are the currencies that matter most in theories that emphasize the power of self-interest, namely economics and evolutionary thinking. Drawing on both cross-sectional (Studies 1 and 2) and panel data (Studies 3 and 4), we find that prosocial individuals tend to have more children and higher income than selfish individuals. An additional survey (Study 5) of lay beliefs about how self-interest impacts income and fertility suggests one reason selfish people may persist in their behavior even though it leads to poorer outcomes: people generally expect selfish individuals to have higher incomes. Our findings have implications for lay decisions about the allocation of scarce resources, as well as for economic and evolutionary theories of human behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).
Chromatin plasticity: A versatile landscape that underlies cell fate and identity

During development and throughout life, a variety of specialized cells must be generated to ensure the proper function of each tissue and organ. Chromatin plays a key role in determining cellular state, whether totipotent, pluripotent, multipotent, or differentiated. We highlight chromatin dynamics involved in the generation of pluripotent stem cells as well as their influence on cell fate decision and reprogramming. We focus on the capacity of histone variants, chaperones, modifications, and heterochromatin factors to influence cell identity and its plasticity. Recent technological advances have provided tools to elucidate the underlying chromatin dynamics for a better understanding of normal development and pathological conditions, with avenues for potential therapeutic application.
Interactive effects of testosterone and the androgen receptor CAG repeat length polymorphism on cardiovascular‐renal events and mortality in men with diabetes

Current evidence relating testosterone to cardiovascular disease and mortality is inconclusive. Cellular effects of testosterone are mediated by androgen receptor and longer receptor gene CAG repeat length correlates with reduced transcriptional activity. We investigated the independent and interactive association of total testosterone and CAG repeat length with incident cardiovascular disease (CVD), chronic kidney disease (CKD) and mortality in Chinese men with type 2 diabetes.
Ecdysone oxidase and 3-dehydroecdysone-3β-reductase contribute to the synthesis of ecdysone during early embryonic development of the silkworm

Maternal ecdysteroids regulate a variety of cellular processes during early embryonic development of insects, yet little is known about the genes involved in the biosynthesis of these hormones. In this study, we found that ecdysone oxidase (EO) gene, which encodes an enzyme to catalyze ecdysone (or 20-hydroxyecdysone, 20E) to 3-dehydroecdysone (3DE), was highly expressed in the mature ovaries of the domestic silkworm, Bombyx mori. B. mori EO (BmEO) was localized in the cytoplasm around the yolk granules of oocyte. Furthermore, the down-regulated expression of the BmEO gene using RNA interference could not affect normal development of the female silkworm, but lower the 20E titer and hatching rate of its offspring. Rescue experiments by injecting the product (3DE) of BmEO can significantly elevate the 20E level and hatching rate of the BmEO RNAi offspring. Meanwhile, during embryonic stage, the down-regulating expression of 3DE-3β-reductase, which can reduce 3DE into ecdysone, also lowered the 20E titer. Taken together, our results prove that 3DE can be synthesized from ecdysone in maternal ovary yolk granules, and then the maternal 3DE is converted into active ecdysone during the early embryonic development of offspring. Thus, our findings reveal a new pathway to explain the origin of high 20E level before the formation the prothoracic gland in the silkworm.
Cloud access control authentication system using dynamic accelerometers data

The main challenge of access control system is how to allow authorized users to access quickly and accurately. In reality, most access control system cannot run smoothly with the adverse impact of a security problem, it is because the access control card is easy to duplicate. To improve system security, recent efforts introduced biological technologies, such as fingerprint identification, facial recognition, and iris recognition. However, these methods are costly for installation and later maintenance. In this paper, we introduce a cloud access control system that employs the ability of sensing acceleration of Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP) tags combined with customized motions. Users are allowed to pass the access control system only if they operate user‐defined motions correctly. Authorized users can define the authentication motions by themselves, which not only facilitates the daily use but also improves the security of the cloud access control system. We conduct intensive experimental measurements. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of our proposed system.
Implicit Emotion Regulation Deficits in Trait Anxiety: An ERP Study

According to the framework of emotion regulation (ER), both explicit and implicit forms are essential to our well-being. It is the interaction between these two processes that ensures adaptive emotional responses. Although many studies have focused on explicit ER deficits in anxiety, there is still a lack of awareness about the implicit form and its role in anxiety. To address this issue, we explored the time course of implicit ER processes in individuals with high and low trait anxiety (LTA). To do this, we employed the newly developed Priming-Identify (PI) paradigm, which includes a word-matching task (externally-generated implicit goals) and a facial expression identification task (emotion processing). We aimed to modulate the implicit ER goals of individuals through the application of different priming conditions (ER-related and -unrelated words). In addition to their behavioral effects, we recorded the influence of these priming conditions through event-related potentials (ERPs) during the facial expression identification task. Three ERP components were chosen as indexes of three stages of implicit ER processing: N170, early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive potential (LPP). In individuals with LTA, the early N170 and the middle EPN were enlarged under the ER-related priming condition, while the LPP was not influenced. However, in individuals with high trait anxiety (HTA), we observed an absence of any significant differences between the ER-related and -unrelated priming conditions across all three ERP components. Furthermore, enlargements of N170 and EPN amplitudes were significantly correlated with a decrease in negative emotion experience scores. Our results suggest that HTA individuals experience implicit ER deficits during the early and middle stages of ER.
Fast Stochastic Algorithms for Low-rank and Nonsmooth Matrix Problems

Composite convex optimization problems which include both a nonsmooth term and a low-rank promoting term have important applications in machine learning and signal processing, such as when one wishes to recover an unknown matrix that is simultaneously low-rank and sparse. However, such problems are highly challenging to solve in large-scale: the low-rank promoting term prohibits efficient implementations of proximal methods for composite optimization and even simple subgradient methods. On the other hand, methods which are tailored for low-rank optimization, such as conditional gradient-type methods, which are often applied to a smooth approximation of the nonsmooth objective, are slow since their runtime scales with both the large Lipshitz parameter of the smoothed gradient vector and with $1/\epsilon$. In this paper we develop efficient algorithms for \textit{stochastic} optimization of a strongly-convex objective which includes both a nonsmooth term and a low-rank promoting term. In particular, to the best of our knowledge, we present the first algorithm that enjoys all following critical properties for large-scale problems: i) (nearly) optimal sample complexity, ii) each iteration requires only a single \textit{low-rank} SVD computation, and iii) overall number of thin-SVD computations scales only with $\log{1/\epsilon}$ (as opposed to $\textrm{poly}(1/\epsilon)$ in previous methods). We also give an algorithm for the closely-related finite-sum setting. At the heart of our results lie a novel combination of a variance-reduction technique and the use of a \textit{weak-proximal oracle} which is key to obtaining all above three properties simultaneously.
Development of Children’s Sensitivity to Overinformativeness in Learning and Teaching

Effective communication requires knowing the “right” amount of information to provide; what is necessary for a naïve learner to arrive at a target hypothesis may be superfluous and inefficient for a knowledgeable learner. The current study examines 4- to 7-year-olds’ developing sensitivity to overinformative communication and their ability to decide how much information is appropriate depending on the learner’s prior knowledge. In Experiment 1 (N = 184, age = 4.09–7.98 years), 5- to 7-year-old children preferred teachers who gave costly, exhaustive demonstrations when learners were naïve, but preferred teachers who gave efficient, selective demonstrations when learners were already knowledgeable given their prior experience (i.e., common ground). However, 4-year-olds did not show a clear preference. In Experiment 2 (N = 80, age = 4.05–6.99 years), we asked whether children flexibly modulated their own teaching based on learners’ knowledge. Five and 6-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, were more likely to provide exhaustive demonstrations to naïve learners than to knowledgeable learners. These results suggest that by 5 years of age, children are sensitive to overinformativeness and understand the trade-off between informativeness and efficiency; they reason about what others know based on the presence or absence of common ground and flexibly decide how much information is appropriate both as learners and as teachers.
Open Source Presentation Attack Detection Baseline for Iris Recognition

This paper proposes the first, known to us, open source presentation attack detection (PAD) solution to distinguish between authentic iris images (possibly wearing clear contact lenses) and irises with textured contact lenses. This software can serve as a baseline in various PAD evaluations, and also as an open-source platform with an up-to-date reference method for iris PAD. The software is written in C++ and Python and uses only open source resources, such as OpenCV. This method does not incorporate iris image segmentation, which may be problematic for unknown fake samples. Instead, it makes a best guess to localize the rough position of the iris. The PAD-related features are extracted with the Binary Statistical Image Features (BSIF), which are classified by an ensemble of classifiers incorporating support vector machine, random forest and multilayer perceptron. The models attached to the current software have been trained with the NDCLD'15 database and evaluated on the independent datasets included in the LivDet-Iris 2017 competition. The software implements the functionality of retraining the classifiers with any database of authentic and attack images. The accuracy of the current version offered with this paper exceeds 99% when tested on subject-disjoint subsets of NDCLD'15, and oscillates around 85% when tested on the LivDet-Iris 2017 benchmarks, which is on par with the results obtained by the LivDet-Iris 2017 winner.
Association of CamK2A genetic variants with transition time from occasional to regular heroin use in a sample of heroin-dependent individuals

Objectives Susceptibility to heroin dependence is strongly influenced by genetic factors with heritability estimates as high as 0.7. A number of genes, as well as environmental factors, are likely to contribute to its etiology. Not all individuals who have ever tried heroin at some stage during their lifetime become dependent on heroin. It has been suggested that genetic factors might be more important in the transition stage to heroin dependence rather than in environmental exposures and experimenting with heroin. As the features of substance dependence and memory formation have been found to be strikingly similar, we have focused on a key enzyme involved in long-term potentiation and synaptic plasticity, namely the calcium-dependent/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II&agr; (CAMKIIa). We hypothesized, that CamK2A genetic variation may play a role in the transition from occasional to regular heroin use. Materials and methods Using quantitative trait association analysis, we addressed this hypothesis by correlating the self-reported time interval between occasional and regular heroin use with the frequency of 12 single nucleotide polymorphisms located within the genomic region of the CamK2A gene. A sample of 570 Caucasian patients was available for analysis. Results Single marker association analysis (rs10066581, P=0.007), as well as haplotype analysis (global P=0.005), suggested an association with the quantitative trait ‘time interval from occasional to regular heroin use. ’ Conclusion Our results propose that genetic variants located in the genomic region of the CamK2A gene may be involved in transition time from occasional to regular heroin use.
Seeding Deep Learning using Wireless Localization

Deep learning is often constrained by the lack of large, diverse labeled training datasets, especially images captured in the wild. We believe advances in wireless localization, working in unison with cameras, can produce automated labeling of targets in videos captured in the wild. Using pedestrian detection as a case study, we demonstrate the feasibility, benefits, and challenges of a possible solution using WiFi localization. To enable the automated generation of labeled training data, our work calls for new technical development on passive localization, mobile data analytics, and error-resilient ML models, as well as design issues in user privacy policies.
Biomechanical design analysis and experiments evaluation of a passive knee-assisting exoskeleton for weight-climbing

This paper aims to investigate weight-climbing assistance strategy for the biomechanical design of passive knee-assisting exoskeleton (PKAExo) and evaluate a designed PKAExo which stores energy when the knee joint flexes and releases the energy to assist ascending when the knee joint extends. ,The authors constructed theoretic modeling of human weight-climbing to analyze characteristics of knee angle and moment. They then conducted camera-based movement analysis, muscle strength and endurance tests and surface electromyography (sEMG) measures to verify the relationship of knee angle and moment with both stair height and load weight. Afterwards, the authors proposed an assistant strategy for passive knee assistance, then gave out designed PKAExo and conducted mechanical experiment to test the knee-assisting torque. Finally, the authors conducted comparison experiment based on measuring the sEMG signals of knee extensor to verify the assistance effect of the PKAExo for weight-climbing. ,The knee extensor produces the maximum force during weight-climbing, and the muscle force provided by knee extensor has significant increasing rate along with the stair height. Thus, the assistance torque of PKAExo is designed to increase nonlinearly along with increasing knee angle. It stores energy when knee flexes and assists when knee extends. Both the mechanical experiment and comparison experiment have demonstrated that the PKAExo is able to provide nonlinear assistance torque for weight-climbing, thus decreasing the average maximum load of knee extensor by about 21 per cent, reducing muscle fatigue and enhancing wearer’s weight-climbing ability. ,The authors construct theoretic maximum force model produced by knee extensor for weight-climbing in static situation and conduct a series of experiments to verify and revise the model, which is the fundamental reference for knee-assisting mechanism designed for weight-climbing. The authors have also provided and validated an assistant strategy and the mechanism based on the biomechanical analysis, which aims to translate wearer’s energy-providing mode form high load to mid-low load by storing energy when knee flexes and assisting when knee extends. The PKAExo decreases the maximum load of knee extensor, reduces muscle fatigue and helps people to easily climb with load.
Mechanism of tRNA-mediated +1 ribosomal frameshifting

Significance Accurate gene expression is essential in all organisms. During protein synthesis, transfer RNAs (tRNAs) decode the genetic information contained in messenger RNA (mRNA) on the ribosome into amino acids using a defined 3-nt code. A fundamental question in biology is how the ribosome maintains this 3-nt code, or mRNA frame, during the dynamic processes that move the mRNA-tRNA pairs through the different tRNA-binding sites. We solved structures of a frameshift-prone tRNA bound to the bacterial ribosome after mRNA decoding. We find that the tRNA undergoes conformational rearrangements in the peptidyl (P) and exit (E) sites that cause the ribosome to lose its grip on the mRNA and allow the tRNA to shift into a new reading frame. Accurate translation of the genetic code is critical to ensure expression of proteins with correct amino acid sequences. Certain tRNAs can cause a shift out of frame (i.e., frameshifting) due to imbalances in tRNA concentrations, lack of tRNA modifications or insertions or deletions in tRNAs (called frameshift suppressors). Here, we determined the structural basis for how frameshift-suppressor tRNASufA6 (a derivative of tRNAPro) reprograms the mRNA frame to translate a 4-nt codon when bound to the bacterial ribosome. After decoding at the aminoacyl (A) site, the crystal structure of the anticodon stem-loop of tRNASufA6 bound in the peptidyl (P) site reveals ASL conformational changes that allow for recoding into the +1 mRNA frame. Furthermore, a crystal structure of full-length tRNASufA6 programmed in the P site shows extensive conformational rearrangements of the 30S head and body domains similar to what is observed in a translocation intermediate state containing elongation factor G (EF-G). The 30S movement positions tRNASufA6 toward the 30S exit (E) site disrupting key 16S rRNA–mRNA interactions that typically define the mRNA frame. In summary, this tRNA-induced 30S domain change in the absence of EF-G causes the ribosome to lose its grip on the mRNA and uncouples the canonical forward movement of the tRNAs during elongation.
Molecular parallelism in fast-twitch muscle proteins in echolocating mammals

A genomic screen uncovers a link between molecular parallelism and the convergent evolution of superfast sound-producing muscles. Detecting associations between genomic changes and phenotypic differences is fundamental to understanding how phenotypes evolved. By systematically screening for parallel amino acid substitutions, we detected known as well as novel cases (Strc, Tecta, and Cabp2) of parallelism between echolocating bats and toothed whales in proteins that could contribute to high-frequency hearing adaptations. Our screen also showed that echolocating mammals exhibit an unusually high number of parallel substitutions in fast-twitch muscle fiber proteins. Both echolocating bats and toothed whales produce an extremely rapid call rate when homing in on their prey, which was shown in bats to be powered by specialized superfast muscles. We show that these genes with parallel substitutions (Casq1, Atp2a1, Myh2, and Myl1) are expressed in the superfast sound-producing muscle of bats. Furthermore, we found that the calcium storage protein calsequestrin 1 of the little brown bat and the bottlenose dolphin functionally converged in its ability to form calcium-sequestering polymers at lower calcium concentrations, which may contribute to rapid calcium transients required for superfast muscle physiology. The proteins that our genomic screen detected could be involved in the convergent evolution of vocalization in echolocating mammals by potentially contributing to both rapid Ca2+ transients and increased shortening velocities in superfast muscles.
Predictive and prognostic role of peripheral blood eosinophil count in triple-negative and hormone receptor-negative/HER2-positive breast cancer patients undergoing neoadjuvant treatment

In current clinical practices, up to 27% of all breast cancer patients receive neoadjuvant chemotherapy. High pathological complete response rate is frequently associated with tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes. Additionally, circulating immune cells are also often linked to chemotherapy response. We performed a retrospective analysis on a cohort of 112 breast cancer patients (79 triple-negative, 33 hormone receptor-negative/HER2-positive) treated with standard neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Eosinophil and lymphocyte counts were collected from whole blood at baseline and during follow-ups and their associations with pathological complete response, relapse, disease-free and breast cancer-specific survival were analyzed. We observed a higher pathological complete response rate in patients who presented at baseline a relative eosinophil count ≥ 1.5% (55.6%) than in those with a relative eosinophil count < 1.5% (36.2%)(p = 0.04). An improvement in breast cancer-specific survival in patients with high relative eosinophil count (p = 0.05; HR = 0.336; 95% CI = 0.107–1.058) or with high relative lymphocyte count (threshold = 17.5%, p = 0.01; HR = 0.217; 95% CI = 0.060–0.783) were also observed. Upon combining the two parameters into the eosinophil x lymphocyte product with a threshold at 35.8, associations with pathological complete response (p = 0.002), relapse (p = 0.028), disease-free survival (p = 0.012) and breast cancer-specific survival (p = 0.001) were also recorded. In conclusion, the relative eosinophil count and eosinophil x lymphocyte product could be promising, affordable and accessible new biomarkers that are predictive for neoadjuvant chemotherapy response and prognostic for longer survival in triple-negative and hormone receptors-negative/HER2-positive breast cancers. Confirmation of these results in a larger patient population is needed.
Hearing Loss, Tinnitus, Hyperacusis, and Diplacusis in Professional Musicians: A Systematic Review

Professional musicians (PMs) are at high risk of developing hearing loss (HL) and other audiological symptoms such as tinnitus, hyperacusis, and diplacusis. The aim of this systematic review is to (A) assess the risk of developing HL and audiological symptoms in PMs and (B) evaluate if different music genres (Pop/Rock Music—PR; Classical Music—CL) expose PMs to different levels of risk of developing such conditions. Forty-one articles including 4618 PMs were included in the study. HL was found in 38.6% PMs; prevalence was significantly higher among PR (63.5%) than CL (32.8%) PMs; HL mainly affected the high frequencies in the 3000-6000 Hz range and was symmetric in 68% PR PMs and in 44.5% CL PMs. Tinnitus was the most common audiological symptom, followed by hyperacusis and diplacusis. Tinnitus was almost equally distributed between PR and CL PMs; diplacusis was more common in CL than in PR PMs, while prevalence of hyperacusis was higher among PR PMs. Our review showed that PR musicians have a higher risk of developing HL compared to CL PMs; exposure to sounds of high frequency and intensity and absence of ear protection may justify these results. Difference in HL symmetry could be explained by the type of instruments used and consequent single-sided exposure.