Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Elevated Whole-Blood Tissue Factor Procoagulant Activity as a Marker of Restenosis After Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty and Stent Implantation

Background—Experimental data suggest that tissue factor (TF) may induce neointimal hyperplasia after arterial injury. In this study, we investigated the hypothesis that elevated levels of TF in the circulation contribute to the development of restenosis after percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) or stent implantation. Methods and Results—Whole-blood TF procoagulant activity (TF-PCA) was measured using a previously described assay before, at 3 hours after, and at 24 hours after the intervention in 61 patients with stable angina undergoing PTCA (n=20) or stent implantation (n=41). Coronary angiography was performed 4 to 6 months after the intervention, and luminal narrowing ≥50% was defined as restenosis. Whole-blood TF-PCA levels did not correlate with intracellular monocyte tumor necrosis factor-&agr; expression, a marker of activation of these cells. Baseline levels and time course of whole-blood TF-PCA after the intervention were compared in patients who did or did not subsequently develop restenosis. Whole-blood TF-PCA levels did not change significantly in the 24 hours after either intervention. However, in both the PTCA and stent groups, initial TF-PCA was significantly higher in patients who subsequently developed restenosis (P =0.018 and 0.039 compared with those who did not develop restenosis for PTCA and stent groups, respectively). Conclusions—Higher baseline values of whole-blood TF-PCA may be a predictor of restenosis after PTCA and stent implantation.
Human Sleep EEG Analysis Using the Correlation Dimension

Sleep electroencephalograms (EEG) were analyzed by non-linear analysis. Polysomnography (PSG) of nine healthy male subjects was analyzed and the correlation dimension (D2) was calculated. The D2 characterizes the dynamics of the sleep EEG, estimates the degrees of freedom, and describes the complexity of the signal. The mean D2 decreased from the awake stage to stages 1,2,3 and 4 and increased during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. The D2 during each REM sleep stage were high and those during each slow wave sleep stage were low, respectively, for each sleep cycle. The mean D2 of the sleep EEG in the second half of the night was significantly higher than those in the first half of the night. Significant changes were also observed during sleep stage 2, but were not seen during REM sleep and sleep stages 3 and 4. The D2 may be a useful method in the analysis of the entire sleep EEG.
Klebsiella pneumoniae: Going on the Offense with a Strong Defense

SUMMARY Klebsiella pneumoniae causes a wide range of infections, including pneumonias, urinary tract infections, bacteremias, and liver abscesses. Historically, K. pneumoniae has caused serious infection primarily in immunocompromised individuals, but the recent emergence and spread of hypervirulent strains have broadened the number of people susceptible to infections to include those who are healthy and immunosufficient. Furthermore, K. pneumoniae strains have become increasingly resistant to antibiotics, rendering infection by these strains very challenging to treat. The emergence of hypervirulent and antibiotic-resistant strains has driven a number of recent studies. Work has described the worldwide spread of one drug-resistant strain and a host defense axis, interleukin-17 (IL-17), that is important for controlling infection. Four factors, capsule, lipopolysaccharide, fimbriae, and siderophores, have been well studied and are important for virulence in at least one infection model. Several other factors have been less well characterized but are also important in at least one infection model. However, there is a significant amount of heterogeneity in K. pneumoniae strains, and not every factor plays the same critical role in all virulent Klebsiella strains. Recent studies have identified additional K. pneumoniae virulence factors and led to more insights about factors important for the growth of this pathogen at a variety of tissue sites. Many of these genes encode proteins that function in metabolism and the regulation of transcription. However, much work is left to be done in characterizing these newly discovered factors, understanding how infections differ between healthy and immunocompromised patients, and identifying attractive bacterial or host targets for treating these infections.
Lovelace & Babbage and the creation of the 1843 'notes'

Augusta Ada Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage to create a description of Babbage's unbuilt invention, the analytical engine, a highly advanced mechanical calculator often considered a forerunner of the electronic calculating computers of the 20th century. Ada Lovelace's "notes," describing the analytical engine, published in Taylor's scientific memoirs in 1843, contained a ground-breaking description of the possibilities of programming the machine to go beyond number-crunching to "computing" in the wider sense in which we understand the term today. We expand on research first presented by the authors in their documentary film, to dream tomorrow.
Foundations and ruling class elites.

In Margaret Atwood's powerful novel The Handmaid's Tale,1 the heroine Offred, a member of a new class of "two legged wombs" in a dystopian society, often thinks to herself, "Context is all. " Offred reminds us of an important truth: at each moment of our lives our every thought, value, and act? from the most mundane to the most lofty? takes its meaning and purpose from the wider political and social reality that constitutes and conditions us. In her newly reduced circumstances, Offred comes to see that matters beyond one's immediate purview make a great deal of difference with respect to living a more or less free and fully human life. But her realization comes too late. Unlike Offred, feminists have long recognized as imperative the task of seeking out, defining, and criticizing the complex reality that governs the ways we think, the values we hold, and the relationships we share, especially with regard to gender. If context is all, then feminism in its various guises is committed to uncovering what is all around us and to revealing the power relations that constitute the creatures we become. "The personal is the political" is the credo of this critical practice.
8.2% of the Human Genome Is Constrained: Variation in Rates of Turnover across Functional Element Classes in the Human Lineage

Ten years on from the finishing of the human reference genome sequence, it remains unclear what fraction of the human genome confers function, where this sequence resides, and how much is shared with other mammalian species. When addressing these questions, functional sequence has often been equated with pan-mammalian conserved sequence. However, functional elements that are short-lived, including those contributing to species-specific biology, will not leave a footprint of long-lasting negative selection. Here, we address these issues by identifying and characterising sequence that has been constrained with respect to insertions and deletions for pairs of eutherian genomes over a range of divergences. Within noncoding sequence, we find increasing amounts of mutually constrained sequence as species pairs become more closely related, indicating that noncoding constrained sequence turns over rapidly. We estimate that half of present-day noncoding constrained sequence has been gained or lost in approximately the last 130 million years (half-life in units of divergence time, d1/2 = 0.25–0.31). While enriched with ENCODE biochemical annotations, much of the short-lived constrained sequences we identify are not detected by models optimized for wider pan-mammalian conservation. Constrained DNase 1 hypersensitivity sites, promoters and untranslated regions have been more evolutionarily stable than long noncoding RNA loci which have turned over especially rapidly. By contrast, protein coding sequence has been highly stable, with an estimated half-life of over a billion years (d1/2 = 2.1–5.0). From extrapolations we estimate that 8.2% (7.1–9.2%) of the human genome is presently subject to negative selection and thus is likely to be functional, while only 2.2% has maintained constraint in both human and mouse since these species diverged. These results reveal that the evolutionary history of the human genome has been highly dynamic, particularly for its noncoding yet biologically functional fraction.
Auditory-Induced Emotion Mediates Perceptual Categorization of Everyday Sounds

Research has shown that emotion categorization plays an important role in perception and categorization in the visual domain. In the present paper, we investigated the role of auditory-induced emotions for auditory perception. We further investigated whether the emotional responses mediate other perceptual judgments of sounds. In an experiment, participants either rated general dissimilarities between sounds or dissimilarities of specific aspects of sounds. The results showed that the general perceptual salience map could be explained by both the emotional responses to, and perceptual aspects of, the sounds. Importantly, the perceptual aspects were mediated by emotional responses. Together these results show that emotions are an integral part of auditory perception that is used as the intuitive basis for categorizing everyday sounds.
The prognostic role of post-induction FDG-PET in patients with follicular lymphoma: a subset analysis from the FOLL05 trial of the Fondazione Italiana Linfomi (FIL).

BACKGROUND [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose-positron emission tomography (PET) is emerging as a strong diagnostic and prognostic tool in follicular lymphoma (FL) patients. PATIENTS AND METHODS In a subset analysis of the FOLL05 trial (NCT00774826), we investigated the prognostic role of post-induction PET (PI-PET) scan. Patients were eligible to this study if they had a PI-PET scan carried out within 3 months from the end of induction immunochemotherapy. Progression-free survival (PFS) was the primary study end point. RESULTS A total of 202 patients were eligible and analysed for this study. The median age was 55 years (range 33-75). Overall, PI-PET was defined as positive in 49 (24%) patients. Conventional response assessment with CT scan was substantially modified by PET: 15% (22/145) of patients considered as having a complete response (CR) after CT were considered as having partial response (PR) after PI-PET and 53% (30/57) patients considered as having a PR after CT were considered as a CR after PI-PET. With a median follow-up of 34 months, the 3-year PFS was 66% and 35%, respectively, for patients with negative and positive PI-PET (P<0.001). At multivariate analysis, PI-PET (hazard ratio 2.57, 95% confidence interval 1.52-4.34, P<0.001) was independent of conventional response, FLIPI and treatment arm. Also, the prognostic role of PI-PET was maintained within each FLIPI risk group. CONCLUSIONS In FL patients, PI-PET substantially modifies response assessment and is strongly predictive for the risk of progression. PET should be considered in further updates of response criteria.
Dietary apple pectic oligosaccharide improves gut barrier function of rotavirus-challenged weaned pigs by increasing antioxidant capacity of enterocytes

Rotavirus can lead to decreasing gut barrier function and diarrhea of children and young animals. Apple pectic oligosaccharide treatment reduced diarrhea in rotavirus-infected piglets. This study was conducted to explore whether apple pectic oligosaccharide administration could protect gut barrier function of piglets against rotavirus infection. A total of 28 crossbred weaned barrows were allotted into 2 treatments fed the diets supplementing 0 and 200 mg/kg apple pectic oligosaccharide. Half of pigs in each diet treatment were challenged by rotavirus on d 15. The whole duration of this experiment is 18 days. Rotavirus challenge increased average diarrhea index, and impaired microbiota in cecal digesta, and histology, expressions of tight-junction proteins, mucins and glucagon like peptide-2 concentrations, antioxidant capacity, endoplasmic reticulum stress, autophagy and apoptosis in jejunal mucosa of piglets. However, dietary apple pectic oligosaccharide supplementation relieved effects of rotavirus challenge on diarrhea, gut health, and antioxidant capacity, endoplasmic reticulum stress, autophagy and apoptosis of jejunal mucosa in piglets. These results suggest that apple pectic oligosaccharide administration can prevent diarrhea and damage of gut barrier function via improving antioxidant capacity that might reduce endoplasmic reticulum stress, autophagy and apoptosis of intestinal epithelial cells in rotavirus-infected piglets.
Gcn4p and Novel Upstream Activating Sequences Regulate Targets of the Unfolded Protein Response

Eukaryotic cells respond to accumulation of unfolded proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) by activating the unfolded protein response (UPR), a signal transduction pathway that communicates between the ER and the nucleus. In yeast, a large set of UPR target genes has been experimentally determined, but the previously characterized unfolded protein response element (UPRE), an upstream activating sequence (UAS) found in the promoter of the UPR target gene KAR2, cannot account for the transcriptional regulation of most genes in this set. To address this puzzle, we analyzed the promoters of UPR target genes computationally, identifying as candidate UASs short sequences that are statistically overrepresented. We tested the most promising of these candidate UASs for biological activity, and identified two novel UPREs, which are necessary and sufficient for UPR activation of promoters. A genetic screen for activators of the novel motifs revealed that the transcription factor Gcn4p plays an essential and previously unrecognized role in the UPR: Gcn4p and its activator Gcn2p are required for induction of a majority of UPR target genes during ER stress. Both Hac1p and Gcn4p bind target gene promoters to stimulate transcriptional induction. Regulation of Gcn4p levels in response to changing physiological conditions may function as an additional means to modulate the UPR. The discovery of a role for Gcn4p in the yeast UPR reveals an additional level of complexity and demonstrates a surprising conservation of the signaling circuit between yeast and metazoan cells.
Trust and matching algorithms for selecting suitable agents

This article addresses the problem of finding suitable agents to collaborate with for a given interaction in distributed open systems, such as multiagent and P2P systems. The agent in question is given the chance to describe its confidence in its own capabilities. However, since agents may be malicious, misinformed, suffer from miscommunication, and so on, one also needs to calculate how much trusted is that agent. This article proposes a novel trust model that calculates the expectation about an agent's future performance in a given context by assessing both the agent's willingness and capability through the semantic comparison of the current context in question with the agent's performance in past similar experiences. The proposed mechanism for assessing trust may be applied to any real world application where past commitments are recorded and observations are made that assess these commitments, and the model can then calculate one's trust in another with respect to a future commitment by assessing the other's past performance.
Importance of serum adipokine and ghrelin levels in patients with Crimean‐Congo hemorrhagic fever

Crimean‐Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) may present with a mild clinical course or else exhibit a severe profile with potentially fatal hemorrhaging. The pathogenesis of the disease has not yet been well described. Cytokines have recently been investigated in order to explain the pathogenesis. The latest reports show that adipokines are powerful inflammation modulators. This study investigated the effect of adipokines (resistin, leptin, and adiponectin) and ghrelin on disease severity in CCHF patients by testing their serum levels. This retrospective study was conducted with patients with CCHF hospitalized at the Karadeniz Technical University, Medical Faculty in Turkey. Patients were divided into severe and non‐severe groups. Serum adipokine levels of patients with CCHF were measured using enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Fifty‐three patients with confirmed CCHF were investigated. Twenty‐five (47.2%) of these patients constituted the severe group. Serum resistin levels in the severe and non‐severe groups were 108.9 ± 24.7 ng/ml and 77.5 ± 27.7 ng/ml (P < 0.001), leptin levels 15.5 ± 9.8 and 11.2 ± 5.1 ng/ml (P = 0.074), adiponectin levels 26.8 ± 18.9 and 27.4 ± 16.3 ng/ml (P = 0.903) and ghrelin levels 57.1 ± 48.7 and 200.9 ± 182.7 ng/ml (P = 0.001), all respectively. This study confirms that significant changes in serum levels of resistin and ghrelin take place in severe CCHF. J. Med. Virol. 87:310–314, 2015. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
A Novel Technique For High Speed PLC Systems

Power line communications (PLC) use the existing electrical power line networks for telecommunication purposes. It exploits the widespread electric power infrastructure to provide high-speed broadband multimedia services to and within the home or office. However Characteristics of electrical power grids present some technical challenges for high-speed data communications. Noise at a power outlet is the sum of noises produced by different appliances connected to the line producing impulsive noise and other narrow-band interference. Communication over power lines was restricted to low-speed functions such as remote metering and operations management that serve the needs of power supply utilities. Performance of OFDM in an appropriate power line channel model with the addition of a properly modeled noise environment investigated. A novel approach to mitigate the periodic impulsive noise of the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) -based power-line communications (PLC) system is introduced. To improve the receiver’s ability to reduce the effect of impulsive noise, a technique that combines time domain nonlinearities with a frequency-domain approach has been proposed.The results show that the proposed periodic impulsive noise mitigation technique is simple and effective for the OFDM-based PLC system.
Mechanism of resistance to silver ions in Klebsiella pneumoniae

The uptake of silver by an experimentally derived silver-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae strain was three to four times lower than the uptake by a susceptible strain. Spheroplasts of the two strains showed no difference in uptake. AgNO3 at a concentration of 40 micrograms/ml decreased the succinate dehydrogenase activity in susceptible and resistant strains by 100 and 18%, respectively. More than one resistance mechanism may be involved.
On the PAC-Bayes Bound Calculation based on Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space

PAC-Bayes risk bound combining Bayesian theory and structure risk minimization for stochastic classifiers has been con- sidered as a framework for deriving some of the tightest generalization bounds. A major issue for calculating the bound is the unknown prior and posterior distributions of the concept space. In this paper, we formulated the concept space as Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) using the kernel method. We further demonstrated that the RKHS can be constructed using the linear combination of kernels, and the support vectors and their corresponding weights of SVM outputs describe the complexity of concept space. Therefore the calculation of PAC-Bayes bound can be simulated by sampling weights of support vectors in RKHS. The experimental results using random and Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplings showed that the simulation is reasonable and effective in practice.
A Fast SVC-Based Channel-Recommendation System for an IPTV on a Cloud and P2P Hybrid Platform

In this paper, we propose a fast scalable video coding (SVC)-based channel-recommendation system for IPTV on a Cloud and peer-to-peer (P2P) hybrid platform. When a user switches channels, the system redirects the client to the cloud network and delivers the base layer of SVC streams to the client.The system provides a multichannel preview window with a small resolution and a fast channelswitching mechanism without additional traffic. After a user has selected a channel, the system redirects the client to the P2P network and sends the necessary enhancement layer streams, so that the client can receive high-quality video. Because of the fact that the recommendation system is known as an effective approach for enhancing the efficiency of channel previews, we propose a novel recommendation system based on the feedback loser tree (FLT) algorithm. The FLT algorithm can be trained by the user’s historical log, and attempt to find the user’s preferred channels quickly. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed platform can obtain a higher peak signal to noise ratio quality than the original P2P networks, and the proposed system can help users find their favorite channels in only 2 to 5 switching pages. The performance of the proposed system is ∼75% better than that of the high-performance multichannel preview system.
Urinary Metabolites of Organophosphate Flame Retardants: Temporal Variability and Correlations with House Dust Concentrations

Background: A reduction in the use of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) because of human health concerns may result in an increased use of and human exposure to organophosphate flame retardants (OPFRs). Human exposure and health studies of OPFRs are lacking. Objectives: We sought to define the degree of temporal variability in urinary OPFR metabolites in order to inform epidemiologic study design, and to explore a potential primary source of exposure by examining the relationship between OPFRs in house dust and their metabolites in urine. Methods: Nine repeated urine samples were collected from 7 men over the course of 3 months and analyzed for bis(1,3-dichloro-2-propyl) phosphate (BDCPP) and diphenyl phosphate (DPP), metabolites of the OPFRs tris(1,3-dichloro-2-propyl) phosphate (TDCPP) and triphenyl phosphate (TPP), respectively. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) were calculated to characterize temporal reliability. Paired house dust and urine samples were collected from 45 men. Results: BDCPP was detected in 91% of urine samples, and DPP in 96%. Urinary BDCPP showed moderate-to-strong temporal reliability (ICC range, 0.55–0.72). ICCs for DPP were lower, but moderately reliable (range, 0.35–0.51). There was a weak [Spearman r (rS) = 0.31] but significant (p = 0.03) correlation between urinary BDCPP and TDCPP concentrations in house dust that strengthened when nondetects (rS = 0.47) were excluded. There was no correlation between uncorrected DPP and TPP measured in house dust (rS < 0.1). Conclusions: Household dust may be an important source of exposure to TDCPP but not TPP. Urinary concentrations of BDCPP and DPP were moderately to highly reliable within individuals over 3 months.
Real-time multi-channel system for neural spikes acquisition and detection

A real-time multi-channel system for neural spikes acquisition and detection is presented in this paper. It incorporates self-designed micro-machined silicon recording probes, specific multi-channel biomedical amplifiers, analog-to-digital converters and a digital signal processor. The system can inspect 32 channels of neural signals, detect the spikes simultaneously, and display 1 channel of the original signals and 32 channels of detection results on the PC screen. The function of the system is verified in a saline environment and the accuracy of the spike detection is 95%. Such system can be used as a head stage for free-moving and long-term recording, and even closed-loop recording and stimulating applications.