Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vitamin D Deficiency in Children and Adolescents

Objective Vitamin D deficiency is an important health problem in both developed and developing countries. Recent reports on the extraskeletal effects of vitamin D have led to increased interest in prevalence studies on states of deficiency/insufficiency of vitamin D. The aim of this study was to determine the frequency of vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency in children and adolescents residing in Ankara, Turkey and to investigate the factors associated with low vitamin D status. Methods: A total of 440 children and adolescents aged between 0 and 16 years were enrolled in this study. The subjects were divided into three groups according to their vitamin D status (deficiency ≤15 ng/mL; insufficiency: 15-20 ng/mL; sufficiency ≥20 ng/mL) and also according to their age (preschool<5 years; middle childhood: 5-10 years; adolescence: 11-16 years). Results: Overall, 40% of the subjects were found to have 25 hydroxy vitamin D [25(OH)D] levels of less than 20 ng/mL. The levels indicated a deficiency state in 110 subjects (25%) and insufficiency - in 66 (15%). The rate of vitamin D deficiency was higher in girls, regardless of age. 25(OH)D levels correlated negatively with age (r=-0.48, p<0.001), body mass index (BMI) (r=-0.20, p=0.001) and intact parathyroid hormone (iPTH) level (r=-0.31, p=0.001). A positive correlation was observed between 25(OH)D and serum ferritin levels (r=0.15, p=0.004). Conclusions: The high frequency of vitamin D deficiency in childhood (especially among adolescent girls) indicates a need for supplementation and nutritional support. Conflict of interest:None declared.
IntellBatt: Towards smarter battery design

Battery lifetime and safety are primary concerns in the design of battery operated systems. Lifetime management is typically supervised by the system via battery-aware task scheduling, while safety is managed on the battery side via features deployed into smart batteries. This research proposes IntellBatt; an intelligent battery cell array based novel design of a multi-cell battery that offloads battery lifetime management onto the battery. By deploying a battery cell array management unit, IntellBatt exploits various battery related characteristics such as charge recovery effect, to enhance battery lifetime and ensure safe operation. This is achieved by using real-time cell status information to selects cells to deliver the required load current, without the involvement of a complex task scheduler on the host system. The proposed design was evaluated via simulation using accurate cell models and real experimental traces from a portable DVD player. The use of a multi-cell design enhanced battery lifetime by 22% in terms of battery discharge time. Besides a standalone deployment, IntellBatt can also be combined with existing battery-aware task scheduling approaches to further enhance battery lifetime.
Plasma Carburizing of AISI 316L Austenitic Stainless Steel at Low Temperature

Plasma carburizing of AISI 316L austenitic stainless steel was carried out at low temperature to improve the surface hardness without degradation of its corrosion resistance. The microstructure, surface hardness, phase composition and corrosion property of the hardened layer were analyzed. The experimental results show that high-quality hardened layers can be produced at the carburizing temperatures between 673 K and 773 K, which have not only high surface hardness and wear resistance, but also good corrosion resistance. All of the hardened layers display a precipitation-free structure or Sc phase. The chromium carbides began to precipitate in the hardened layer as soon as the carburizing temperature is higher than 823 K. The precipitation of chromium carbides will lead to deterioration in corrosion resistance of the hardened stainless steel.
Testing the suitability of polynomial models in errors-in-variables problems

A low-degree polynomial model for a response curve is used commonly in practice. It generally incorporates a linear or quadratic function of the covariate. In this paper we suggest methods for testing the goodness of fit of a general polynomial model when there are errors in the covariates. There, the true covariates are not directly observed, and conventional bootstrap methods for testing are not applicable. We develop a new approach, in which deconvolution methods are used to estimate the distribution of the covariates under the null hypothesis, and a "wild" or moment-matching bootstrap argument is employed to estimate the distribution of the experimental errors (distinct from the distribution of the errors in covariates). Most of our attention is directed at the case where the distribution of the errors in covariates is known, although we also discuss methods for estimation and testing when the covariate error distribution is estimated. No assumptions are made about the distribution of experimental error, and, in particular, we depart substantially from conventional parametric models for errors-in-variables problems.
Selective Perceptual Phase Entrainment to Speech Rhythm in the Absence of Spectral Energy Fluctuations

Perceptual phase entrainment improves speech intelligibility by phase-locking the brain's high-excitability and low-excitability phases to relevant or irrelevant events in the speech input. However, it remains unclear whether phase entrainment to speech can be explained by a passive “following” of rhythmic changes in sound amplitude and spectral content or whether entrainment entails an active tracking of higher-level cues: in everyday speech, rhythmic fluctuations in low-level and high-level features always covary. Here, we resolve this issue by constructing novel speech/noise stimuli with intelligible speech but without systematic changes in sound amplitude and spectral content. The probability of detecting a tone pip, presented to human listeners at random moments during our speech/noise stimuli, was significantly modulated by the rhythmic changes in high-level information. Thus, perception can entrain to the speech rhythm even without concurrent fluctuations in sound amplitude or spectral content. Strikingly, the actual entrainment phase depended on the tone-pip frequency, with tone pips within and beyond the principal frequency range of the speech sound modulated in opposite fashion. This result suggests that only those neural populations processing the actually presented frequencies are set to their high-excitability phase, whereas other populations are entrained to the opposite, low-excitability phase. Furthermore, we show that the perceptual entrainment is strongly reduced when speech intelligibility is abolished by presenting speech/noise stimuli in reverse, indicating that linguistic information plays an important role for the observed perceptual entrainment.
The Cloudlet Bazaar Dynamic Markets for the Small Cloud

The recent emergence of the small cloud (SC), both in concept and in practice, has been driven mainly by issues related to service cost and complexity of commercial cloud providers (e.g., Amazon) employing massive data centers. However, the resource inelasticity problem faced by the SCs due to their relatively scarce resources (e.g., virtual machines) might lead to a potential degradation of customer QoS and loss of revenue. A proposed solution to this problem recommends the sharing of resources between competing SCs to alleviate the resource inelasticity issues that might arise [1]. Based on this idea, a recent effort ([2]) proposed SC-Share, a performance-driven static market model for competitive small cloud environments that results in an efficient market equilibrium jointly optimizing customer QoS satisfaction and SC revenue generation. However, an important non-obvious question still remains to be answered, without which SC sharing markets may not be guaranteed to sustain in the long-run - is it still possible to achieve a stable market efficient state when the supply of SC resources is dynamic in nature and there is a variation of customer demand over time? In this paper, we address the problem of efficient market design for SC resource sharing in dynamic environments. We answer our previous question in the affirmative through the use of Arrow and Hurwicz's disequilibrium process [3], [4] in economics, and the gradient play technique in game theory that allows us to iteratively converge upon efficient and stable market equilibria
A highly reconfigurable system emulator for testing AC microgrids

Microgrids are seen to play an ever increasing role in providing clean energy which is essential to ensure sustainable and equitable growth. A variety of challenges need to be overcome for these microgrids to be successful, varying from stability, power quality issues to protection and management. Various control algorithms are actively being proposed, and emerging challenges still being researched upon. To verify these, there has been a lot of interest related to the aspect of testing of these systems. The ever increasing complexity of control mechanisms, invoke the need for faster, yet safer and reliable testing methods. These should not compromise on the degree of detail and at the same time be economical, requiring the minimum testing time. Real-time emulation could hold the key to provide the realistic testing environments for the development of products and control algorithms. Typically in literature, multiple converters are used for individual component emulation of a system such as a microgrid (hardware test bed cluster). This paper presents the work on a highly reconfigurable microgrid system emulator, based on a single converter for the testing of a complete microgrid, at any node selected by the user. The modeling and control aspects have been discussed and the simulation results for its working considering the case of a simple two distributed generator (DG) based microgrid is presented.
Draft genome sequence of strain HIMB100, a cultured representative of the SAR116 clade of marine Alphaproteobacteria

Strain HIMB100 is a planktonic marine bacterium in the class Alphaproteobacteria. This strain is of interest because it is one of the first known isolates from a globally ubiquitous clade of marine bacteria known as SAR116 within the family Rhodospirillaceae. Here we describe preliminary features of the organism, together with the draft genome sequence and annotation. This is the second genome sequence of a member of the SAR116 clade. The 2,458,945 bp genome contains 2,334 protein-coding and 42 RNA genes.
Attenuated Hepatic Glucose Production but Unimpaired Lipolysis in Newborn Infants of Mothers with Diabetes

In infants of diabetic mothers, maternal-fetal hyperglycemia induces fetal hyperinsulinemia, which may be sustained for several hours after birth. The inhibitory effect of insulin on glycogenolysis, gluconeogenesis, and lipolysis increases the risk of hypoglycemia in these infants. Eight term infants of diabetic mothers were studied between 3.9 and 8.5 h postnatally. The maternal diabetes was considered well controlled as judged by self-monitoring of blood glucose and Hb A1c. Neonatal plasma concentrations of glucose, glycerol, and insulin were monitored and averaged 2.7 ± 0.7 mM, 371 ± 116μM, and 15.9 ± 2.8 μU·mL-1, respectively. Stable isotope-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry techniques were used to determine glucose and glycerol turnover rates and gluconeogenesis from glycerol in the infants. The appearance rates of glucose and glycerol averaged 20.0 ± 5.4 μmol·kg-1·min-1 (3.6 ± 1.0 mg·kg-1·min-1), and 8.9 ± 2. 3μmol·kg-1·min-1, respectively. The fraction of glycerol appearance rate converted to glucose was 68.2 ± 17.3%, which accounted for 15.5 ± 4.6% of glucose production. Thus, compared with healthy term infants studied previously under identical conditions, the infants of diabetic mothers had higher insulin concentrations and attenuated glucose production. Despite increased insulin concentrations, lipolysis was unimpaired, and the gluconeogenic contribution from glycerol was higher than in the healthy newborns.
Determining Force-Closure Grasps Reachable by a Given Hand

Abstract The paper presents an approach to find contact points on an object surface that are reachable by a given hand and such that the resulting grasp satisfies the force-closure condition. This is a very common problem that still requires a practical solution. The proposed method is based on the computation of a set of independent contact regions on the object boundary such that a finger contact on each region produces a force-closure grasp, and then this set of regions is iteratively recomputed while looking for a set of contact points that are reachable by a given hand. The search is done guided by a cost function that indicates the proximity of the hand fingertips to a candidate set of grasping contact points. The approach has been implemented for the Schunk Anthropomorphic Hand and planar objects, and application examples are included to illustrate its performance.
Estimation of homogenized Young’s modulus of silicone/phosphor composite considering random dispersion and size variation of phosphor particles

Silicone/phosphor composite is a functional material used in light-emitting diode packages. In this paper, Young’s modulus of silicone/phosphor composite is studied experimentally and investigated with a multi-sphere random unit cell model. Experimental samples of pure silicone and four groups of silicone/phosphor composites are prepared and subjected to tensile loading. Young’s moduli of the samples are calculated from tensile curves. The results indicate that composite modulus increases with increasing content of phosphor, and silicone matrix is stiffened by the phosphor particles. In the simulation part, unit cell model is utilized and serves as the statistical representation of the original composite. The employed three-dimensional random unit cell model consists of silicone matrix and randomly dispersed phosphor particles with various sizes. Modeling results from random unit cell model are compared with experimental results and theoretical predictions. It is found that, with increasing volume fractions of phosphor, random dispersion and size variation of phosphor have increasingly significant influence on homogenized Young's modulus of silicone/phosphor composite.
Control of myogenic differentiation by fibroblast growth factor is mediated by position in the G1 phase of the cell cycle

We have used the expression of the muscle form of creatine phosphokinase (M-CPK) to assay myogenic differentiation in the cloned muscle cell line BC3Hl. BC3Hl cells express M-CPK when arrested in the G0 portion of the cell cycle. Addition of the anionic form of brain fibroblast growth factor (B-FGF) rapidly represses synthesis of M-CPK with a half-time of 7 h. Even though B-FGF is not mitogenic for the cells, it causes quiescent BC3Hl cells to exit from the G0 portion of the cell cycle, and to accumulate at a new restriction point approximately 4 to 6 h in the G1 portion of the cell cycle. The repression of M-CPK synthesis by B-FGF is reversible upon removal of B- FGF, and cells which have re-initiated expression of M-CPK have also returned to the G0 portion of the cell cycle. The primary control of M- CPK expression by B-FGF appears to be at the level of gene transcription. We conclude that arrest of cells at G0 but not at other positions in the G1 phase of the cell cycle provides permissive conditions for the expression of muscle-specific proteins, and that defined polypeptide growth factors, in this case B-FGF, are important in the control of the expression of muscle-specific proteins.
A robust modified model predictive control (MMPC) based on Lyapunov function for three-phase active-front-end (AFE) rectifier

This paper proposes a robust modified model predictive control (MMPC) algorithm based on Lyapunov function for a three-phase active-front-end (AFE) rectifier in order to improve the system performance as well as ensure the stability, robustness, and fast dynamic response. The proposed control technique utilizes the discrete behavior of the converter considering the unavoidable quantization errors between the controller and the control actions selected from the finite control set of the AFE rectifier. The proposed MMPC method increases the dynamic response by avoiding the calculation of future current for every switching states. Moreover, the nonlinear system stability of the proposed MMPC technique is ensured by a 2.5 kW experimental system and the direct Lyapunov method. Detailed robustness analysis with experimental parameter variations are provided to show the efficacy of the proposed Lyapunov function based MMPC technique.
Markers of oxidative stress and aging in Duchene muscular dystrophy patients and the possible ameliorating effect of He:Ne laser.

UNLABELLED Replicative aging and oxidative stress are two plausible theories explaining the etiology of muscular dystrophy. The first theory indicates that replicative aging of myogenic cells (satellite cells), owing to enhanced myofiber turnover, is a plausible explanation of the progression of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). The oxidative stress theory indicates that failure of muscle regeneration to keep up with the ongoing apoptosis and necrosis following oxidative stress, that normally associates muscular exercise, leads to muscle atrophy in DMD. To test for these two theories, markers of replicative aging and oxidative stress were assessed in the blood of 30 DMD patients vs. 20 normal healthy age matching controls. Markers of replicative aging showed significantly lower telomerase activity, significantly increased expression of receptors for advanced glycation end products (RAGEs) mRNA and Bax mRNA (an apoptotic gene) in DMD compared to controls. There was a significant increase in markers of oxidative stress among DMD patients compared to controls, measured in terms of increased apoptotic percentage in circulating mononuclear cells, increased lipid peroxidation measured in terms of plasma malondialdehyde (MDA) and increased protein carbonyls. Levels of plasma nitric oxide (NO), which neutralizes oxygen radicals, and expression of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) mRNA in neutrophils was significantly lower among DMD compared to controls. Biostimulation of WBC by helium neon (He:Ne) laser irradiation induced a significant increase in the expression of iNOS mRNA and plasma NO levels, but still at a lower level compared to controls. He:Ne laser irradiation induced a marked decrease in markers of oxidative stress among DMD patients compared to their level before irradiation, measured in terms of decreased plasma protein carbonyls, decreased plasma MDA, and decreased apoptosis percentage. CONCLUSION This study points to that oxidative stress is the prime cause for muscle degeneration in DMD and points out to the possible ameliorative effect of He:Ne laser on this
Potentials of Tracking and Tracing Technologies - The Perspective of IT Decision Makers in Germany

RFID-technologies have been described as major enabling technologies for automated, contactless data collection. We conveyed a quantitative survey of 463 executives across various industries in Germany to investigate about the perceived strategic importance of RFID among IT decision makers,current RFID usage, companies' intentions to invest in RFID and visions of RFID application. The survey results showed that: - RFID is currently not very widespread. - The importance of RFID will rise significantly over the next few years. However, RFID is neither considered a strategic issue, nor a topic of high priority. - Companies? RFID budgets will rise over the next 5 years and IT decision makers are willing to invest in the technology. - Only a minority seems to consider RFID as a source for competitive advantage. - Companies do not seem to worry much about issues such as data security, or integration of RFID systems into their IT landscape. - The high-level concepts often associated with RFID, above all the ? real time enterprise? or the ? internet of things? , have not yet entered companies? RFID visions. The greater part of them has not yet thought about RFID at all.
There was more to osmolyte selection than just osmotic balance

[Figure][1] Jason Treberg discusses the impact of Paul Yancey et al.'s classic paper ‘Living with water stress: evolution of osmolyte systems', published in Science in 1982. Occasionally a hypothesis comes along that is so broadly applicable to biological systems that it borders on
Architecture to Summarize Patient-Level Data Across Borders and Countries

Translational medicine is becoming fundamental in promoting information flow between basic research and clinical practice, and in improving patients' health. The need for efficient systems to process and share information from multiple sources--including distinct areas of medicine--is a pressing need in biomedical research. Nevertheless, healthcare information systems are fragmented over different databases, medical institutions, and geographical locations. There are already several approaches to tackle this problem based on centralized or distributed solutions. Nonetheless, mainly due to privacy reasons, these models only work for specific silos. In this paper, we present a new ecosystem for connecting database owners and researchers. Our approach consists of gathering, via a common fingerprint, an extensive characterization of dispersed databases. This fingerprint typically contains high-level aggregated information addressing questions at a population level and allowing, for instance, quick identification of databases with data that may help to answer a specific research question. This work is being conducted in the context of EMIF (European Medical Information Framework), an IMI (The Innovative Medicines Initiative) joint undertaking funded project, wherein the Catalogue is being used to collect data from cohorts and Electronic Health Record systems of several European countries.
DNA Analysis and Document Examination: The Impact of Each Technique on Respective Analyses

Threatening letters, counterfeit documents, and anonymous notes can commonly be encountered in criminal situations. Such handwritten documents may encourage DNA to transfer from the writer's hands and lower arms when these areas come into contact with the document. As any DNA transferred is likely to be at a low level, sensitive low copy number (LCN) DNA analysis can be employed for testing document exhibits. In this study, we determine locations on the document that are most commonly touched during writing and handling and compare DNA recovery from these sites. We describe the impact of DNA sampling on subsequent document examination techniques including the ESDA® and likewise the effect of the ESDA® and two other document examination techniques on subsequent DNA analysis. The findings from this study suggest that DNA results can be obtained through targeted sampling of document evidence, but that care is required when ordering these examination strategies.