Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Phase II Trial of Recombinant Human Interleukin-4 in Patients With Advanced Renal Cell Carcinoma: A Southwest Oncology Group Study

Advanced renal cell carcinoma is a chemoresistant disease. Immunotherapy with alpha interferon or interleukin (IL)-2 has produced response rates of approximately 15%, but better treatments are needed. IL-4 is a cytokine produced by activated CD4+ lymphocytes and has pluripotent activities including inhibiting the in vitro proliferation of human renal cell carcinoma cell lines. In this trial, patients were required to have a histologic diagnosis of renal cell adenocarcinoma with measurable disease and performance status (SWOG) of 0–1. Patients had to have adequate bone marrow, renal, and hepatic function as well as no clinically significant pulmonary or cardiac dysfunction. IL-4 was given by subcutaneous injection at a dose of 5 &mgr;g/kg/d, daily for 28 days followed by a 7-day rest period. Fifty-eight patients were registered with seven patients ineligible and two patients not analyzable because they did not receive treatment. In the 49 eligible and analyzable patients, there were no confirmed complete or partial responses. There was one unconfirmed partial response in retro-caval lymph nodes, but no verifying measurement was done. There were seven patients with stable disease, no response, 25 with increasing disease/progression, and 16 patients whose assessment was inadequate to determine response. The median time to progression was 3 months, and the median survival was 13 months. Toxicity was significant with the most common side effects nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea, followed by headache/pain and malaise/fatigue/lethargy. There were 13 instances of grade 4 toxicity that occurred in nine different patients. Unique toxicities included Bell's palsy in three patients and hypoglycemia in a previously well-controlled diabetic. Despite promising growth inhibitory and immunologic effects, IL-4 in this dose and schedule is not useful for the treatment of patients with disseminated renal cell carcinoma.
New pathophysiological mechanisms in irritable bowel syndrome

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a functional, multifactorial disease characterized by abdominal pain and erratic bowel habit. Changes in gastrointestinal motor function, enhanced perception of stimuli arising from the gut wall and psychosocial factors are thought to be major contributors for symptom generation. In recent years, several additional factors have been identified and postulated to interact with these classical mechanisms. Reduced ability to expel intestinal gas with consequent gas trapping and bowel distension may contribute to abdominal discomfort/pain and bloating. Abnormal activation of certain brain regions following painful stimulation of the rectum suggests altered processing of afferent signals. An acute gastrointestinal infection is now a recognized aetiological factor for symptom development in a subset of IBS patients (i.e. post‐infectious IBS), who are probably unable to down‐regulate the initial inflammatory stimulus efficiently. Furthermore, low‐grade inflammatory infiltration and activation of mast cells in proximity to nerves in the colonic mucosa may also participate in the frequency and severity of perceived abdominal pain in post‐infectious and non‐specific IBS. Initial evidence suggests the existence of changes in gut microflora, serotonin metabolism and a genetic contribution in IBS pathophysiology. These novel mechanisms may aid a better understanding of the complex pathophysiology of IBS and to develop new therapies.
Love Is in the Air: Queer (Im)Possibility and Straightwashing in FrontierVille and World of Warcraft

Games like World of Warcraft have been called “inherently queer,” providing gamic spaces where gender and sexuality seem fluid and customizable. Although the provocation is exciting and revisits many of the arguments made about the liberatory potential of cyberspace, this article hopes to antidote the assumption that the virtual is “inherently” queer and to unpack what I call the “interactive fallacy,” the further assumption that video games offer players unlimited power and control. Through a close reading and close playing of two massively multiplayer games—Zynga’s casual game FrontierVille and Blizzard’s World of Warcraft—I hope to identify and interrogate the ways that gender and sexuality (even race) in games are both normative and subversive. In other words, in games about fantasy and fun, how and where and why might real world queerness, gender, and race be rendered, negotiated, and disrupted? Is that even possible? Games like FrontierVille and World of Warcraft offer beginnings for gendered and queered play, allowing players to imagine and enact a range of desires, but ultimately both games narrow these choices and possibilities, rendering them algorithmically inconsequential, and restore them to heteronormative ends. Looking at character creation, game play, and game narratives, this article argues for the productive opportunity in the play of, with, and play in sexuality and gender and race to discover what Lisa Nakamura calls “disruptive moments of recognition and misrecognition” that can offer subversive and queergaming potential and practices. Perhaps more important, this article also uncovers the ways that logics of digital games limit and norm players, narratives, and play itself.
On hobos and homelessness

In the early 1920s Nels Anderson combined his own experience "on the bummery", with his sociological insight to give voice to a largely ignored underclass. This text presents Nels Anderson's ethnographic work of a world of homeless men, a study conducted on Madison street in Chicago, and also includes Anderson's later work on the juvenile and the tramp, the unattached migrant, and the family.
Fluttering wing feathers produce the flight sounds of male streamertail hummingbirds

Sounds produced continuously during flight potentially play important roles in avian communication, but the mechanisms underlying these sounds have received little attention. Adult male Red-billed Streamertail hummingbirds (Trochilus polytmus) bear elongated tail streamers and produce a distinctive ‘whirring’ flight sound, whereas subadult males and females do not. The production of this sound, which is a pulsed tone with a mean frequency of 858 Hz, has been attributed to these distinctive tail streamers. However, tail-less streamertails can still produce the flight sound. Three lines of evidence implicate the wings instead. First, it is pulsed in synchrony with the 29 Hz wingbeat frequency. Second, a high-speed video showed that primary feather eight (P8) bends during each downstroke, creating a gap between P8 and primary feather nine (P9). Manipulating either P8 or P9 reduced the production of the flight sound. Third, laboratory experiments indicated that both P8 and P9 can produce tones over a range of 700–900 Hz. The wings therefore produce the distinctive flight sound, enabled via subtle morphological changes to the structure of P8 and P9.
Supply Chair Demonstrator Based on Federated Models and HLA Application

Supply chains are complex systems that are difficult to be understood from the viewpoint of the single enterprise. This often leads to local optimizations that form an optimum for one company or a short section of a supply network. Such local optimizations endanger the competitiveness of the whole supply chain, as today not the single enterprise, but the production network (sometimes named Virtual Enterprise) has to be the competitive entity. Simulation could help to understand the full network and to study and improve the network as a whole. However, the development of such networks is complicated, as it models several distributed entities and might also be forced to introduce the human-in-the-loop or to include IT control systems in the simulation run. The authors propose a supply chain demonstrator, that can run distributed, combine several (local) simulation models into one federation and also include non-simulation federates like human user interfaces or additional IT systems.
Virtual PAT : A Virtual Personal Aerobics

A prototype system for implementing a virtual Personal Aerobics Trainer (PAT) is presented. Unlike workout video tapes or TV exercise shows, this system allows the user to create and personalize an aerobics session to meet the user's needs and desires. Various media technology and computer vision algorithms are used to enhance the interaction of a virtual instructor by enabling it to watch and talk to the user. Throughout the paper, we report the system components and discuss the advantages, problems, and extensions of the design.
Comparison of Normal and Parkinsonian Microcircuit Dynamics in the Rodent Striatum

Experimentally, depriving the basal ganglia (BG) from their dopaminergic innervation, dramatically changes the behavior of all their circuits, neurons, and synapses in multiple ways. Dopamine afferents are received by all BG nuclei (Rommelfanger and Wichmann, 2010). In the absence of DA, BG generate enhanced pathological oscillatory patterns in the external segment of the striatum: globus pallidus (GPe), internal segment of the globus pallidus (GPi), subthalamic nucleus (STN) and substantia nigra pars reticulata (SNr) (Blandini et al., 2000). These pathological oscillatory patterns are expressed as increased cortical beta frequency coherence (Costa et al., 2006; Fuentes et al., 2009; Kozlov et al., 2009; Walters and Bergstrom, 2009) and are reflected as the inability to select, change or initiate motor actions (Magill et al., 2001; Ni et al., 2001; Wilson et al., 2006), as though all neurons were trapped in a massive oscillation that does not allow the selection of any circuit or action. Behaviorally, circuit disfunction is accompanied by bradykinesia, akinesia, tremor and muscular rigidity (Brown, 2007; Hammond et al., 2007; Galvan and Wichmann, 2008; Fuentes et al., 2009; Walters and Bergstrom, 2009; Zold et al., 2009). One question is what are the manifestations of these changes at the level of the striatal microcircuitry (Alexander and Crutcher, 1990; Middleton and Strick, 2002), given that its neurons are the principal entrance to the BG (Alexander and Crutcher, 1990; Middleton and Strick, 2002), and DA is particularly concentrated in this nucleus (striatum); more than in any other BG nuclei (Bjorklund and Dunnett, 2007). To answer this question, here we show how the striatal microcircuit functions before and after DA depletion. The changes observed may be fundamental to understand BG activity during Parkinsonism.
Does grape seed oil improve inflammation and insulin resistance in overweight or obese women?

Abstract Grape seed oil (GSO) is reported to improve oxidative stress and lipid profile. However, the ameliorating effect of GSO on inflammation and insulin resistance has not being noticed so far. We aimed to examine the effects of GSO consumption on inflammation and insulin resistance in overweight or obese females. The subjects (n = 44) were randomly assigned into intervention group as “GSO” (consuming 15% of energy from GSO) and control group as sunflower oil “SFO” (consuming 15% of energy from SFO) through a weight loss diet for 8 weeks. Anthropometric measurements, dietary recall and fasting serum glucose, insulin, high sensitive C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) were assessed before and after the intervention. Homeostatic model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) scores, hs-CRP and TNF-α decreased in the GSO group. The hs-CRP was lower in GSO than the SFO group (p < 0.03). GSO consumption seems to improve inflammatory condition and insulin resistance in overweight/obese women.
A Review of Intent Detection, Arbitration, and Communication Aspects of Shared Control for Physical Human-Robot Interaction

As robotic devices are applied to problems beyond traditional manufacturing and industrial settings, we find that interaction between robots and humans, especially physical interaction, has become a fast developing field. Consider the application of robotics in healthcare, where we find telerobotic devices in the operating room facilitating dexterous surgical procedures, exoskeletons in the rehabilitation domain as walking aids and upper-limb movement assist devices, and even robotic limbs that are physically integrated with amputees who seek to restore their independence and mobility. In each of these scenarios, the physical coupling between human and robot, often termed physical human robot interaction (pHRI), facilitates new human performance capabilities and creates an opportunity to explore the sharing of task execution and control between humans and robots. In this review, we provide a unifying view of human and robot sharing task execution in scenarios where collaboration and cooperation between the two entities are necessary, and where the physical coupling of human and robot is a vital aspect. We define three key themes that emerge in these shared control scenarios, namely, intent detection, arbitration, and feedback. First, we explore methods for how the coupled pHRI system can detect what the human is trying to do, and how the physical coupling itself can be leveraged to detect intent. Second, once the human intent is known, we explore techniques for sharing and modulating control of the coupled system between robot and human operator. Finally, we survey methods for informing the human operator of the state of the coupled system, or the characteristics of the environment with which the pHRI system is interacting. At the conclusion of the survey, we present two case studies that exemplify shared control in pHRI systems, and specifically highlight the approaches used for the three key themes of intent detection, arbitration, and feedback for applications of upper limb robotic rehabilitation and haptic feedback from a robotic prosthesis for the upper limb. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4039145]
Extract of Ferula foetida regel reverses gentamicin-induced nephrotoxicity in rats

Natural products and dietary components have earlier been proven as potential chemoprotective agents, and continuous efforts are in progress to search for such new products. Gentamicin, an aminoglycoside antibiotic, is widely used for treating the infections caused by many gram negative bacteria. However, besides other unwanted effects, the drug causes tubular cell necrosis in the proximal convoluted tubules of nephrons. Unavailability of any remedial measures in the modern medicine for such ailments therefore makes it imperative to screen for natural products that are nephroprotective against such renal impairment. Here in the undertaken study, we have tested nephroprotective effects of Hing (Ferula foetida) extracts on gentamicin-treated rats. As expected, subcutaneous administration of rats with Gentamicin (100 mg/kg) showed significant increase in blood urea nitrogen (BUN), serum creatinine and thiobarbituric acid reacting substances (TBARS), as an indication of renal disorder. However, co-administration of methanol soluble and insoluble fractions of Ferula foetida (Hing), to the Gentamicin-treated rats almost showed a complete reversal of the above effects, indicating nephroprotective properties of the herbal drug. This may be an important addition to the list of studies where natural products have been discovered to be chemoprotective.
Capacity of Human Dendritic Cells Uptake Receptor Expression and Endocytic Sanglifehrin A Specifically Affects Antigen The Novel Cyclophilin-Binding Drug

Sanglifehrin is a recently developed immunosuppressant that belongs to the family of immunophilin-binding ligands. SFA is a cyclophilin A-binding immunosuppressive drug with a novel, but unidentiﬁed, mechanism of action. Several reports exist about the effect of SFA on T cells, but its effect on the initiators of the immune response, i.e., dendritic cells (DCs), is relatively unknown. Therefore, we examined the effect of SFA on the differentiation and function of human monocyte-derived DCs. Unlike the well-known cyclophilin A-binding immunosuppressant cyclosporin A, which did not affect DC phenotype, differentiation of DCs in the presence of SFA resulted in CD14-CD1a DCs with normal DC morphology, viability, and a proper capacity to activate allogeneic T cells. However, DCs generated in the presence of SFA demonstrated reduced macropinocytosis and lectin-mediated endocytosis, which was in line with a decreased expression of C-type lectins, including mannose receptor, C1qRP, DC-ASGPR, and especially, DC-SIGN. In contrast, Fc (cid:1) RI (CD89) and Fc (cid:2) RII (CD32) were increased by SFA. The explicit effect of SFA on the expression of Ag uptake receptors and Ag capture by DCs makes SFA unique among immunophilin-binding immunosuppressive drugs. The Journal of Immunology, 2004, 172: 6482–6489. ﬂuorescence Bio-sciences). iodide
A Novel Meiotic Drive Locus Almost Completely Distorts Segregation in Mimulus (Monkeyflower) Hybrids

We report the discovery, mapping, and characterization of a meiotic drive locus (D) exhibiting nearly 100% nonrandom transmission in hybrids between two species of yellow monkeyflowers, outcrossing Mimulus guttatus and selfing M. nasutus. Only 1% of F2 hybrids were M. nasutus homozygotes at the marker most tightly linked to D. We used a set of reciprocal backcrosses to distinguish among male-specific, female-specific, and zygote-specific sources of transmission ratio distortion. Transmission was severely distorted only when the heterozygous F1 acted as the female parent in crosses to either parental species, ruling out pollen competition and zygote mortality as potential sources of drive. After four generations of backcrossing to M. nasutus, nearly isogenic lines were still >90% heterozygous at markers linked to D, suggesting that heterozygosity at the drive locus alone is sufficient for nonrandom transmission. A lack of dramatic female fitness costs in these lines rules out alternatives involving ovule or seed mortality and points to a truly meiotic mechanism of drive. The strength and direction of drive in this system is consistent with population genetic theory of selfish element evolution under different mating systems. These results are the first empirical demonstration of the strong female-specific drive predicted by new models of selfish centromere turnover.
New drugs and treatment for cryptosporidiosis

Purpose of review There is a history of inadequate treatments for cryptosporidiosis and a lack of understanding of the species that cause human disease. Against this background, we review the efficacy of antiparasitic agents, particularly nitazoxanide, which has led to increased treatment options, the potential for immunotherapy, and consider the role of highly active antiretroviral therapy in reducing the incidence of this opportunistic infection. Recent findings Nitazoxanide is effective for cryptosporidiosis in immunocompetent and probably immunocompromised patients (with an alteration in the duration of treatment or the dosing regimen). HIV-infected patients on highly active antiretroviral therapy have a dramatically lower incidence of cryptosporidiosis, attributable to the effects of intestinal immune reconstitution as well as the effect on the CD4 cell count. Protease inhibitors have a direct inhibitory effect on Cryptosporidium infection, suggesting a further reason for the reduction in the incidence of cryptosporidiosis and implying a further possible therapeutic modality. Summary Cryptosporidiosis remains a significant public health threat. Risk avoidance guidance could be viewed in the more relative terms of risk management depending on the degree of immunosuppression. Of established efficacy in immunocompetent patients, nitazoxanide is also useful for immunocompromised patients. Better prevention and treatment options mean that, in the immunocompromised, this disease is now less common. Immune reconstitution is the key to prevention. Further database mining of the Cryptosporidium genome will assist in the discovery of new genes, biochemical pathways and protective antigens that can be targeted to develop novel therapies for cryptosporidiosis.
A distributed algorithm of delay bounded multicast routing for multimedia applications

The aim of multicast routing is to find a tree which is rooted from the source node and contains all the multicast destinations. A delay bounded routing tree, is a tree where the accumulated delay from the source node to any destination along the tree shall not exceed a pre-specified bound. This paper presents a distributed heuristic algorithm which generates routing trees with sub-optimal network cost under the delay bound constraint. The proposed algorithm is fully distributed, efficient in terms of the number of messages required, and flexible in multicast membership changes. A large amount of simulations have been done to show that the network cost of the routing trees generated by our algorithm is better than the major existing algorithms.
A novel bandgap reference for minimizing current-mirror mismatch

A novel bandgap reference for minimizing current-mirror mismatch is presented. In the proposed circuit, the small-signal current variations in the two current paths are self-compensated while in the conventional bandgap core they are multiplied. As a result, error caused by current-mirror mismatch has been much reduced in the proposed circuit. Moreover, the voltage variations caused by temperature and supply voltage changes which make the small-signal current in the bandgap core vary can also be minimized. Based on the 0.6 um BiCMOS process technology, the error caused by current-mirror mismatch has been reduced by about 50 times in the proposed bandgap core and the complete circuit achieves a low temperature coefficient of 2.3 ppm/°C and a high power supply rejection ratio (PSRR) of 72 db without any PSRR boosting technique. On typical working conditions, the proposed circuit consumes only a supply current of 3.6 uA.