Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inhomogeneity of skeletal muscle glycogen synthesis upon refeeding following starvation.

more potent than TNFa or IL1 a in inhibiting PG synthesis. Additionally. TNFa-induced inhibition of PG synthesis in control or OA cartilage was relieved slightly by TGFB (10 ng/ml) and t o a greater extent by IGF-1 (100 nglml), although neither growth factor could completely abrogate inhibition. No differences could be detected in the response of OA cartilage t o 1L1 or TNFa compared with control cartilage. I3'S]PG was inhibited to a similar extent and could be only partially, if at all, relieved by simultaneous TGFP or IGF-1 treatment. I t therefore appears that the early changes in PG metabolism in OA cartilage are not brought about by differences in responsiveness of chondrocytes to catabolic cytokines. I . '5andy.J.D. Adams, M. E.Billingham. M.E. J.Plaas,A. & Muir,H.
Food Environment, Policy and Sugar-Sweetened Beverages Consumption in U.S. Adolescents

Increased consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) is a critical nutrition problem in the U.S. and has been identified as a key contributor to the current epidemic of obesity among adolescents. Up to date, little is known on how this high level of SSBs consumption can be reduced. Recently, environmental and policy interventions have been advocated as powerful strategies to address the epidemic. While there is a growing consensus that food environments and policies play important roles in influencing individuals’ food choice, reviews of studies linking the food environment (i.e. fast food restaurants density, conventional stores density, school cafeteria and vending machines) and policies (i.e. food price and tax) with the SSBs consumption in adolescents indicate the research is equivocal and data for policy making is lacking. In addition, little research has been done to compare the relative importance of the various aspects of food environment in influencing SSBs intake in youth. Part of the research barriers could be lack of database that includes validated measures of multiple environmental and policy factors. In this review, we summarized the environments and policy determinants of SSB consumptions in U.S. adolescents and the challenges in measuring environmental contexture factors. We also proposed the future research directions and believed findings from research in these areas will inform policy and guide future environmental and policy interventions on reducing the SSBs consumption and lower the obesity rate in U.S. adolescents. [N A J Med Sci. 2017;10(2):73-77. DOI: 10.7156/najms.2017. 1002073]
Effect of Cadmium Levels on Seed Germination and Seedling Growth of Spinach (Spinacia oleracea) Under Salinity Stress

Cadmium is highly toxic heavy metal. Soil factors such as pH, caution exchange capacity, CaCO3 content and salinity have a significant influence on Cd uptake by plants. Moreover, soil salinity has a great impact on crop yield in Iran. Therefore, the effect of four salt levels (0, 45, 90, 180 mM) of NaCl solutions and four concentrations (0, 15, 30, 60 ppm) of Cadmium sulfate solutions on seed germination of spinach was studied in two separate experiments. Treatments were arranged in a factorial manner in base of completely randomized design with four replications. The most seed germination percentage decreased significantly with increasing after 180mM NaCl concentration under levels of Cd. Increased salt concentration caused a decrease in germination percentage and rate. In comparison with the control treatment, the lowest germination rate values determined at 180 mM NaCl salinity and 60 ppm Cd. Shoot and root length was reduced significantly with a rise in NaCl and Cd levels. Cd concentration had a more depressing effect on the root than on the shoot growth. Interactive effects between Cd and NaCl on dry weight and root length was significant. According to this study the interactive effect of both stresses were more than additive.
Nonlocal correlations as an information-theoretic resource

It is well known that measurements performed on spatially separated entangled quantum systems can give rise to correlations that are nonlocal, in the sense that a Bell inequality is violated. They cannot, however, be used for superluminal signaling. It is also known that it is possible to write down sets of 'superquantum' correlations that are more nonlocal than is allowed by quantum mechanics, yet are still nonsignaling. Viewed as an information-theoretic resource, superquantum correlations are very powerful at reducing the amount of communication needed for distributed computational tasks. An intriguing question is why quantum mechanics does not allow these more powerful correlations. We aim to shed light on the range of quantum possibilities by placing them within a wider context. With this in mind, we investigate the set of correlations that are constrained only by the no-signaling principle. These correlations form a polytope, which contains the quantum correlations as a (proper) subset. We determine the vertices of the no-signaling polytope in the case that two observers each choose from two possible measurements with d outcomes. We then consider how interconversions between different sorts of correlations may be achieved. Finally, we consider some multipartite examples.
Molecular Studies of R Factor Compatibility Groups

Molecular studies of R factors of six groups, FII, I1, I2, N, B, and H, defined on the basis of compatibility, support the conclusions drawn from genetic studies. In general, R factors of a given compatibility group are similar in size. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) reassociation occurs freely between members of the same group but is minimal between heterologous groups. An exception to this was found in group H, of which one factor showed minimal homology with the remaining plasmids of the group. A further exception was found with groups I1 and B, which, although genetically distinct, show between 18 and 28% of DNA homology. Groups I1 and I2 are molecularly distinct, despite the fact that they both stimulate the synthesis of I-fimbriae.
Energy Landscape Reveals That the Budding Yeast Cell Cycle Is a Robust and Adaptive Multi-stage Process

Quantitatively understanding the robustness, adaptivity and efficiency of cell cycle dynamics under the influence of noise is a fundamental but difficult question to answer for most eukaryotic organisms. Using a simplified budding yeast cell cycle model perturbed by intrinsic noise, we systematically explore these issues from an energy landscape point of view by constructing an energy landscape for the considered system based on large deviation theory. Analysis shows that the cell cycle trajectory is sharply confined by the ambient energy barrier, and the landscape along this trajectory exhibits a generally flat shape. We explain the evolution of the system on this flat path by incorporating its non-gradient nature. Furthermore, we illustrate how this global landscape changes in response to external signals, observing a nice transformation of the landscapes as the excitable system approaches a limit cycle system when nutrients are sufficient, as well as the formation of additional energy wells when the DNA replication checkpoint is activated. By taking into account the finite volume effect, we find additional pits along the flat cycle path in the landscape associated with the checkpoint mechanism of the cell cycle. The difference between the landscapes induced by intrinsic and extrinsic noise is also discussed. In our opinion, this meticulous structure of the energy landscape for our simplified model is of general interest to other cell cycle dynamics, and the proposed methods can be applied to study similar biological systems.
Divergent thinking in the grasslands: thinking about object function in the context of a grassland survival scenario elicits more alternate uses than control scenarios

ABSTRACT The survival processing effect is a recall advantage for information processed in the context of a grassland survival scenario. The current studies build upon previous research suggesting the effect is due to elaborative encoding and functional thinking. In two experiments, participants completed the “alternate uses test” under five conditions: baseline, grassland survival, Ebola survival, moving to a new home and planning a bank heist. Experiment 1 stimuli were everyday objects. Experiment 2 stimuli were functionally ambiguous “mystery” objects. Number of generated uses was highest in the baseline, but the grassland scenario was consistently highest of the schematic conditions. Recall data lend support to the mnemonic superiority of the grassland condition. Results suggest that grassland scenarios place fewer attenuating constraints on divergent thinking. It is suggested that the survival processing effect might be usefully conceptualised as an effect of creatively thinking about object function in response to broadly defined problems.
Verification of heterogeneous multi-agent system using MCMAS

The focus of the paper is how to model autonomous behaviours of heterogeneous multi-agent systems such that it can be verified that they will always operate within predefined mission requirements and constraints. This is done by using formal methods with an abstraction of the behaviours modelling and model checking for their verification. Three case studies are presented to verify the decision-making behaviours of heterogeneous multi-agent system using a convoy mission scenario. The multi-agent system in a case study has been extended by increasing the number of agents and function complexity gradually. For automatic verification, model checker for multi-agent systems (MCMAS) is adopted due to its novel capability to accommodate the multi-agent system and successfully verifies the targeting behaviours of the team-level autonomous systems. The verification results help retrospectively the design of decision-making algorithms improved by considering additional agents and behaviours during three steps of scenario modification. Consequently, the last scenario deals with the system composed of a ground control system, two unmanned aerial vehicles, and four unmanned ground vehicles with fault-tolerant and communication relay capabilities.
Twitter: A New Online Source of Automatically Tagged Data for Conversational Speech Emotion Recognition

In the space of affect detection in multimedia, there is a strong demand for more tagged data in order to better understand human emotions, the way they are expressed, and approaches for detecting them automatically. Unfortunately, emotion datasets are typically small due to the manual process of annotating them with emotional labels. In response, we present for the first time the application of automatically tagged Twitter data to the problem of speech emotion recognition (SER). SER has been shown to benefit from the combination of acoustic and linguistic features, albeit when the linguistic training data is from the same database as the test data. Using the presence of emoticons for automatic tagging, we compile a corpus of over 800,000 tweets that is totally independent from our evaluation database. By supplementing an acoustic classifier with linguistic information, we classify the spontaneous content within the USC-IEMOCAP corpus on valence and activation descriptors. With comparison to prior literature, we demonstrate performance improvements for valence of 2% and 6% over an acoustic-only system, using linguistic training data from Twitter and IEMOCAP respectively.
Study on integrated development of modern agriculture evaluation

In this paper, the development level of modern agriculture is divided into five levels: social development level, economic development level, productivity development level, agricultural economic structure and integrated use of agricultural technology which is according to the functional structure of modern agricultural development. And it accordingly sets the evaluation index system of the integrated development of modern agriculture in Shijiazhuang City, and uses the application of factor analysis to analyze and compare the level of development of modern agriculture of the 12 cities. It points out the advantages and disadvantages of the agricultural development in Shijiazhuang and provides a theory basis for the development of modern agriculture in Shijiazhuang.
In Vivo Imaging of Hedgehog Pathway Activation with a Nuclear Fluorescent Reporter

The Hedgehog (Hh) pathway is essential for embryonic development and tissue regeneration, and its dysregulation can lead to birth defects and tumorigenesis. Understanding how this signaling mechanism contributes to these processes would benefit from an ability to visualize Hedgehog pathway activity in live organisms, in real time, and with single-cell resolution. We report here the generation of transgenic zebrafish lines that express nuclear-localized mCherry fluorescent protein in a Gli transcription factor-dependent manner. As demonstrated by chemical and genetic perturbations, these lines faithfully report Hedgehog pathway state in individual cells and with high detection sensitivity. They will be valuable tools for studying dynamic Gli-dependent processes in vertebrates and for identifying new chemical and genetic regulators of the Hh pathway.
Inferring Genetic Interactions via a Data-Driven Second Order Model

Genetic/transcriptional regulatory interactions are shown to predict partial components of signaling pathways, which have been recognized as vital to complex human diseases. Both activator (A) and repressor (R) are known to coregulate their common target gene (T). Xu et al. (2002) proposed to model this coregulation by a fixed second order response surface (called the RS algorithm), in which T is a function of A, R, and AR. Unfortunately, the RS algorithm did not result in a sufficient number of genetic interactions (GIs) when it was applied to a group of 51 yeast genes in a pilot study. Thus, we propose a data-driven second order model (DDSOM), an approximation to the non-linear transcriptional interactions, to infer genetic and transcriptional regulatory interactions. For each triplet of genes of interest (A, R, and T), we regress the expression of T at time t + 1 on the expression of A, R, and AR at time t. Next, these well-fitted regression models (viewed as points in R3) are collected, and the center of these points is used to identify triples of genes having the A-R-T relationship or GIs. The DDSOM and RS algorithms are first compared on inferring transcriptional compensation interactions of a group of yeast genes in DNA synthesis and DNA repair using microarray gene expression data; the DDSOM algorithm results in higher modified true positive rate (about 75%) than that of the RS algorithm, checked against quantitative RT-polymerase chain reaction results. These validated GIs are reported, among which some coincide with certain interactions in DNA repair and genome instability pathways in yeast. This suggests that the DDSOM algorithm has potential to predict pathway components. Further, both algorithms are applied to predict transcriptional regulatory interactions of 63 yeast genes. Checked against the known transcriptional regulatory interactions queried from TRANSFAC, the proposed also performs better than the RS algorithm.
Gene Expression Analysis of Dupuytren’s Disease: The Role of TGF-β2

Dupuytren’s disease is characterised by nodular fibroblastic proliferation of the palmar fascia leading to contracture of the hand. Transforming growth factor beta (TGF-β) is thought to play a role in its pathogenesis. We performed a cDNA microarray analysis of Dupuytren’s diseased cord tissue with an emphasis on TGF-β isoforms. Normal-appearing transverse ligament of the palmar fascia from adjacent to the diseased cord and palmar fascia from patients undergoing carpal tunnel release were used as controls. TGF-β gene expression was confirmed by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. Over 20 unique genes were found to be significantly up-regulated, including several previously reported genes. A dominant increase in TGF-β2 expression was seen in the cord tissue, whereas TGF-β1 and TGF-β3 were found not to be significantly up-regulated. Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction confirmed these findings. This gene expression profile allows for further experiments that may eventually lead to gene therapy to block the development and progression of Dupuytren’s disease clinically.
Concomitant Ablation of Atrial Fibrillation: Are Results Associated With Surgeon's Experience?

Abstract Background and aim of the study: Atrial fibrillation (AF) ablation has become an effective concomitant procedure, which is increasingly used. We questioned whether results are related to surgeon's experience. Methods: Patients (n = 141) with persistent AF (pAF) underwent concomitant left atrial (LA) endocardial ablation, performed by six surgeons. Follow‐up (FU) was after 3, 6, and 12 months (mean 8 ± 4.1 months). FU was 97% complete. Results were analyzed according to surgeon's volume: >20 (group A, n = 85) and ≤20 (group B, n = 56) ablations per year. Results: Baseline data of groups A and B were similar regarding age (70 ± 9.0 vs. 70 ± 8.1 years, n.s.), NYHA class (3.0 ± 0.84 vs. 2.9 ± 0.95, n.s.), AF duration (58 ± 83.4 vs. 63 ± 69.4 months, n.s.), LA diameter (50 ± 8.5 vs. 48 ± 7.3 mm, n.s.), and LVEF (50 ± 12.0 vs. 50 ± 13.0%, n.s.). Overall mortality (30 days) was 7.1% (six and four in groups A and B, n.s.). Ablation caused no injury or death. At FU sinus rhythm (SR) conversion rate was 68.1% in each group. Atrial contraction was demonstrated in 86.0 and 90.3% of SR patients in groups A and B (n.s.). NYHA functional class improved and was similar in both groups (A: 2.1 ± 0.56, B: 2.1 ± 0.48, n.s.). Compared to non‐SR, SR was associated with better NYHA class (A: 2.0 ± 0.57 vs. 2.3 ± 0.46, p < 0.05; B: 2.0 ± 0.44 vs. 2.3 ± 0.47, p < 0.05) and smaller LA diameter (A: 42 ± 5.5 vs. 46 ± 8.4 mm, p < 0.05; B: 40 ± 5.5 vs. 45 ± 5.8 mm, p < 0.05). Conclusions: We found no association between surgeon's experience and results of AF ablation, neither in SR conversion rate nor in morbidity and mortality.
Demographic Variation of Wolbachia Infection in the Endangered Mitchell’s Satyr Butterfly

The Mitchell’s satyr, Neonympha mitchellii, is an endangered species that is limited to highly isolated habitats in the northern and southern United States. Conservation strategies for isolated endangered species often implement captive breeding and translocation programs for repopulation. However, these programs risk increasing the spread of harmful pathogens, such as the bacterial endosymbiont Wolbachia. Wolbachia can manipulate the host’s reproduction leading to incompatibilities between infected and uninfected hosts. This study uses molecular methods to screen for Wolbachia presence across the distribution of the Mitchell’s satyr and its subspecies, St. Francis satyr, which are both federally listed as endangered and are considered two of the rarest butterflies in North America. The screens confirmed the presence of Wolbachia in the northern and newly discovered southern populations of the Mitchell’s satyr, but not in the St. Francis satyr population. These results combined with previous reports of Wolbachia in N. mitchellii, highlight that Wolbachia infection varies both geographically and temporally in satyr populations. The temporal variance shows the importance of continued monitoring of Wolbachia infection during conservation programs. To reduce the risk of reproductive incompatibilities, it is advised that all individuals collected for conservation purposes be screened for Wolbachia and recommended to avoid the use of infected individuals for captive breeding and translocation programs.
Early identification of Hispanic English language learners for gifted and talented programs

Early Identification of Hispanic English Language Learners for Gifted and Talented Programs. (May 2006) Jennifer Joy Esquierdo, B.A., University of Texas-Pan American; M.Ed., University of Texas-Pan American Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Rafael Lara-Alecio The exponential growth of the Hispanic student population and the controversial educational issue surrounding the assessment of English language learners are the two fundamental topics of this study. Due to the uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding the assessment of the escalating Hispanic student population, the underrepresentation of Hispanics in gifted and talented (GT) programs has developed into a critical educational concern (Bernal, 2002; Irby & Lara-Alecio, 1996; Ortiz & Gonzalez, 1998). The research questions that guided this study focused on finding validated assessments for early identification of the gifted Hispanic English language learners (ELLs) in kindergarten. The first research question aimed to determine the concurrent validity of the Hispanic Bilingual Gifted Screening Instrument (HBGSI) using the Naglieri Nonverbal Abilities Test (NNAT) and Wookcock Language Proficient BatteryRevised (WLPB-R) selected three subtests, administered in English and Spanish. This study found a positive statistically significant correlation between the HBGSI, the NNAT, and WLPB-R subtests. The second question focused on the correlation between language proficiency as measured by the WLPB-R subtests and nonverbal intelligence
Investigation of an Adenovirus-Induced Respiratory Disease Outbreak

Objective: An epidemiological investigation was carried out in school X in Jinan, Shandong Province, China, to identify the cause, epidemiology, and etiological characteristics of a febrile respiratory disease outbreak; and therefore to control the dissemination. Methods: Both field epidemiological investigations and laboratory examinations were carried out. Results: Forty cases were identified, in which 38 cases were students and two were teachers. Clinical manifestations included fever, coughing, headache, and sore throat. A total of 21 pharyngeal swab specimens were collected and 18 tested positive for adenovirus. The adenovirus hexon gene was sequenced in three of the 18 positive specimens and the results showed a 100% homology with the standard HAdV-55 HEXO. Conclusions: The outbreak originated from an adenovirus-infected student, who spread the pathogen to her classmates and teacher. The teacher then further disseminated the disease within the school which led to 40 febrile respiratory infections.
A Specialized Odor Memory Buffer in Primary Olfactory Cortex

Background The neural substrates of olfactory working memory are unknown. We addressed the questions of whether olfactory working memory involves a verbal representation of the odor, or a sensory image of the odor, or both, and the location of the neural substrates of these processes. Methodology/Principal Findings We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure activity in the brains of subjects who were remembering either nameable or unnameable odorants. We found a double dissociation whereby remembering nameable odorants was reflected in sustained activity in prefrontal language areas, and remembering unnameable odorants was reflected in sustained activity in primary olfactory cortex. Conclusions/Significance These findings suggest a novel dedicated mechanism in primary olfactory cortex, where odor information is maintained in temporary storage to subserve ongoing tasks.
A light WLAN radio map for floor detection in multi-floor environment localization

Ubiquitous environments relies on the localization process of the mobile device or user. Although WLAN Received Signal Strength (RSS) fingerprinting is the most accurate indoor positioning method, it is a time consuming process and become impractical process for multi-floor environments. In addition to this any proposed method for floor determination in multi-floor environment must take into account the mobile device's limitations. In this paper the path loss model will be used to generate a light fingerprint radio map in order to determine the floor where the mobile device located. The experimental results show that the proposed method can determine the floor of the mobile device accurately with percentage exceeded 97%.