Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spring-like behavior of cytoplasm holds the mitotic spindle in place

In cell biology textbooks, cytoplasm is often depicted as a homogeneous color that bathes the nucleus and organelles, leaving the impression that it consists of a liquid solution without structure or physical properties. In reality, cytoplasm is crowded with macromolecules (1) and organized by cytoskeletal networks (2), which endow it with both viscous and elastic properties (2), but the biological significance of these properties is often unclear. In PNAS, Xie et al. (3) use magnetic tweezers to displace the mitotic spindle in sea urchin embryos and find that it springs back when displaced. Remarkably, the elasticity that maintains spindle position does not depend on microtubules and only partly depends on actin, suggesting that the crowded nature of cytoplasm may contribute. During cell division, eukaryotic cells assemble a mitotic spindle whose position determines cleavage geometry and sometimes, the developmental fate of daughter cells (4). In symmetric divisions, the spindle is positioned at the center of the cell. How it achieves this central location has been studied in multiple organisms. In most metazoans, the poles of the spindle are defined by radial arrays of microtubules called asters. Microtubules are nucleated at the aster center, and their growth is bounded by dynamic instability, leading to a maximum mitotic aster radius of ∼30 μm (5). If the cell radius is shorter than this, the spindle is positioned dynamically throughout mitosis by microtubules that touch the cortex, as in Caenorhabditis elegans embryos (6). If longer, as in Xenopus embryos, the spindle forms at a central location defined by microtubules in the preceding interphase (7, 8). In such large cells, the spindle has to remain in position throughout mitosis without connections to the cortex, and the mechanisms that keep it there have been unclear. The sea urchin embryos analyzed by Xie et al. (3) have a radius of ∼48 μm and a mitotic aster radius of ∼25 μm, so they are in the large cell regime and provide a system to probe the mechanisms used to maintain spindle location. Fig. 1. Viscoelastic forces from bulk cytoplasm maintain the spindle position. (A) The experimental procedure for displacing mitotic spindles with magnetic tweezers. (B) Viscoelasticity modeled by spring–dashpot models. In small cells where microtubules touch the cortex, microtubules constitute the main elastic component. In large cells, in contrast, bulk cytoplasm generates viscoelastic restoring forces. (C) Cytoplasmic components implicated in force generation. Passive components resist perturbations, while active components generate force using chemical energy.
Neurobiological Correlates of Change in Adaptive Behavior in Autism.

OBJECTIVE Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition that is associated with significant difficulties in adaptive behavior and variation in clinical outcomes across the life span. Some individuals with ASD improve, whereas others may not change significantly, or regress. Hence, the development of "personalized medicine" approaches is essential. However, this requires an understanding of the biological processes underpinning differences in clinical outcome, at both the individual and subgroup levels, across the lifespan. METHODS The authors conducted a longitudinal follow-up study of 483 individuals (204 with ASD and 279 neurotypical individuals, ages 6-30 years), with assessment time points separated by ∼12-24 months. Data collected included behavioral data (Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale-II), neuroanatomical data (structural MRI), and genetic data (DNA). Individuals with ASD were grouped into clinically meaningful "increasers," "no-changers," and "decreasers" in adaptive behavior. First, the authors compared neuroanatomy between outcome groups. Next, they examined whether deviations from the neurotypical neuroanatomical profile were associated with outcome at the individual level. Finally, they explored the observed neuroanatomical differences' potential genetic underpinnings. RESULTS Outcome groups differed in neuroanatomical features (cortical volume and thickness, surface area), including in "social brain" regions previously implicated in ASD. Also, deviations of neuroanatomical features from the neurotypical profile predicted outcome at the individual level. Moreover, neuroanatomical differences were associated with genetic processes relevant to neuroanatomical phenotypes (e.g., synaptic development). CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrates, for the first time, that variation in clinical (adaptive) outcome is associated with both group- and individual-level variation in anatomy of brain regions enriched for genes relevant to ASD. This may facilitate the move toward better targeted/precision medicine approaches.
Cortical surface variation in individuals with excessive smartphone use

Excessive smartphone use has been repeatedly related to adverse effects on mental health and psychological well‐being in young adults. The continued investigation of the neurobiological mechanism underlying excessive smartphone use—sometimes also referred to as “smartphone addiction”(SPA)—is considered a top priority in system neuroscience research. Despite progress in the past years, cortical morphology associated with SPA is still poorly understood. Here, we used structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at 3 T to investigate two cortical surface markers of distinct neurodevelopmental origin such as the complexity of cortical folding (CCF) and cortical thickness (CTh) in individuals with excessive smartphone use (n = 19) compared to individuals not fulfilling SPA criteria (n‐SPA; n = 22). SPA was assessed using the Smartphone Addiction Inventory (SPAI). CCF and CTh were investigated using the Computational Anatomy Toolbox (CAT12). SPA individuals showed lower CCF in the right superior frontal gyrus as well as in the right caudal (cACC) and rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) compared to n‐SPA individuals (TFCE, uncorrected at p < 0.001). Following a dimensional approach, across the entire sample, CCF of the right cACC was significantly associated with SPAI total score, as well as with distinct SPAI subdimensions, particularly time spent with the device, compulsivity, and sleep interference in all participants (n = 41; p < 0.05, FDR‐corrected). Collectively, these findings suggest that SPA is associated with aberrant structural maturation of regions important for cognitive control and emotional regulation.
Effectiveness of 12‐week inspiratory muscle training with manual therapy in patients with COPD: A randomized controlled study

The benefits of inspiratory muscle training (IMT) in patients with COPD were reported. However, its effects are limited in severe COPD patients. Further researches are required in new and complementary modalities demonstrating IMT efficacy in severe COPD patients. This study aims to investigate effects of manual therapy (MT) additional over IMT on functional capacity, respiratory muscle strength, pulmonary function, dyspnea, fatigue, and quality of life in severe COPD patients. Sixty patients with COPD in GOLD stage III–IV were included in this prospective single‐blind randomized trial. Patients were randomly assigned to receive either MT additional over IMT at 40% of maximal inspiratory pressure (MIP) (n = 30) or only IMT (n = 30) for 12 weeks. MT group received MT during 12 weeks for 30 min additional to IMT. Pulmonary function, respiratory muscle strength, functional capacity, dyspnea, fatigue, and quality of life were evaluated by spirometry, mouth pressure device, six‐minute walk test, Modified Medical Research Council (mMRC) dyspnea scale, fatigue severity scale, and St. George's Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ), respectively. MT group had significantly greater improvement in FEV1%, FVC%, PEF%, respiratory muscle strength, function, dyspnea, fatigue, and quality of life compared with IMT group (p < 0.05). 6MWT (p < 0.001, effect size Cohen's d: 0.915), MIP (p < 0.001, effect size Cohen's d: 1.235), and mMRC score (p < 0.001, effect size Cohen's d: 0.982) were significantly improved in IMT with MT group. This study demonstrated that subjects in IMT with MT group had improved outcomes in functional capacity, respiratory muscle strength, pulmonary function, dyspnea, fatigue perception, and quality of life compared with alone IMT group.
The novel monopole antenna that is suitable for dual-band WLANs

In this letter, new and accurate synthesis formulas to compute the physical dimensions of asymmetric coplanar waveguide (ACPW) are presented. The synthesis formulas are obtained with the use of differential evolution algorithm (DEA), genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and simulated annealing (SA) algorithm. The synthesis formulas are useful to microwave engineers for accurately calculating the physical dimensions of ACPWs. The results of the synthesis formulas are compared with the quasi-static analysis, a full-wave electromagnetic simulator IE3D, and experimental results obtained in this work. The average percentage errors of the synthesis Figure 11 Measured antenna peak and average gains for operating frequencies: (a) 2 GHz bands; and (b) 5 GHz bands. [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at wileyonlinelibrary.com] DOI 10.1002/mop MICROWAVE AND OPTICAL TECHNOLOGY LETTERS / Vol. 53, No. 9, September 2011 1991 formulas found by using DEA, GA, PSO, and SA algorithm are calculated to be 0.56, 0.62, 0.87, and 0.88%, respectively, for 2079 ACPW samples having different electrical parameters and physical dimensions, as compared with the results of respective quasi-static analysis. VC 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 53:1991–1996, 2011; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.26224
Serious gaming design for adaptability training of military personnel

As the world in the 21st century has become more dynamic and unpredictable, the need for adaptive behavior in the military is of increasing importance. A serious game (SG) seems to be a suitable intervention for improving adaptability to prepare the military to deal with unpredictability. The purpose of this study is to explore the game design for enhancing adaptability of the military in an ill-structured complex decision-making context. We introduce rule changes in the game to stimulate learners’ sensitivity to detect the applied changes and to develop an appropriate strategy. The procedure of our SG intervention design and development is described within the framework of the Cognitive Flexibility Theory and that of Reversal Learning. The Job Oriented Training approach as well as rule change is embedded in the game structure. This paper summarizes the results of a pilot (n=12) with the game. The participants’ score, time spent to complete the game and adaptive performance score are described. Survey data shows players’ detection of rule change, their experience on difficulty, engagement, motivation, and concentration level of this game play. Finally, we discuss issues and future direction of this study.
Approach to Modeling Boundary Layer Ingestion using a Fully Coupled Propulsion-RANS Model

Airframe-propulsion integration concepts that use boundary layer ingestion have the potential to reduce aircraft fuel burn. One concept that has been recently explored is NASA's Starc-ABL aircraft configuration, which offers the potential for 12% mission fuel burn reduction by using a turbo-electric propulsion system with an aft-mounted electrically driven boundary layer ingestion propulsor. This large potential for improved performance motivates a more detailed study of the boundary layer ingestion propulsor design, but to date, analyses of boundary layer ingestion have used uncoupled methods. These methods account for only aerodynamic effects on the propulsion system or propulsion system effects on the aerodynamics, but not both simultaneously. This work presents a new approach for building fully coupled propulsive-aerodynamic models of boundary layer ingestion propulsion systems. A 1D thermodynamic cycle analysis is coupled to a RANS simulation to model the Starc-ABL aft propulsor at a cruise condition and the effects variation in propulsor design on performance are examined. The results indicates that both propulsion and aerodynamic effects contribute equally toward the overall performance and that the fully coupled model yields substantially different results compared to uncoupled. The most significant finding is that boundary layer ingestion, while offering substantial fuel burn savings, introduces throttle dependent aerodynamics effects that need to be accounted for. This work represents a first step toward the multidisciplinary design optimization of boundary layer ingestion propulsion systems.
Trends in Computer Instruction in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Waterloo Part 1: Historical Perspective and Current Trends

The Engineering Faculty at the University of Waterloo has recognized the need to introduce sufficient microcomputer material into the curriculum to prepare students for the modern engineering workplace. At the same time, the level of instruction in ‘engineering fundamentals’ has to be maintained. A further issue at Waterloo arises because of the cooperative or thin sandwich nature of our programs; about 350 or half of the first-year students go out to industry on their first work term after the first four-month academic term (1A). The value of these students to their employers and the value of the work term to the student is increased if they are introduced to microcomputers during their 1A term. Following a number of studies into how the use of microcomputers could be most effectively incorporated into the undergraduate curriculum, the Department of Mechanical Engineering chose to ‘strongly recommend’ that all first-year students consider the purchase of a mircocomputer. To complement this, an existing first-year course on engineering concepts was substantially modified to include introductory lectures on microcomputer basics. Also, the University of Waterloo established a new microcomputer hardware and software sales centre and provided financial assistance to students, if required, through University-guaranteed commercial loans.
Nanoplasmonic sensing of Pb-acid and Li-ion batteries

The increasing sophistication and performance of batteries are connected with more complex chemical and physical battery processes and increase the need of more direct and informative measurements, both in the R&D phase and for monitoring and control during operation of vehicles. Todays potentiometric based measurement sensors are not sufficiently accurate for optimal battery sensing. To avoid the built in wide safety margins new, more informative monitoring signals are therefore desired or needed. In this study the optical technology NanoPlasmonic Sensing (NPS) has been used to in-situ monitor the charge and discharge processes of lead-acid and Li-ion batteries. The optical signals were found to correlate well with charging/discharging of both battery technologies.
Design and applications of a new DE-PSO-DE algorithm for unconstrained optimisation problems

This paper introduces a novel hybridisation between differential evolution (DE) and particle swarm optimisation (PSO), based on 'tri-population' environment. Initially, the whole population (in increasing order of fitness) is divided into three groups - inferior group, mid group and superior group. DE is employed in the inferior and superior groups, whereas PSO is used in the mid-group. It is based on the basic qualities of DE and PSO along with their information sharing mechanism. This proposed method is named as DPD as it uses DE-PSO-DE on a population. Two more strategies namely elitism (to retain the best obtained values so far) and non-redundant search (to improve the solution quality) have been incorporated in DPD cycle. Out of eight variants of mutation strategies for each of both DEs in DPD, the best combination is investigated. In other words, among 8 × 8 = 64 variants of DPDs, the top four DPDs where DEs use their best mutation strategies have been pointed out. Later they are being employed to solve a total of 13 unconstrained benchmark function and six real life problems. The results of top four DPDs compared with state-of-the-art algorithms. Finally the best DPD is recommended in the conclusion.
Test time optimization in scan circuits

As circuit sizes increase with scale down in technology, the time required to test the circuits also increases. Expensive automatic test equipment (ATE) is used to test these circuits and the cost of testing becomes a significant fraction of the total cost of the chip. Testing cost of a chip is directly related to the time its testing takes. However, test time cannot be reduced by simply applying the tests at a faster speed because if the test clock frequency is increased, the power consumed during test increases. If this power were to exceed the power consumption the chip can withstand, the circuit might perform slower or might malfunction [52]. This research aims at reducing the time required for test without increasing the power dissipated during test. Full scan design is a popular design for testability (DFT) method [11] in which the flip-flops of the circuit are chained together to function as a shift register during test. Test vectors are scanned in and the responses are scanned out bit by bit. The power consumption during test can exceed the power consumption in the functional mode of operation [12, 53] due to high activity required to achieve high test coverage for the circuit under test. Therefore, the scan-in and scan-out of vectors are normally carried out at frequencies much lower than functional frequencies. However, all vectors do not create the same amount of activity in the circuit. The vectors that cause low activity in the circuit can be scanned in at higher frequencies without exceeding the power limit. A scheme to reduce test application time by dynamically increasing the scan clock frequency is proposed. The test power is held below the allowed power limit by controlling the activity per unit time. The per cycle scan activity is monitored dynamically to speed up the scan clock for low activity cycles without exceeding the specified peak power budget. The
PENERAPAN METODE PEMBELAJARAN DRILL UNTUK MENINGKATKAN HASIL BELAJAR PESERTA DIDIK PADA STANDAR KOMPETENSI MENGUKUR

Penelitian ini bertujuan mengetahui nilai standar kompetensi mengukur menggunakan alat ukur dengan metode pembelajaran demonstrasi dan metode pembelajaran drill . Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian eksperimen dengan desain Pre test-Post test Control Group Design , menggunakan Tes pilihan ganda sebagai alat pengumpul data penelitian. Populasi penelitian adalah siswa kelas X Teknik Pemesinan SMK Negeri 1 Kota Semarang terdiri dari 108 siswa dan diambil 72 siswa sebagai sampel. Hasil analisis data diperoleh rata-rata post-test kelas eksperimen adalah 81,70 dan rata-rata kelas kontrol adalah 72,70. Kedua kelas berdistribusi normal dan mempunyai dua varians yang sama. Pada uji perbedaan dua rata-rata diperoleh thitung= 4,66. Untuk α = 5% dan dk = (36+36-2) = 70 diperoleh t(0,95)(70) = 1,99, karena thitung ≥ t (0,95)(70) maka H0 ditolak, hal ini berarti ada perbedaan hasil belajar secara signifikan antara kelompok eksperimen dan kelompok kontrol atau dengan kata lain hasil belajar kelas eksperimen lebih baik daripada kelas kontrol.
Isolating GPU Architectural Features Using Parallelism-Aware Microbenchmarks

GPUs develop at a rapid pace, with new architectures emerging every 12 to 18 months. Every new GPU architecture introduces new features, expecting to improve on previous generations. However, the impact of these changes on the performance of GPGPU applications may not be directly apparent; it is often unclear to developers how exactly these features will affect the performance of their code. In this paper we propose a suite of microbenchmarks to uncover the performance of novel GPU hardware features in isolation. We target features in both the memory system and the arithmetic cores. We further ensure, by design, that our microbenchmarks capture the massively parallel nature of the GPUs, while providing fine-grained timing information at the level of individual compute units. Using this benchmarking suite, we study the differences between three of the most recent NVIDIA architectures: Pascal, Turing, and Ampere. We find that the architecture differences can have a meaningful impact on both synthetic and more realistic applications. This impact is visible both in terms of outright performance, but also affects the choice of execution parameters for realistic applications. We conclude that microbenchmarking, adapted to massive GPU parallelism, can expose differences between GPU generations, and discuss how it can be adapted for future architectures.
Response Generation via Structure-aware Constraints

End-to-end neural modeling with the encoder-decoder architecture has shown great promise in response generation. However, it often generates dull and generic responses, due to its failure to effectively perceive various kinds of act, sentiment, and topic information. To address the above challenges, we propose a response generation model with structure-aware constraints to capture the structure of dialog and generate a better response with various constraints of the act, sentiment, and topic. In particular, give an utterance sequence, we first learn the representation of each utterance in encoding stage. We then learn the turn, speaker, and dialog representation from the utterance representations, and construct the structure of dialog. Thirdly, we employ attention mechanism to extract the constraints of act, sentiment, and topic based on the structure of dialog. Finally, we utilize these structure-aware constraints to control the response generation process in decoding stage. Extensive experimental results validate the superiority of our proposed model against the state-of-the-art baselines. In addition, the results also show that the proposed model can generate responses with more appropriate content based on the structure-aware constraints.
Calcium signaling in prostate cancer cells of increasing malignancy

Abstract Calcium signaling controls a large variety of cell functions, including proliferation and apoptosis, and plays a major role in neoplastic transformation. Prostate cancer (PCa) is one of the most common malignancies in men. The transition to castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), a lethal form that is still lacking an effective cure, could be influenced by fine tuning intracellular calcium ([Ca2+]i) homeostasis. This study investigates [Ca2+]i dynamics in metastatic PCa cell lines that mimic the progression of PCa to CRPC: (i) well differentiated LNCaP cells that require androgen for survival, and (ii) poorly differentiated, highly aggressive androgen-insensitive prostate cancer (AIPC) PC3 and DU145 cells. In AIPC cells, ATP induces a fast rise in [Ca2+]i, due to release from intracellular stores and sensitive to phospholipase C inhibitors, while LNCaP cells do not respond to ATP challenge. Moreover, AIPC cells showed a reduced capacity to store Ca2+ in thapsigargin-sensitive stores and limited store-operated calcium entry, with respect to androgen-dependent LNCaP cells. Finally, green tea extract causes [Ca2+]i elevation and inhibits proliferation in PC3 and DU145 cells, but is ineffective in LNCaP cells. The consequences of these differences are discussed and interpreted in this study with reference to previously proposed models for Ca2+ dependence of prostate carcinogenesis.