Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Utilization of palmitate in the epididymal adipose tissue from New Zealand obese mice.

The metabolism of 14C1-palmitate was studied in the isolated epididymal adipose tissue from fed and starved New Zealand obese mice. Animals with lower total weight of the fat pads, which also have smaller fat cells, showed a higher rate of incorporation of the precursor into tissue lipids per unit weight tissue than animals with larger fat pads and larger cells. The addition of glucose to the incubation medium influenced the formation of neutral fat from exogenous palmitate differently in starved and fed animals. The effect of starvation was greater in the small fat cells. The recovery of palmitate carbon in tissue free fatty acids and the release or uptake from the medium of free fatty acids was also influenced both by previous starvation and addition of glucose in vitro.
Non‐coeliac gluten sensitivity

Irritable bowel syndrome‐like symptoms in response to wheat ingestion is common and well described, but whether the reaction is due to gluten (i.e., non‐coeliac gluten sensitivity), other wheat proteins, or FODMAPs (mostly fructans) alone or in combinations has not been clearly defined. Exclusion of coeliac disease in the presence of negative serology, and normal villous architecture but increased density of intraepithelial lymphocytes on duodenal biopsies, is difficult. Furthermore, the confidence by which a positive diagnosis is made or non‐coeliac gluten sensitivity is excluded by blinded placebo‐controlled rechallenge with wheat protein is reduced by strong nocebo responses generally found in patients with self‐reported non‐coeliac gluten sensitivity. The absence of a clear biological mechanism of action and difficulties with the design and interpretation of research studies have plunged this entity into even deeper controversy. In the absence of clarity in its diagnosis, the epidemiology, prognosis, and therapeutic approaches to a patient who may be gluten sensitive remain to be determined. Adequate understanding of the issues surrounding the controversy and further research will slowly unravel the truth behind the problem.
MAWPS: A Math Word Problem Repository

Recent work across several AI subdisciplines has focused on automatically solving math word problems. In this paper we introduce MAWPS, an online repository of Math Word Problems, to provide a unified testbed to evaluate different algorithms. MAWPS allows for the automatic construction of datasets with particular characteristics, providing tools for tuning the lexical and template overlap of a dataset as well as for filtering ungrammatical problems from web-sourced corpora. The online nature of this repository facilitates easy community contribution. At present, we have amassed 3,320 problems, including the full datasets used in several prominent works.
Local-field and exchange-correlation effects in optical spectra of semiconductors.

The density-functional theory with ab initio pseudopotentials has been used to study the linear optical response of semiconductors. We present results for optical spectra where the effects of the macroscopic local-field and microscopic exchange-correlation interaction are included beyond diagonal and random-phase approximations. Quasiparticle corrections to the single-particle energies have been added in the polarization function. Numerical calculations are performed for the column-IV materials Si, SiC, and diamond as model substances. @S0163-1829~96! 07944-1#
A CD13‐targeting peptide integrated protein inhibits human liver cancer growth by killing cancer stem cells and suppressing angiogenesis

CD13 is a marker of angiogenic endothelial cells, and recently it is proved to be a biomarker of human liver cancer stem cells (CSCs). Herein, the therapeutic effects of NGR‐LDP‐AE, a fusion protein composed of CD13‐targeting peptide NGR and antitumor antibiotic lidamycin, on human liver cancer and its mechanism were studied. Western blot and immunofluorescence assay demonstrated that CD13 (WM15 epitope) was expressed in both human liver cancer cell lines and vascular endothelial cells, while absent in normal liver cells. MTT assay showed that NGR‐LDP‐AE displayed potent cytotoxicity to cultured tumor cell lines with IC50 values at low nanomolar level. NGR‐LDP‐AE inhibited tumorsphere formation of liver cancer cells, and the IC50 values were much lower than that in MTT assay, indicating selectively killing of CSCs. In endothelial tube formation assay, NGR‐LDP‐AE at low cytotoxic dose significantly inhibited the formation of intact tube networks. Animal experiment demonstrated that NGR‐LDP‐AE inhibited the growth of human liver cancer xenograft. Immunohistochemical analysis showed that NGR‐LDP‐AE induced the down‐regulation of CD13. In vitro experiment using cultured tumor cells also confirmed this result. NGR‐LDP‐AE activated both apoptotic and autophagic pathways in cultured tumor cells, while the induced autophagy protected cells from death. Conclusively, NGR‐LDP‐AE exerts its antitumor activity via killing liver CSCs and inhibiting angiogenesis. With one targeting motif, NGR‐LDP‐AE acts on both liver CSCs and angiogenic endothelial cells. It is a promising dual targeting fusion protein for liver cancer therapy, especially for advanced or relapsed cancers.
Negative self-conscious emotion and grief: an actor-partner analysis in couples bereaved by stillbirth or neonatal death.

OBJECTIVES The purpose of the present study was to examine the intrapersonal (actor) and interpersonal (partner) relationships of personality proneness to negative self-conscious emotion (shame and guilt) to grief in couples 13 months after a perinatal death. DESIGN A cohort study using self-report questionnaire measures of grief, shame, and guilt. METHODS The participants were 63 Australian couples bereaved by stillbirth (N= 31) or neonatal death (N= 32). The actor and partner relationships of chronic shame (Personal Feelings Questionnaire-2), situational shame (Test of Self-Conscious Affect-2), and survivor guilt and omnipotence guilt (Interpersonal Guilt Questionnaire-67) to grief (Perinatal Grief Scale-33) were explored using the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM) method of dyadic analysis. RESULTS The correlations between the self-conscious emotions and grief were invariably larger in men compared with women. Chronic shame had a significant actor relationship with grief in women and men and a non-significant partner relationship in both sexes. Situational shame and survivor guilt had significant actor relationships with grief in men and significant partner relationships in women. Omnipotence guilt had a significant linear actor relationship with grief in men and a significant U-shaped quadratic actor relationship in women. CONCLUSIONS Negative self-conscious emotions had intrapersonal relationship with grief in men and both intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships with grief in women. A moderate level of omnipotence guilt was associated with lower grief in women. APIM dyadic analysis furthers understanding of the relationship between personality and parental grief following a perinatal death.
Long-Distance Movement, Virulence, and RNA Silencing Suppression Controlled by a Single Protein in Hordei- and Potyviruses: Complementary Functions between Virus Families

ABSTRACT RNA silencing is a natural defense mechanism against genetic stress factors, including viruses. A mutant hordeivirus (Barley stripe mosaic virus [BSMV]) lacking the γb gene was confined to inoculated leaves in Nicotiana benthamiana, but systemic infection was observed in transgenic N. benthamiana expressing the potyviral silencing suppressor protein HCpro, suggesting that the γb protein may be a long-distance movement factor and have antisilencing activity. This was shown for γb proteins of both BSMV and Poa semilatent virus (PSLV), a related hordeivirus. Besides the functions in RNA silencing suppression, γb and HCpro had analogous effects on symptoms induced by the hordeiviruses. Severe BSMV-induced symptoms were correlated with high HCpro concentrations in the HCpro-transgenic plants, and substitution of the γb cistron of BSMV with that of PSLV led to greatly increased symptom severity and an altered pattern of viral gene expression. The efficient systemic infection with the chimera was followed by the development of dark green islands (localized recovery from infection) in leaves and exemption of new developing leaves from infection. Recovery and the accumulation of short RNAs diagnostic of RNA silencing in the recovered tissues in wild-type N. benthamiana were suppressed in HCpro-transgenic plants. These results provide evidence that potyviral HCpro and hordeivirus γb proteins contribute to systemic viral infection, symptom severity, and RNA silencing suppression. HCpro's ability to suppress the recovery of plants from viral infection emphasizes recovery as a manifestation of RNA silencing.
The Euplotes telomerase subunit p43 stimulates enzymatic activity and processivity in vitro.

Telomerase is a reverse transcriptase that synthesizes telomeric DNA repeats at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes. Although it is minimally composed of a conserved catalytic protein subunit (TERT) and an RNA component, additional accessory factors present in the holoenzyme play crucial roles in the biogenesis and function of the enzyme complex. Telomerase from the ciliate Tetrahymena can be reconstituted in active form in vitro. Using this system, we show that p43, a telomerase-specific La-motif protein from the ciliate Euplotes, stimulates activity and increases repeat addition processivity of telomerase. Activity enhancement by p43 requires its incorporation into a TERT.RNA. p43 ternary complex but is independent of other dissociable protein factors functioning in telomerase complex assembly. Stimulation is enhanced at elevated temperatures, supporting a role for p43 in structural stabilization of a critical region of the RNA subunit. To our knowledge, this represents the first demonstration that an authentic telomerase accessory protein can directly affect the enzymatic activity of the core enzyme in vitro.
Pathophysiology of Helicobacter pylori infection.

Helicobacter pylori is now accepted as the major cause of chronic gastritis. The initial response to infection is acute neutrophilic gastritis, which progresses to active chronic gastritis in most people. To confirm the pathogenic role of H. pylori, both the individual histological features of chronic gastritis and its topographical patterns must be shown to be caused by the infection. Surface epithelial degeneration is a probable result of direct tissue injury by bacterial products. Candidates are ammonia or ammonium products, cytotoxins, phospholipases and pro-inflammatory products such as lipopolysaccharide and platelet-activating factor. Neutrophil polymorph and chronic inflammatory cell infiltration are consequences of the mucosal immune response to bacterial antigens. Complement products and interleukin (IL)-8 are polymorph chemotaxins, and monocyte processing of antigens, followed by T helper cell and B lymphocyte responses, explain the presence of these cells in the mucosa. Atrophy may be a consequence of autodestructive products of neutrophil and monocyte activation, such as reactive oxygen metabolites and proteases. Intestinal metaplasia is most probably an adaptive response, possibly to H. pylori infection, exacerbated by other injurious agents such as bile reflux and dietary irritants. Pangastritis is the usual outcome after H. pylori infection. This is followed by multifocal atrophy and intestinal metaplasia. The latter changes weaken mucosal defences further and peptic ulceration may ensue. Patients with an increased parietal cell mass who become infected with H. pylori will exhibit antral restriction of the gastritis because the high acid output protects the corpus mucosa from bacterial adhesion and the inflammatory consequences. Such patients also have acid-induced gastric metaplasia in the proximal duodenum. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Structure and Antioxidant Activity of Polyphenols Derived from Propolis

Propolis is a potential source of natural antioxidants such as phenolic acids and flavonoids. Its wide biological effects have been known and used since antiquity. In the modern world natural substances are sought which would be able to counteract the effects of antioxidative stress, which underlies many diseases, such as cancer, diabetes and atherosclerosis. This paper aims to present the antioxidative activity of phenolic acids and flavonoids present in Polish propolis and the relationship between their chemical structure and antioxidative activity influencing its medicinal properties. Data concerning the biological activity of propolis are summarized here, including its antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, anticarcinogenic, antiatherogenic, estrogenic effects, as well as AIDS- counteracting and reparative-regenerative function.
Selectivity and Tolerance (“Invariance”) Both Increase as Visual Information Propagates from Cortical Area V4 to IT

Our ability to recognize objects despite large changes in position, size, and context is achieved through computations that are thought to increase both the shape selectivity and the tolerance (“invariance”) of the visual representation at successive stages of the ventral pathway [visual cortical areas V1, V2, and V4 and inferior temporal cortex (IT)]. However, these ideas have proven difficult to test. Here, we consider how well population activity patterns at two stages of the ventral stream (V4 and IT) discriminate between, and generalize across, different images. We found that both V4 and IT encode natural images with similar fidelity, whereas the IT population is much more sensitive to controlled, statistical scrambling of those images. Scrambling sensitivity was proportional to receptive field (RF) size in both V4 and IT, suggesting that, on average, the number of visual feature conjunctions implemented by a V4 or IT neuron is directly related to its RF size. We also found that the IT population could better discriminate between objects across changes in position, scale, and context, thus directly demonstrating a V4-to-IT gain in tolerance. This tolerance gain could be accounted for by both a decrease in single-unit sensitivity to identity-preserving transformations (e.g., an increase in RF size) and an increase in the maintenance of rank-order object selectivity within the RF. These results demonstrate that, as visual information travels from V4 to IT, the population representation is reformatted to become more selective for feature conjunctions and more tolerant to identity preserving transformations, and they reveal the single-unit response properties that underlie that reformatting.
Mobile Silent and Continuous Authentication using Apps Sequence

The last years have seen a growing explosion of the use of mobile devices. As matter of fact “smart” devices are used for a plethora of activities: from spending leisure time on social networks to e-banking. For these reasons smart devices hold huge volumes of private and sensitive user data and allow the access to critical applications in terms of privacy and security. Currently mobile devices provide an authentication mechanism based on the login: they do not continuously verify the identity of the user while sensitive activities are performed. This mechanism may allow an adversary to access sensitive information about users and to replace them during sensitive tasks, once they have obtained the user’s credentials. To mitigate this risk, in this paper we propose a method for the silent and continuous authentication. Considering that each user typically runs recurrently a certain set of applications in every-day life, our method extracts this characterizing sequences of apps for profiling the user and recognizing the user of the device that is not the owner. Using machine learning techniques several classifiers have been trained and the effectiveness of the proposed method has been evaluated by modeling the user behavior of 15 volunteer participants. Encouraging results have been obtained, i.e. a precision in distinguishing an impostor from the owner equal to 99%. The main benefit of this method is that is does not use sensitive data, nor biometrics, which, if compromised, cannot be replaced.
A Hypotheses-based Method for Identifying Skewed Itemsets

Parallel and distributed association rule mining are very important research subjects, with various work addressing them. Data skewness, which describes the degree of non-uniformity of the itemset distribution among database partitions, causes various problems to parallel and distributed association rule mining algorithms, such as the generation of many false candidate itemsets. However, some algorithms employ techniques in order to not only overcome these problems but also to take advantage of data skewness with the purpose of improving their performance. For instance, some algorithms employ skewness-based pruning techniques. In the literature, an entropy-based metric has been used for measuring data skewness. In this paper we present a method for identifying skewed itemsets which uses tests of statistical hypotheses. This method has some advantages over the entropy-based method and can also be used in environments with privacy-preserving constraints. As a result we show that our approach is more accurate for identifying skewed itemsets than the entropy-based method.
Dissatisfaction with medical practice.

This article reviews the subjective and objective indicators of dissatisfaction with medical practice. Discontent seems to have increased substantially during the past two decades, after a period of unprecedented satisfaction within the medical profession. Some of the sources of dissatisfaction include pressures from managed-care systems, the malpractice crisis, aggravation with bureaucratic red tape, and constant time pressures. However, most physicians still take satisfaction in their work.
Pore Distribution and Water Uptake in a Cenosphere-Cement Paste Composite Material

Alumina silicate cenospheres (CS) is a significant waste material from power plants that use a coal. Use CS as Portland cement replacement material gives opportunity to control physical and mechanical properties and makes a product lighter and more cost-effective. In the frame of this study, Portland cement paste samples were produced by adding CS in the concentration range from 0 to 40 volume %. Water uptake of hardened samples was checked and pore size distribution by using the mercury porosimetry was determined. In a cold climate where the temperature often falls below 0 °C, it is important to avoid the amount of micrometer sized pores in the final structure and to decrease water absorption capacity of material. In winter conditions, water fills such pores and causes additional stresses to their walls by expansion while freezing. It was found that generally water uptake capacity for cement paste samples decreased up to 20% by increasing the concentration of CS up to 40 volume %, at the same time, the volume of micrometer sized opened pores increases.
Cluster-based text categorization: a comparison of category search strategies

Text categorization can be viewed asaprocessof catego~ search, in which one or more categories for a testdocument are searchedfor by using given training documents with known categories. In this paper a cluster-based search with a probabilistic clustering algorithm is proposed and evaluated on two data sets. The “efficiency, effectiveness, and noise tolerance of this search strategy were confirmed to be better than those of a full search, a category-based search, and a cluster-based search with nonprobabilistic clustering.
Development of a combined In-Cell ELISA and flow cytometry method for quantification of uptake of PEGylated nanoparticles by Raw264.7 and HepG2 cells

Cancer is one of today’s most common causes of human mortality. For long, chemotherapeutics has been a conventional treatment of the disease, but due to its low precision and high frequency of side effects, this treatment has been highly debated. Nanosized particles, so called nanoparticles (NPs), have emerged as a promising tool for cancer treatment, due to their ability of selectively reaching tumor sites. Developing biocompatible NPs has turned out to be challenging, due to the particles’ tendency of interacting with proteins and immune cells present throughout the blood, interactions further leading to removal of the NPs from the bloodstream. This removal strongly reduces the circulation half-life of NPs in the blood, something that in turn reduces the therapeutic efficacy of the particles. Coating of NPs is often used as a tool for increasing the half-life of the particles in the blood. By attaching coating molecules to the surface of the NPs, protein interaction and subsequent removal of the particles from the bloodstream can be reduced. Polyethylene glycol (PEG) is one of the most common polymers used for coating of NPs. The main goal of this project was to study whether coating degree and PEG length of NPs had an impact on the uptake of these particles by Raw264.7 (macrophage cell line) and HepG2 (hepatocyte cell line) cells. To study the impact of coating on cellular uptake, organosilicophosphonate core NPs were coated with PEG of three different lengths, each at two different coating degrees. The coated NPs were characterized with respect to size, pH, charge, coating degree and tendency to aggregate in culture media. Analytical techniques such as gel permeation chromatography (GPC), dynamic light scattering (DLS), zeta potential measurements and inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES) were used for characterization of the particles. Uptake of PEG coated as well as bare NPs by Raw264.7 and HepG2 cells was quantified by developing and using a combined method constituting In-Cell enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (In-Cell ELISA), ELISA and flow cytometry. Finally, the intracellular distribution of NPs in Raw264.7 cells was studied using fluorescence microscopy. Indicatively, coating degree as well as PEG length had an impact on the cellular uptake of NPs. NPs coated with long-length PEG showed a lower uptake, compared to NPs coated with short-length PEG. In addition, NPs coated with a high amount of PEG showed a lower uptake than NPs coated with a low amount of PEG. Preliminary indications of differences in intracellular distribution of PEG coated NPs in Raw264.7 cells were seen. (Less)
Reactive target-tracking control with obstacle avoidance of unicycle-type mobile robots in a dynamic environment

This paper proposes a new reactive control design for unicycle-type mobile robots with limited sensor range to track targets while avoiding static and moving obstacles in a dynamically evolving environment. With the relative motion among the mobile robot, targets, and obstacles formulated in polar coordinates, kinematic control laws achieving target-tracking and obstacle avoidance are synthesized using Lyapunov based technique, and more importantly, the proposed control laws also account for possible kinematic control saturation constraints. Simulation examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control.