Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ca2+-sensors and ROS-GC: interlocked sensory transduction elements: a review

From its initial discovery that ROS-GC membrane guanylate cyclase is a mono-modal Ca2+-transduction system linked exclusively with the photo-transduction machinery to the successive finding that it embodies a remarkable bimodal Ca2+ signaling device, its widened transduction role in the general signaling mechanisms of the sensory neuron cells was envisioned. A theoretical concept was proposed where Ca2+-modulates ROS-GC through its generated cyclic GMP via a nearby cyclic nucleotide gated channel and creates a hyper- or depolarized sate in the neuron membrane (Ca2+ Binding Proteins 1:1, 7–11, 2006). The generated electric potential then becomes a mode of transmission of the parent [Ca2+]i signal. Ca2+ and ROS-GC are interlocked messengers in multiple sensory transduction mechanisms. This comprehensive review discusses the developmental stages to the present status of this concept and demonstrates how neuronal Ca2+-sensor (NCS) proteins are the interconnected elements of this elegant ROS-GC transduction system. The focus is on the dynamism of the structural composition of this system, and how it accommodates selectivity and elasticity for the Ca2+ signals to perform multiple tasks linked with the SENSES of vision, smell, and possibly of taste and the pineal gland. An intriguing illustration is provided for the Ca2+ sensor GCAP1 which displays its remarkable ability for its flexibility in function from being a photoreceptor sensor to an odorant receptor sensor. In doing so it reverses its function from an inhibitor of ROS-GC to the stimulator of ONE-GC membrane guanylate cyclase.
Resveratrol inhibits the electrical activity of subfornical organ neurons in rat.

The effects of resveratrol on the discharges of neurons in rat subfornical organ (SFO) slices were examined by using extracellular recording technique. The results are as follows: (1) In response to the application of resveratrol (1, 5, 10 mumol/L, n=65) into the superfusate for 2 min, the spontaneous discharge rate of 60/65 (92.3%) neurons was significantly decreased in a dose-dependent manner;(2) Application of L-glutamate (0.3 mmol/L) into the superfusate led to a marked increase in discharge rate of all 12 (100%) neurons in an epileptiform pattern. The increased discharges of 10/12 (83.3%) neurons were suppressed by application of resveratrol (5 mumol/L);(3) In 8 neurons, the selective L-type calcium channel agonist, Bay K8644 (0.1 mumol/L), induced a significant increase in discharge rate of all 8 (100%) neurons. The increased discharges of all 8 (100%) neurons were suppressed by resveratrol (5 mumol/L);(4) In 14 neurons, nitric oxide synthase (NOS) inhibitor N(G)-nitro-L-arginine methyl ester (L-NAME) 50 mumol/L significantly increased the discharge rate of 11/14 (78.6%) neurons. Resveratrol (5 ? mol/L) applied into the superfusate reduced the increased discharges of 9/11 (81.8%) neurons;(5) In 12 neurons, the large-conductance Ca(2+)-activated K(+) channel blocker tetraethylammonium chloride (TEA) 1 mmol/L significantly increased the discharge rate of 10/12 (83.3%) neurons. Resveratrol (5 mumol/L) inhibited the increased discharges of 9/10 (90%) neurons. These results suggest that resveratrol inhibits the electrical activity of SFO neurons. This effect may be related to its properties of blockade of L-type voltage-gated calcium channel and nitric oxide (NO) promoting, and probably has no association with large-conductance Ca(2+)-activated K(+) channel.
Smallpox in the Post-Eradication Era

Widespread vaccination programmes led to the global eradication of smallpox, which was certified by the World Health Organisation (WHO), and, since 1978, there has been no case of smallpox anywhere in the world. However, the viable variola virus (VARV), the causative agent of smallpox, is still kept in two maximum security laboratories in Russia and the USA. Despite the eradication of the disease smallpox, clandestine stocks of VARV may exist. In a rapidly changing world, the impact of an intentional VARV release in the human population would nowadays result in a public health emergency of global concern: vaccination programmes were abolished, the percentage of immunosuppressed individuals in the human population is higher, and an increased intercontinental air travel allows for the rapid viral spread of diseases around the world. The WHO has authorised the temporary retention of VARV to enable essential research for public health benefit to take place. This work aims to develop diagnostic tests, antiviral drugs, and safer vaccines. Advances in synthetic biology have made it possible to produce infectious poxvirus particles from chemicals in vitro so that it is now possible to reconstruct VARV. The status of smallpox in the post-eradication era is reviewed.
Use of the Proton Pump Inhibitor Pantoprazole to Modify the Distribution and Activity of Doxorubicin: A Potential Strategy to Improve the Therapy of Solid Tumors

Purpose: Limited drug distribution within solid tumors is an important cause of drug resistance. Basic drugs (e.g., doxorubicin) may be sequestered in acidic organelles, thereby limiting drug distribution to distal cells and diverting drugs from their target DNA. Here we investigate the effects of pantoprazole, a proton pump inhibitor, on doxorubicin uptake, and doxorubicin distribution and activity using in vitro and murine models. Experimental Design: Murine EMT-6 and human MCF-7 cells were treated with pantoprazole to evaluate changes in endosomal pH using fluorescence spectroscopy, and uptake of doxorubicin using flow cytometry. Effects of pantoprazole on tissue penetration of doxorubicin were evaluated in multilayered cell cultures (MCC), and in solid tumors using immunohistochemistry. Effects of pantoprazole to influence tumor growth delay and toxicity because of doxorubicin were evaluated in mice. Results: Pantoprazole (>200 μmol/L) increased endosomal pH in cells, and also increased nuclear uptake of doxorubicin. Pretreatment with pantoprazole increased tissue penetration of doxorubicin in MCCs. Pantoprazole improved doxorubicin distribution from blood vessels in solid tumors. Pantoprazole given before doxorubicin led to increased growth delay when given as single or multiple doses to mice bearing MCF7 xenografts. Conclusions: Use of pantoprazole to enhance the distribution and cytotoxicity of anticancer drugs in solid tumors might be a novel treatment strategy to improve their therapeutic index. Clin Cancer Res; 19(24); 6766–76. ©2013 AACR.
Balance-of-Payments Liberalization: Effects on Growth, Employment and Income in Argentina

Introduction In the first half of the nineties, Argentina witnessed an impressive process of market-friendly reforms, targeting the privatization of a large proportion of state-owned enterprises, as well as both trade and financial opening. At the same time the country was emerging from a period of extreme instability in prices which had led to two brief hyperinflationary episodes in 1989 and 1990. This price stabilization was concurrent with a strong recovery in growth that had its dark side: unemployment grew significantly and inequality deepened. One of the main structural reforms in the nineties was the opening of the economy to international trade. It was already in 1988 that notable inroads had been made in this direction. However, in the nineties the previous gradual approach was abandoned and the opening was accelerated. Average import tariffs were reduced from 26.5 percent in October 1989 to 9.7 percent in April 1991. In addition, specific duties were eliminated, as were quantitative restrictions on imports. 1 Privatizations, for their part, commenced in 1990 with the transfer of the telephone company and the national airlines. By late 1994 the major part of the state-owned firms producing goods and services had been sold, including the most important ones: the oil company (YPF) and the producers and distributors of electric power. This process covered a wide range of productive areas from iron and steel works to petrochemicals and gas. In some cases (oil fields, railways, ports, highways, waterworks and sewage, and television channels and radio stations) the government resorted to concession mechanisms. Several legal norms marked the structural reform process. First was the Law of the State Reform (August 1989) which established the legal bases for the privatization of state-owned enterprises with the capitalization of public debt. Second, in order to improve the 1 Between 1987 and 1988 the average tariff dropped from 43 percent to 30 percent and quantitative restrictions were reduced. In October 1989, some 807 tariff lines were subject to "transitory additional duties," 122 to import licensing and 129 to specific duties. In April 1991 not one tariff line was subject to either specific duties, transitory additional duties or to import licenses. Restrictions remained in effect for only 25 tariff items those corresponding to motor vehicles and auto parts out of a total of 10,000. Special rates were also maintained for motor vehicles and electronics, which were subject to a 35 percent tariff. The tariff …
SPARTAN: a model-based semantic compression system for massive data tables

While a variety of lossy compression schemes have been developed for certain forms of digital data (e.g., images, audio, video), the area of lossy compression techniques for arbitrary data tables has been left relatively unexplored. Nevertheless, such techniques are clearly motivated by the ever-increasing data collection rates of modern enterprises and the need for effective, guaranteed-quality approximate answers to queries over massive relational data sets. In this paper, we propose SPARTAN, a system that takes advantage of attribute semantics and data-mining models to perform lossy compression of massive data tables. SPARTAN is based on the novel idea of exploiting predictive data correlations and prescribed error tolerances for individual attributes to construct concise and accurate Classification and Regression Tree (CaRT) models for entire columns of a table. More precisely, SPARTAN selects a certain subset of attributes for which no values are explicitly stored in the compressed table; instead, concise CaRTs that predict these values (within the prescribed error bounds) are maintained. To restrict the huge search space and construction cost of possible CaRT predictors, SPARTAN employs sophisticated learning techniques and novel combinatorial optimization algorithms. Our experimentation with several real-life data sets offers convincing evidence of the effectiveness of SPARTAN's model-based approach — SPARTAN is able to consistently yield substantially better compression ratios than existing semantic or syntactic compression tools (e.g., gzip) while utilizing only small data samples for model inference.
Coordinated Multi-Cell MIMO Transmission with Feedback Based Precoding Control

Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) transmission technique, in which both transmitter and receiver are equipped with multiple antennas, is attracting attention due to its many advantages such as its throughput improvement. For this reason, various cellular mobile radio systems based on MIMO have been developed such as 3GPP LTE (Long Term Evolution) [1] and Mobile WiMAX [2]. MIMO technique is also a promising technique in next generation cellular mobile radio systems such as 3GPP LTE-Advanced [3]. However, in cellular systems, cell-edge users generally suffer from large propagation loss and large inter-cell interference, and it is difficult for conventional single-cell based MIMO technique to improve throughput performance of cell-edge users. So, there is a strong need to improve cell-edge performance for the next generation systems [4]. Multi-cell MIMO transmission technique, in which multiple Base Stations (BSs) synchronize to each other and coordinate their wireless transmission [5]-[7], is a promising candidate due to the large cell-edge performance improvement for next generation cellular mobile systems [4]. On the other hand, adaptive MIMO, in which adaptively changes among multi-antenna transmission methods pre-defined between transmitter and receiver sides, is an effective technique. For example, 3GPP-LTE specifies two adaptive MIMO transmission modes of open-loop MIMO (OL-MIMO) and closed-loop MIMO (CL-MIMO) with simple feedback control, respectively [8]. Consequently, it is considered to be effective that Multi-cell MIMO applies the concept of simple feedback based adaptive MIMO such as the OL-MIMO and the CLMIMO. The OL-MIMO feeds back only transmit rank information (TX rank) corresponding to the number of substreams in spatial multiplexing, and it adaptively switches two precoding types of Space Frequency Block Code based transmit diversity (SFBC) [9] and Space Division Multiplexing without TXbeamforming (SDM) [10]. On the other hand, The CL-MIMO feeds back TX rank as well as an index of selected TX-beamforming matrix (precoding matrix), and it adaptively switches the number of substreams and TX-beamforming matrix. The authors propose two coordinated multi-cell MIMO tansmission methods, based on the OL-MIMO and the CL-MIMO specified in 3GPP-LTE. In this paper, open-loop MIMO based multi-cell MIMO is called as “multi-cell OL-MIMO” and closed-loop MIMO based multi-cell MIMO is called as “multi-cell CL-MIMO”. This paper also investigates the precoding control schemes of the multi-cell MIMO transmission methods. Moreover, it evaluates the proposed multi-cell MIMO schemes and clarifies the effectiveness of multi-cell CL-MIMO.
Visualisation of device datasets to assist digital forensic investigation

The increasing use of digital devices in our everyday lives, and their ever-increasing storage capacities places digital forensics investigatory resources under significant pressure. The workload for investigators is increasing, and the time required to analyse the datasets is not decreasing to compensate. This research looks at the potential for utilising information visualisation techniques to increase investigative efficiency with a view to decreasing the overall time taken to investigate a case, while still maintaining a high level of accuracy. It is envisaged that this may have the potential to lead to a reduced backlog of cases for law enforcement agencies, and expedited processing of criminal cases involving digital evidence.
Colonization of skin by Helcococcus kunzii

In order to investigate the role of Helcococcus kunzii as a colonizer of skin and as a possible participant in diabetic foot ulcers, we used a selective medium to culture both lower- and upper-extremity skin from a study group of podiatry patients (60 diabetics and 60 nondiabetics) and a control group of 50 healthy volunteers. Although differences in colonization were not statistically significant, a trend toward higher colonization rates in the group of podiatry patients was noted. H. kunzii appears to preferentially colonize the skin of the feet, and while its pathogenic role in diabetic foot ulcers is difficult to establish, it may be a previously unrecognized component of the polymicrobial flora characteristically isolated from patients with these infections.
Real-Time Simulation of Brittle Fracture Using Modal Analysis

We present a novel physically based approach for simulating realistic brittle fracture of impacting bodies in real time. Our method is mainly composed of two novel parts: 1) a fracture initiation method based on modal analysis, and 2) a fast energy-based fracture propagation algorithm. We propose a way to compute the contact durations and the contact forces between stiff bodies to simulate the damped deformation wave that is responsible for fracture initiation. As a consequence, our method naturally takes into account the damping properties of the bodies as well as the contact properties to simulate the fracture. To obtain a complete fracture pipeline, we present an efficient way to generate the fragments and their geometric surfaces. These surfaces are sampled on the edges of the physical mesh, to visually represent the actual fracture surface computed. As shown in our results, the computation time performances and realism of our method are well suited for physically based interactive applications.
Texture Analysis

Chip manufacturing company moves from Al interconnects into Cu-based technology. Now the task is to establish proper conditions for the Cu film growth on Si. Number of samples, Cu on Si(001), were grown at different temperatures and using different Cu growth rates. You were given one of the many samples, Cu on Si(001). Your assignment consists in: 1) determining a preferred orientation along c-axis (preferred out-ofplane orientation) of Cu film and 2) determining the in-plane orientation of the layer with respect to the Si substrate.
A framework for an interactive robot-based tutoring system and its application to ball-passing training

This paper describes a framework for an interactive robot-based tutoring system (IRTS). The proposed IRTS is based on combining aspects of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) which are computer-based expert systems to simulate aspects of a human tutor, and robot-assisted systems which help users with physical interaction using robotic devices. The IRTS involves the robot interacting with a user, generating the user model, providing training tasks for guiding the user, and giving feedback on his/her performance. The proposed system is applied to ball-passing training. In the training, a human trainee passes a ball to a robot tutor and receives feedback from the robot on how to improve the kick, based on the angle and velocity of the ball. In the experiment, the system is implemented in a real robot and demonstrates that the system is able to provide user-adaptive training tasks and feedback to improve his/her ball-passing skill.
Interactive Knowledge Validation and Query Refinement in CBR

In most case-based reasoning (CBR) systems there has been little research done on validating new knowledge, specifically on how previous knowledge differs from current knowledge as a result of conceptual change. This paper proposes two methods that enable the domain expert, who is nonexpert in artificial intelligence (AI), to interactively supervise the knowledge validation process in a CBR system, and to enable dynamic updating of the system, to provide the best diagnostic questions. The first method is based on formal concept analysis which involves a graphical representation and comparison of the concepts, and a summary description highlighting the conceptual differences. We propose a dissimilarity metric for measuring the degree of variation between the previous and current concepts when a new case is added to the knowledge base. The second method involves determining unexpected classification-based association rules to form critical questions as the knowledge base gets updated.
Risk factors for disability pension over 11 years in a cohort of young persons initially sick-listed with low back, neck, or shoulder diagnoses

Aim: A study was undertaken to ascertain whether the differences in risk in relation to gender and citizenship observed in a previous study of the same cohort would remain if more recent data on sickness absence were used. Methods: This was an 11-year prospective population-based cohort study. The dataset includes all individuals in a Swedish city who, in 1985, were aged 25 - 34 and had a sick-leave spell≥28 days with neck, shoulder, or back diagnoses (n=213). The data covered the following: for 1985 - 96, disability pension, emigration, and death; for 1982 - 96, sickness absence; for 1985, sex and citizenship. The data were subjected to Cox regression analyses with a time-dependent covariate. Results: Disability pension was granted to 22% (n=46) of the cohort. The relative risk for disability pension increased by 9.3 with each sick-leave spell≥90 days during the two previous years. The risk was higher for women than men, and also higher for foreign citizens than Swedes. Conclusion: Many studies have revealed a gender difference in the risk of being on disability pension, and it was found that this difference was still apparent when sick leave during the follow-up period is taken into account. Thus, the reason for the gender differences ought to be found among other factors than prior levels of sickness absence.
Comparison of Intramuscular or Subcutaneous Injections vs. Castration in Pigs—Impacts on Behavior and Welfare

Simple Summary Physical castration (PC) of piglets is a painful and stressful procedure and alternatives are being sought to improve animal well-being, such as immunological castration (IC). However, IC requires injections which may also cause pain and stress during handling. In this study, piglets and finishing pigs were placed in the following treatment groups: no handling or treatment (NO), sham-handling (SHAM), intramuscular injection (IM), subcutaneous injection (SQ), or PC on piglets only. Behavior was monitored for 1 h prior and 1 h post treatment in each age group. Social behavior and feeding behavior, and signs of pain were recorded. Physical castration caused measurable pain-like behaviors and general behavioral dysregulation at a much higher level than changes associated with handling associated with IM or SQ injections. Overall, injections did not cause a change in weaning pig behaviors. Finishing pigs given SQ injections showed a lower number of feeding behaviors post treatment but other changes were not observed in the other treatment groups. Abstract Physical castration (PC) is painful and stressful for nursing piglets. One alternative to PC is immunological castration (IC), but the pain and stress of handling associated with injections have not been assessed. The objectives of this study were to measure the pain and distress of subcutaneous (SQ) and intramuscular (IM) injections compared to PC in piglets, and to compare SQ or IM injections in finishing pigs. After farrowing, 3 to 5 d old male piglets were randomly assigned to (control) no handling treatment (NO), sham-handling (SHAM), IM, SQ, or PC. Finishing pigs were assigned to NO, SHAM, IM, or SQ. Behavior was monitored for 1 h prior and 1 h post treatment in each age group. Social, feeding behaviors, and signs of pain were recorded. Finishing pigs treated with SQ injections had higher feeding behaviors pre-treatment than they did post-treatment. Overall, physical castrations caused measurable pain-like behaviors and general behavioral dysregulation at a much higher level than the other treatment groups. SQ and IM injections did not cause either significant behavioral or physiological alterations in piglets. SQ injections caused a decrease in finishing pig feed behaviors post treatment (p = 0.02) and SHAM treated finishing pigs spent significantly more time lying than the other treatment groups. In general IM and SQ injections did not cause any other significant changes in behavior or physiology.