Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Potassium Fluxes in Dialyzed Squid Axons

Measurements have been made of K influx in squid giant axons under internal solute control by dialysis. With [ATP]i = 1 µM, [Na]i = 0, K influx was 6 ± 0.6 pmole/cm2 sec; an increase to [ATP]i = 4 mM gave an influx of 8 ± 0.5 pmole/cm2 sec, while [ATP]i 4, [Na]i 80 gave a K influx of 19 ± 0.7 pmole/cm2 sec (all measurements at ∼16°C). Strophanthidin (10 µM) in seawater quantitatively abolished the ATP-dependent increase in K influx. The concentration dependence of ATP-dependent K influx on [ATP]i, [Na]i, and [K]o was measured; an [ATP]i of 30 µM gave a K influx about half that at physiological concentrations (2–3 mM). About 7 mM [Na]i yielded half the K influx found at 80 mM [Na]i. The ATP-dependent K influx responded linearly to [K]o from 1–20 mM and was independent of whether Na, Li, or choline was the principal cation of seawater. Substances tested as possible energy sources for the K pump were acetyl phosphate, phosphoarginine, PEP, and d-ATP. None was effective except d-ATP and this substance gave 70% of the maximal flux only when phosphoarginine or PEP was also present.
User interface distribution in multi-device and multi-user environments with dynamically migrating engines

In this paper we present a framework and associated run-time support for flexible user interface distribution in multi-device and multi-user environments. It supports distribution across dynamic sets of devices, and does not require the use of a fixed server. The distribution updates are processed taking in account device types and user roles. We also report on three example applications and a validation of the presented framework.
The Role of Method Chains and Comments in Software Readability and Comprehension—An Experiment

Software readability and comprehension are important factors in software maintenance. There is a large body of research on software measurement, but the actual factors that make software easier to read or easier to comprehend are not well understood. In the present study, we investigate the role of method chains and code comments in software readability and comprehension. Our analysis comprises data from 104 students with varying programming experience. Readability and comprehension were measured by perceived readability, reading time and performance on a simple cloze test. Regarding perceived readability, our results show statistically significant differences between comment variants, but not between method chain variants. Regarding comprehension, there are no significant differences between method chain or comment variants. Student groups with low and high experience, respectively, show significant differences in perceived readability and performance on the cloze tests. Our results do not show any significant relationships between perceived readability and the other measures taken in the present study. Perceived readability might therefore be insufficient as the sole measure of software readability or comprehension. We also did not find any statistically significant relationships between size and perceived readability, reading time and comprehension.
Ventricular Remodeling and Survival Are More Favorable for Myocarditis Than For Idiopathic Dilated Cardiomyopathy in Childhood: An Outcomes Study From the Pediatric Cardiomyopathy Registry

Background—Myocarditis is a cause of a new-onset dilated cardiomyopathy phenotype in children, with small studies reporting high rates of recovery of left ventricular (LV) function. Methods and Results—The presenting characteristics and outcomes of children with myocarditis diagnosed clinically and with biopsy confirmation (n=119) or with probable myocarditis diagnosed clinically or by biopsy alone (n=253) were compared with children with idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy (n=1123). Characteristics at presentation were assessed as possible predictors of outcomes. The distributions of time to death, transplantation, and echocardiographic normalization in the biopsy-confirmed myocarditis and probable myocarditis groups did not differ (P≥0.5), but both groups differed significantly from the idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy group (all P⩽0.003). In children with myocarditis, lower LV fractional shortening z-score at presentation predicted greater mortality (hazard ratio, 0.85; 95% confidence interval, 0.73 to 0.98; P=0.03) and greater LV posterior wall thickness predicted transplantation (hazard ratio, 1.17; 95% confidence interval, 1.02 to 1.35; P=0.03). In those with decreased LV fractional shortening at presentation, independent predictors of echocardiographic normalization were presentation with an LV end-diastolic dimension z-score >2 (hazard ratio, 0.36; 95% confidence interval, 0.22 to 0.58; P<0.001) and greater septal wall thickness (hazard ratio, 1.16; 95% confidence interval, 1.01 to 1.34; P=0.04). Conclusions—Children with biopsy-confirmed or probable myocarditis had similar proportions of death, transplantation, and echocardiographic normalization 3 years after presentation and better outcomes than those of children with idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy. In children with myocarditis who had impaired LV ejection at presentation, rates of echocardiographic normalization were greater in those without LV dilation and in those with greater septal wall thickness at presentation. Clinical Trial Registration—URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov. Unique identifier: NCT00005391.
Identification of Small Molecule Activators of Cryptochrome

Modulating the Clock Because of the close association of the circadian clock with a wide range of physiological processes, identification of clock-modulating small molecules may prove useful for the treatment of circadian-related disorders, which include circadian sleep disorders, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and metabolic disease. Hirota et al. (p. 1094, published online 12 July) screened for chemical compounds that affected the period of the circadian clock in a human osteosarcoma cell line. A carbazole derivative named KL001 appeared to act by inhibiting proteolytic degradation of the cryptochrome proteins, which in turn caused a lengthening of the circadian period. KL001 also inhibited glucagon-induced gluconeogenesis in primary cultures of mouse hepatocytes. A small molecule binds to a core protein in the circadian clock and slows down time. Impairment of the circadian clock has been associated with numerous disorders, including metabolic disease. Although small molecules that modulate clock function might offer therapeutic approaches to such diseases, only a few compounds have been identified that selectively target core clock proteins. From an unbiased cell-based circadian phenotypic screen, we identified KL001, a small molecule that specifically interacts with cryptochrome (CRY). KL001 prevented ubiquitin-dependent degradation of CRY, resulting in lengthening of the circadian period. In combination with mathematical modeling, our studies using KL001 revealed that CRY1 and CRY2 share a similar functional role in the period regulation. Furthermore, KL001-mediated CRY stabilization inhibited glucagon-induced gluconeogenesis in primary hepatocytes. KL001 thus provides a tool to study the regulation of CRY-dependent physiology and aid development of clock-based therapeutics of diabetes.
The Effects of Running Cadence Manipulation on Plantar Loading in Healthy Runners

Abstract Our purpose was to evaluate effects of cadence manipulation on plantar loading during running. Participants (n=38) ran on a treadmill at their preferred speed in 3 conditions: preferred, 5% increased, and 5% decreased while measured using in-shoe sensors. Data (contact time [CT], peak force [PF], force time integral [FTI], pressure time integral [PTI] and peak pressure [PP]) were recorded for 30 right footfalls. Multivariate analysis was performed to detect differences in loading between cadences in the total foot and 4 plantar regions. Differences in plantar loading occurred between cadence conditions. Total foot CT and PF were lower with a faster cadence, but no total foot PP differences were observed. Faster cadence reduced CT, pressure and force variables in both the heel and metatarsal regions. Increasing cadence did not elevate metatarsal loads; rather, total foot and all regions were reduced when healthy runners increased their cadence. If a 5% increase in cadence from preferred were maintained over each mile run the impulse at the heel would be reduced by an estimated 565 body weights*s (BW*s) and the metatarsals 140–170 BW*s per mile run despite the increased steps taken. Increasing cadence may benefit overuse injuries associated with elevated plantar loading.
Open sourcing nanotechnology research and development: issues and opportunities

The prominent role of software in nanotechnology research and development suggests that open source development methods might offer advantages in improving reliability, performance and accessibility. Open source approaches have shown new opportunities for voluntary cooperation to create and improve complex software. Suitable software licences could be used to promote access, compatibility and sharing of improvements. Many companies currently associated with nanotechnology produce materials, equipment and research and development services, all of which could support open source business models; however, no company yet emphasizes an open source strategy. Some molecular modelling software is already open source or public domain. Software for molecular engineering constitutes an important opportunity for open sourcing, especially if systems architectures encouraging collaboration can be further developed. Analysis suggests that the net impact of open sourcing would be to enhance safety. Initiatives for open sourcing of molecular nanotechnology could be strengthened by coalition building, and appropriate strategies for open source licensing of copyrights and patents. Prepared for the Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology, Bethesda, MD, USA, 3-5 November 2000.
The operator tensor formulation of quantum theory

In this paper, we provide what might be regarded as a manifestly covariant presentation of discrete quantum theory. A typical quantum experiment has a bunch of apparatuses placed so that quantum systems can pass between them. We regard each use of an apparatus, along with some given outcome on the apparatus (a certain detector click or a certain meter reading for example), as an operation. An operation (e.g. Bb2a3a1) can have zero or more quantum systems inputted into it and zero or more quantum systems outputted from it. The operation Bb2a3a1 has one system of type a inputted, and one system of type b and one system of type a outputted. We can wire together operations to form circuits, for example, . Each repeated integer label here denotes a wire connecting an output to an input of the same type. As each operation in a circuit has an outcome associated with it, a circuit represents a set of outcomes that can happen in a run of the experiment. In the operator tensor formulation of quantum theory, each operation corresponds to an operator tensor. For example, the operation Bb2a3a1 corresponds to the operator tensor . Further, the probability for a general circuit is given by replacing operations with corresponding operator tensors as in 1 Repeated integer labels indicate that we multiply in the associated subspace and then take the partial trace over that subspace. Operator tensors must be physical (namely, they must have positive input transpose and satisfy a certain normalization condition).
Regression calibration with instrumental variables for longitudinal models with interaction terms, and application to air pollution studies

In this paper, we derive forms of estimators and associated variances for regression calibration with instrumental variables in longitudinal models that include interaction terms between two unobservable predictors and interactions between these predictors and covariates not measured with error; the inclusion of the latter interactions generalize results we previously reported. The methods are applied to air pollution and health data collected on children with asthma. The new methods allow for the examination of how the relationship between health outcome leukotriene E4 (LTE4, a biomarker of inflammation) and two unobservable pollutant exposures and their interaction are modified by the presence or absence of upper respiratory infections. The pollutant variables include secondhand smoke and ambient (outdoor) fine particulate matter. Simulations verify the accuracy of the proposed methods under various conditions. © 2015 The Authors Environmetrics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
A general non-linear multilevel structural equation mixture model

In the past 2 decades latent variable modeling has become a standard tool in the social sciences. In the same time period, traditional linear structural equation models have been extended to include non-linear interaction and quadratic effects (e.g., Klein and Moosbrugger, 2000), and multilevel modeling (Rabe-Hesketh et al., 2004). We present a general non-linear multilevel structural equation mixture model (GNM-SEMM) that combines recent semiparametric non-linear structural equation models (Kelava and Nagengast, 2012; Kelava et al., 2014) with multilevel structural equation mixture models (Muthén and Asparouhov, 2009) for clustered and non-normally distributed data. The proposed approach allows for semiparametric relationships at the within and at the between levels. We present examples from the educational science to illustrate different submodels from the general framework.
AudioVisual Speech Recognition Using Motion Based Lipreading

This paper presents an audio-visual speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition system. The idea is to extract features from the audio-and the video-stream of a speaking person separately and use them to train a Hidden-Markov-Model based recognizer with the combined feature vectors. While the audio feature extraction follows a classical approach, the visual features are obtained by means of an advanced image processing algorithm which tracks certain regions on the speaker’s lips with high robustness and accuracy. For a self-generated audio-visual database, we compare the recognition rates of audio only, video only and audio-visual based recognition systems. We also compare the results of the audio only and the audiovisual systems under different noise conditions. The work is part of a larger project which aims at a new man-machine interface in the form of a so-called Virtual Personal Assistant which communicates with the user based on the multimodal integration of natural communication channels.
FlexCL: An analytical performance model for OpenCL workloads on flexible FPGAs

The recent adoption of OpenCL programming model by FPGA vendors has realized the function portability of OpenCL workloads on FPGA. However, the poor performance portability prevents its wide adoption. To harness the power of FPGAs using OpenCL programming model, it is advantageous to design an analytical performance model to estimate the performance of OpenCL workloads on FPGAs and provide insights into the performance bottlenecks of OpenCL model on FPGA architecture. To this end, this paper presents FlexCL, an analytical performance model for OpenCL workloads on flexible FPGAs. FlexCL estimates the overall performance by tightly coupling the off-chip global memory and on-chip computation models based on the communication mode. Experiments demonstrate that with respect to RTL-based implementation, the average of absolute error of FlexCL is 9.5% and 8.7% for the Rodinia and PolyBench suite, respectively. Moreover, FlexCL enables rapid exploration of the design space within seconds instead of hours or days.
The role of adipocytes in the modulation of iron metabolism in obesity

A tight relationship between iron deficiency and obesity is known to exist. The chronic low‐grade inflammation that characterizes obesity enhances hepcidin production, the principal regulator of iron availability. Adipose tissue is known to secret interleukin‐6 and leptin that triggers hepcidin production. It was found that adipose tissue also expresses hepcidin and hemojuvelin, a regulator of hepcidin production. These recent findings suggest that adipose tissue may have an important role in erythropoiesis particularly on obesity that is still poorly clarified. This paper discusses these findings and how they can modulate erythropoiesis.
Skeletal muscle insulin resistance in morbid obesity: the role of interleukin-6 and leptin.

BACKGROUND Although insulin resistance in obesity is established, the link between excess body fat and skeletal muscle insulin resistance is obscure. The aim of this study was to investigate whether cytokines secreted from the subcutaneous adipose tissue are related to the sensitivity of glucose metabolism to insulin in skeletal muscle. METHODS A meal was given to 14 obese and 10 non-obese women. Plasma samples were taken for 360 min from a forearm vein and from the radial artery for glucose and insulin measurements. Interleukin-6, leptin, TNFα, resistin and adiponectin were measured preprandially from the radial artery and from the superficial epigastric vein. Forearm blood flow was measured with plethysmography. RESULTS (1) In obese vs non-obese: (a) Glucose uptake by skeletal muscle was decreased (AUC (0-360)369 ± 55 vs. 877 ± 146 μmol/100 g tissue, p=0.001) (b) arterial interleukin-6 (2.5 ± 0.5 vs. 1 ± 0.1 pg/ml, p=0.013) and subcutaneous venous interleukin-6 (5 ± 0.5 vs. 3.4 ± 0.5 pg/ml, p=0.027) were increased (c) arterial leptin (63 ± 7 vs. 5 ± 0.6 ng/ml, p<0.0001) and subcutaneous venous leptin 80 ± 8 vs. 6.5 ± 0.7 ng/ml, p<0.0001) were increased. (2) Arterial interleukin-6 (p=0.002) and subcutaneous venous interleukin-6 (p=0.014) were negatively associated with forearm glucose uptake in obese. (3) No association was found between leptin and forearm glucose uptake, after correcting with fat mass. CONCLUSIONS In morbid obesity: (1) Subcutaneous adipose tissue releases interleukin-6 which could then mediate insulin resistance in skeletal muscle. (2) Although there is increased secretion of leptin by the subcutaneous adipose tissue, leptin levels are not correlated to the sensitivity of glucose metabolism to insulin in muscle.
Timing and Tempo of Early and Successive Adaptive Radiations in Macaronesia

The flora of Macaronesia, which encompasses five Atlantic archipelagos (Azores, Canaries, Madeira, Cape Verde, and Salvage), is exceptionally rich and diverse. Spectacular radiation of numerous endemic plant groups has made the Macaronesian islands an outstanding area for studies of evolution and speciation. Despite intensive investigation in the last 15 years, absolute age and rate of diversification are poorly known for the flora of Macaronesia. Here we report molecular divergence estimates and rates of diversification for five representative, putative rapid radiations of monophyletic endemic plant lineages across the core eudicot clade of flowering plants. Three discrete windows of colonization during the Miocene and early Pliocene are suggested for these lineages, all of which are inferred to have had a single colonization event followed by rapid radiation. Subsequent inter-archipelago dispersal events into Madeira and the Cape Verdes took place very recently during the late Pliocene and Pleistocene after initial diversification on the Canary Islands. The tempo of adaptive radiations differs among the groups, but is relatively rapid compared to continental and other island radiations. Our results demonstrate that opportunity for island colonization and successful radiation may have been constrained to discrete time periods of profound climatic and geological changes in northern African and the Mediterranean.
Effects of exercise on fitness and health of adults with spinal cord injury

Objective: To synthesize and appraise research testing the effects of exercise interventions on fitness, cardiometabolic health, and bone health among adults with spinal cord injury (SCI). Methods: Electronic databases were searched (1980–2016). Included studies employed exercise interventions for a period ≥2 weeks, involved adults with acute or chronic SCI, and measured fitness (cardiorespiratory fitness, power output, or muscle strength), cardiometabolic health (body composition or cardiovascular risk factors), or bone health outcomes. Evidence was synthesized and appraised using Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE). Results: A total of 211 studies met the inclusion criteria (22 acute, 189 chronic). For chronic SCI, GRADE confidence ratings were moderate to high for evidence showing exercise can improve all of the reviewed outcomes except bone health. For acute SCI, GRADE ratings were very low for all outcomes. For chronic SCI, there was low to moderate confidence in the evidence showing that 2–3 sessions/week of upper body aerobic exercise at a moderate to vigorous intensity for 20–40 minutes, plus upper body strength exercise (3 sets of 10 repetitions at 50%–80% 1-repetition maximum for all large muscle groups), can improve cardiorespiratory fitness, power output, and muscle strength. For chronic SCI, there was low to moderate confidence in the evidence showing that 3–5 sessions per week of upper body aerobic exercise at a moderate to vigorous intensity for 20–44 minutes can improve cardiorespiratory fitness, muscle strength, body composition, and cardiovascular risk. Conclusions: Exercise improves fitness and cardiometabolic health of adults with chronic SCI. The evidence on effective exercise types, frequencies, intensities, and durations should be used to formulate exercise guidelines for adults with SCI.
What Do Medical Students Know about Deep Brain Stimulation

Background: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an established therapy for movement disorders. It is currently under investigation in neuropsychiatric disorders. Neurophobia is a common phenomenon that might have a negative impact in medical education. Little is known about medical students' knowledge about DBS when they enter university and what they learn about it during their medical formation. Methods: A 10-item questionnaire was designed. Questions addressed indications for DBS, costs of DBS, complications, the percentage of Parkinson disease (PD) patients who might profit from DBS, etc. Students at Hannover Medical School were asked to complete the questionnaire in the preclinical study period and in the last year of the study. Results: Comparing the “early group” (204 students) and the “advanced group” (162 students), there was a significant gain of knowledge. More common disorders such as PD and tremor were known to be indications for DBS. Knowledge about the impact of DBS on specific symptoms in PD and about DBS targets was limited in both groups. Conclusions: DBS is partly known among medical students in the preclinical phase with a gain of knowledge during further study. Future studies on this topic addressing general practitioners as neurologists are needed to better understand why knowledge on DBS is still limited.
Estimation of Elastic Modulus of Dielectric Elastomer Materials Using Mooney-Rivlin and Ogden Models

Elastomers have low elastic modulus, high specific energy density, light weight, high dielectric constant and high electrical breakdown strength. Due to these properties, elastomers are currently recognized as the future materials for actuator technology and actuators based on these materials are known as dielectric elastomer actuators (DEA). Based on Maxwell stress principle, these actuators transform electric energy directly into mechanical work. Modeling large actuation of this material depends on accurate estimation of E-modulus which varies with strain. In this work, E-modulus values at different strain are estimated based Mooney-Rivlin & Ogden Models. The model predicted values of E-modulus are compared with experimentally estimated values of E-modulus and found to be in good agreement.