Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hepatic progenitor cells from adult human livers for cell transplantation

Objective: Liver regeneration is mainly based on cellular self-renewal including progenitor cells. Efforts have been made to harness this potential for cell transplantation, but shortage of hepatocytes and premature differentiated progenitor cells from extra-hepatic organs are limiting factors. Histological studies implied that resident cells in adult liver can proliferate, have bipotential character and may be a suitable source for cell transplantation. Methods: Particular cell populations were isolated after adequate tissue dissociation. Single cell suspensions were purified by Thy-1 positivity selection, characterised in vitro and transplanted in immunodeficient Pfp/Rag2 mice. Results: Thy-1+ cells that are mainly found in the portal tract and the surrounding parenchyma, were isolated from surgical liver tissue with high yields from specimens with histological signs of regeneration. Thy-1+ cell populations were positive for progenitor (CD34, c-kit, CK14, M2PK, OV6), biliary (CK19) and hepatic (HepPar1) markers revealing their progenitor as well as hepatic and biliary nature. The potential of Thy-1+ cells for differentiation in vitro was demonstrated by increased mRNA and protein expression for hepatic (CK18, HepPar1) and biliary (CK7) markers during culture while progenitor markers CK14, chromogranin A and nestin were reduced. After transplantation of Thy-1+ cells into livers of immunodeficient mice, engraftment was predominantly seen in the periportal portion of the liver lobule. Analysis of in situ material revealed that transplanted cells express human hepatic markers HepPar1 and albumin, indicating functional engraftment. Conclusion: Bipotential progenitor cells from human adult livers can be isolated using Thy-1 and might be a potential candidate for cell treatment in liver diseases.
Nicotinic α7 Receptor Clusters on Hippocampal GABAergic Neurons: Regulation by Synaptic Activity and Neurotrophins

Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors containing the α7 gene product are expressed at substantial levels in the hippocampus. Because of their specific locations and their high relative calcium permeability, the receptors not only mediate cholinergic transmission in the hippocampus but also influence signaling at noncholinergic synapses. We have used fluorescently labeled α-bungarotoxin to image α7-containing receptors on hippocampal neurons and to examine their regulation in culture. The highest levels of staining for such receptors were most commonly found on GABAergic interneurons identified immunohistochemically. The receptors were distributed in clusters on the soma and dendrites and were localized in part at GABAergic synapses. A 3 d blockade of electrical activity with tetrodotoxin or NMDA receptors with APV dramatically reduced the proportion of GABAergic neurons expressing high levels of receptor staining and reduced the mean number of distinguishable receptor clusters on individual neurons. Blockade of either GABAA receptors with bicuculline or nicotinic receptors with d-tubocurarine had no effect, although exposure to nicotine could increase the level of receptor staining. Anti-BDNF and anti-NGF antibodies produced decrements equivalent to those of tetrodotoxin and APV, whereas addition of BDNF and NGF each increased staining levels and increased the number of distinguishable receptor clusters on GABAergic neurons. The exogenous neurotrophins could not, however, overcome the effects of either tetrodotoxin or APV. The results indicate that both NMDA receptor activation and the neurotrophins BDNF and NGF are necessary to sustain the distribution patterns of α7-containing nicotinic receptors on GABAergic hippocampal neurons.
Resolution of chronic hypoxemia in pediatric sickle cell patients after treatment with hydroxyurea

Chronic hypoxemia is a common manifestation among patients with sickle cell anemia (SCA) who develop chronic lung disease. We report the beneficial effect of hydroxyurea on chronic hypoxemia in three pediatric patients with SCA and recurrent episodes of acute chest syndrome (ACS). All three patients improved rapidly after they were treated with hydroxyurea despite having additional risk factors for hypoxemia. A prospective trial is warranted to assess whether there is a therapeutic effect from the use of hydroxyurea in pediatric SCA patients with chronic hypoxemia. Pediatr Blood Cancer 2008;50:1258–1260. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Reducing dementia-related aggression through a staff education intervention

This article presents findings from a research study that examined the impact of a staff education programme on aggression as displayed by people with dementia living in residential aged care. The staff education programme was designed to change staff attitudes and perceptions towards their care management of the person with dementia. A simple interrupted time series, with the resident acting as his/her own comparison, was used to measure residents' aggressive behaviour both before and after the education intervention — Emotional Responses as Quality Indicators (ERIC). Forty-three residents and 85 staff were involved in the study. Staff attitudes to their work were assessed before and six weeks after the education intervention using the Attitude to Elderly Severely Mentally Infirm Care Scale. Findings indicate that people with dementia display cues about impending physical aggression, but such cues are often ignored by staff, as they may not see or understand anger as a legitimate human emotion within the context of the disease process.
Do Street Robbery Location Choices Vary Over Time of Day or Day of Week? A Test in Chicago

Objectives: This article examines the hypothesis that in street robbery location choices, the importance of location attributes is conditional on the time of day and on the day of the week. Method: The hypothesis is assessed by estimating and comparing separate discrete location choice models for each two-hour time block of the day and for each day of the week. The spatial units of analysis are census blocks. Their relevant attributes include presence of various legal and illegal cash economies, presence of high schools, measures of accessibility, and distance from the offender’s home. Results: The hypothesis is strongly rejected because for almost all census block attributes, their importance hardly depends on time of day or day of week. Only the effect of high schools in census blocks follows expectations, as its effect is only demonstrated at the times and on the days that schools are open. Conclusions: The results suggest that street robbers’ location choices are not as strongly driven by spatial variations in immediate opportunities as has been suggested in previous studies. Rather, street robbers seem to perpetrate in the environs of cash economies and transit hubs most of the time irrespective of how many potential victims are around.
Clinical aspects of hepatosplenic schistosomiasis: a contrast with cirrhosis.

The clinical picture of liver disease in endemic areas of Schistosomiasis mansoni differs in many ways from that observed in alcoholic and other types of cirrhosis. In hepatosplenic schistosomiasis there is predominance of the clinical manifestations of portal hypertension, e.g., bleeding esophageal varices, while ascites, jaundice, and hepatic precoma or coma are much less common. Ammonia tolerance is usually normal and helps explain the low mortality rate during bleeding. Of special interest is the observation of a high incidence of persistent hepatitis B surface antigenemia among patients with hepatosplenic schistosomiasis, suggesting increased susceptibility of such patients to the development of virus-induced chronic active hepatitis. ImagesFIG. 1FIG. 2
Comparative Study of Partial Closed-loop Versus Open-loop Motion Estimation for Coding of HDTV

Motion estimation is a vital function of video coders that utilize motion compensated prediction to exploit the temporal redundancy of video signals. The reference images used in the motion estimation process can be either original images (open-loop architecture) or reconstructed images (closedloop architecture). While the closed-loop architecture is intuitively superior to the open-loop architecture, closed-loop motion estimation is more difficult to implement in a realtime video encoder. A compromise is to perform open-loop integer-pel accurate motion estimation followed by closedloop half-pel accurate estimation. In this paper we present a comparative study of the performance of half-pel closed-loop versus open-loop motion estimation for coding of High Definition Television with the MPEG algorithm. Simulation results indicate that, on average, closed-loop half-pel accurate motion estimation provides slightly better performance. This improvement depends on the bit rate of the coded video stream. For relatively high bit rates, the closedloop implementation often provides no improvement and sometimes an actual degradation of performance. Analysis of why a closed-loop implementation does not guarantee a better performance is presented.
Arab integration in Jewish-Israeli social space: does commuting make a difference?

Urban research on segregation and integration has been dominated by an obsessive focus on ethno-racial residential patterns, obscuring the multidimensional facets of separation versus encounter that define contemporary urban experience. In this study, we develop an explicitly multidimensional theoretical perspective that relates segregation/integration not only to residential location, but also to daily activity spaces, social networks, transnational media and communications environments, and aspects of identity and sense of place. To disentangle residential location from other facets of segregation/integration, we use GPS and interview data to analyze the socio-spatial experiences of 60 Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel who live in ethnically homogenous Arab towns—divided equally between “localists” versus “commuters” who spend most of their daytime hours working in Jewish-Israeli spaces. While results highlight many important consequences of commuters’ long hours of daily exposure to Jewish urban mileux, daily activity spaces are only marginally associated with other dimensions of socio-spatial integration. Our analysis reveals evidence of complex relations amongst the multiple dimensions of segregation and integration. Partial integration on a few of these dimensions is insufficient to overcome the structural stratification of Arabs in contemporary Israeli society.
Ties that Bind: Three Studies of Obligation in Adult Relationships with Family

This article reports three exploratory studies that describe aspects of obligation in ongoing relationships with family. Using independent samples of young married couples and single, college-age adults, five dimensions of felt obligation were identified as expectations for appropriate behavior about: (1) family contact and participation in family ritual; (2) assistance; (3) conflict avoidance; (4) self-sufficiency; and (5) personal sharing in specific relationships with kin. Initial evidence of convergent and discriminant validity was established for the felt obligation measure. Gender differences in felt obligation dimensions were found across studies with women generally reporting higher levels of obligation than did men. Felt obligation differed as a function of kinrole relationship (i.e. parents and in-laws, mother, father) across the three studies. Among married couples, felt obligation towards parents was related to higher levels of psychological symptomatology, depression and neuroticism for men but were not significantly related to mental health scores for women. The usefulness of the concept of felt obligation in the study of adult family relationships is discussed.
Modular development of the teleost trunk along the dorsoventral axis and zic1/zic4 as selector genes in the dorsal module

Teleost fish exhibit remarkable diversity in morphology, such as fins and coloration, particularly on the dorsal side. These structures are evolutionary adaptive because their back is highly visible to other individuals. However, owing to the late phenotypic appearance (from larva to adult) and lack of appropriate mutants, the genetic mechanisms that regulate these dorsoventrally asymmetric external patterns are largely unknown. To address this, we have analyzed the spontaneous medaka mutant Double anal fin (Da), which exhibits a mirror-image duplication of the ventral half across the lateral midline from larva to adult. Da is an enhancer mutant for zic1 and zic4 in which their expression in dorsal somites is lost. We show that the dorsoventral polarity in Da somites is lost and then demonstrate using transplantation techniques that somites and their derived tissues globally determine the multiple dorsal-specific characteristics of the body (fin morphology and pigmentation) from embryo to adult. Intriguingly, the zic1/zic4 expression in the wild type persists throughout life in the dorsal parts of somite derivatives, i.e. the myotome, dermis and vertebrae, forming a broad dorsal domain in the trunk. Comparative analysis further implies a central role for zic1/zic4 in morphological diversification of the teleost body. Taken together, we propose that the teleost trunk consists of dorsal/ventral developmental modules and that zic1/zic4 in somites function as selector genes in the dorsal module to regulate multiple dorsal morphologies.
Hip Fractures and Bone Mineral Density in the Elderly—Importance of Serum 25-Hydroxyvitamin D

Background The significance of serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] concentrations for hip fracture risk of the elderly is still uncertain. Difficulties reaching both frail and healthy elderly people in randomized controlled trials or large cohort studies may in part explain discordant findings. We determined hazard ratios for hip fractures of elderly men and women related to serum 25(OH)D, including both the frail and the healthy segment of the elderly population. Methods The AGES-Reykjavik Study is a prospective study of 5764 men and women, age 66–96 years, based on a representative sample of the population of Reykjavik, Iceland. Participation was 71.8%. Hazard ratios of incident hip fractures and baseline bone mineral density were determined according to serum concentrations of 25(OH)D at baseline. Results Mean follow-up was 5.4 years. Compared with referent values (50–75 nmol/L), hazard ratios for hip fractures were 2.24 (95% CI 1.63, 3.09) for serum 25(OH)D <30 nmol/L, adjusting for age, sex, body mass index, height, smoking, alcohol intake and season, and 2.08 (95% CI 1.51, 2.87), adjusting additionally for physical activity. No difference in risk was associated with 30–50 nmol/L or ≥75 nmol/L in either model compared with referent. Analyzing the sexes separately, hazard ratios were 2.61 (95% CI 1.47, 4.64) in men and 1.93 (95% CI 1.31, 2.84) in women. Values <30 nmol/L were associated with significantly lower bone mineral density of femoral neck compared with referent, z-scores -0.14 (95% CI −0.27, −0.00) in men and −0.11 (95% CI −0.22, −0.01) in women. Conclusions Our results lend support to the overarching importance of maintaining serum 25(OH)D above 30 nmol/L for bone health of elderly people while potential benefits of having much higher levels could not be detected.
Lucky Events and Beliefs in Luck: Paradoxical Effects on Confidence and Risk-Taking

The effects of a lucky event and irrational beliefs about luck were examined. In two experiments, some subjects experienced a lucky event, whereas others did not. All subjects then completed an unrelated decision task rated their confidence, and placed a bet. The effects of a lucky experience depended substantially on individual beliefs concerning the causal properties of luck. After the lucky event, those who believed in luck (i.e., thought of luck as a stable, personal attribute) were more confident and bet more, whereas those who did not believe in luck (i.e., thought luck was random) were less confident and bet less. A third experiment identified analogous effects using multiple-choice test questions that included a monetary penalty for errors. Increased expectations following initial luck were interpreted in terms of a lucky streak effect, whereas the paradoxical decrease in expectancy was viewed as an instance of the gamblers' fallacy.
Energy Harvesting for Two-Way OFDM Communications under Hostile Jamming

Hostile jamming can cause significant performance degradation in wireless communications, but it also provides an unexplored source of additional signal power. In this letter, we propose an energy-harvesting receiver for two-way orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems under hostile jamming. More specifically, in the downlink, the receiver is designed to simultaneously process information and harvest energy from the received desired signal as well as the jamming interference through a power splitter. The harvested energy can then be used as an additional source of power to enhance the uplink transmission. We investigate the optimal power allocation and power splitting ratio to maximize the sum-rate of the uplink and downlink transmissions. To reduce the complexity, a suboptimal energy harvesting scheme with closed-form solution is proposed. We also obtain a lower bound on the sum-rate of the proposed scheme under strong full-band jamming.
Artists' Circles and the Development of Artists

The best things come . from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding to the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation. Great things have of course been done by solitary workers; but they have usually been done with double the pains they would have cost if they had been produced in more genial circumstances [Henry James, in Cowley 1973: 134].
GETTING A MAN OR GETTING AHEAD

In-depth interviews with thirteen white and thirteen black sorority members at two college campuses show that white sororities encourage romantic pairings (“getting a man”) evidenced by their extensive social affairs and formal recognitions for women who achieve relationship milestones, while black sororities focus on careers and community service (“getting ahead”) evidenced by their reliance on sorority alumnae for career networking and by their extensive involvement in community service. The authors argue that the key to understanding the variation lies in the different histories and current structural positions of the groups. For black sororities, historic images of strong, independent black women and the modern reality of black female marriage and poverty rates have shaped the sorority structure. White sororities have emphasized finding a man as a source of support, an orientation at odds both with a modern reality that dictates labor force participation for all women and with members' career aspirations.
Prognostic modeling of total steel production and according to production technology in Poland

B. Gajdzik, The Silesian University of Technology, Faculty of Materials Science and Metallurgy, Katowice, Poland The publication presents the prognostic modeling of steel production in Poland by 2020. Based on the general framework predicting, an attempt was made to adjust the model to empirical data, which were related to the size of steel production in Poland. Two prognostic approaches were used. The first approach included determination of prognoses for total steel production on the basis of empirical data for the 1990-2014 period. The second approach used empirical data for the volume of steel production according to production technologies for the 2000-2015 period. Prognoses until 2020 were determined in both cases. Thus obtained prognoses were related to changes observed on the global steel market.
Antioxidant Activities of Flavonoid Aglycoes from Kenyan Gardenia ternifolia Schum and Thonn

Phytochemical investigation of surface exudates of the leaves of Gardenia ternifolia resulted to characterization of four flavonoids; 3,5,3′-trihydroxy-7,4′-dimethoxyflavone (1), 5,7-trihydroxy-4′methoxyflavone (2), 5,7-dihydroxy-3,4′-dimethoxyflavone (3), 5,4′-dihydroxy-7-methoxyflavanone (4) and two tritepenoids; β-sitosterol (6) and stigmasterol (7). Compound 1 exhibited the highest antioxidant activity with IC50 = 40.3± 1.55 μΜ. The rest of the flavonoids showed minimal activities with IC50 values of 75.5±1.75, 89±0.22, 94±0.11 μΜ for 2-4, respectively. The antioxidant activities of 1 was substantially lower than the standard, quercetin (IC50 = 20.1±1.34 M). Methoxylation of quercetin at 7 and 4′-position in 1 substantially reduced antioxidant potential. Lack of oxygenation at 3′ position, as observed for kaempferol derivatives was responsible for further reduction in the radical scavenging potential as observed for 2 and 3. Furthermore, methylation of 3-OH position in kaempferol derivatives further reduced the antioxidant activities as exhibited by 3 with an oxygenation pattern similar to 2 except for the methylation at 3-position. The results of this study are consistent with previous findings that revealed that flavonols, exhibited better anti-oxidant activities as compared to 3-methoxyflavones. Acetylation of 3 at the 5 and 7 positions resulting to 3,4′dimethoxy-5,7diacetylflavone (5), substantially reduced the activity of this compound. The triterpenoids exhibited were inactive as expected.
The species-specific RNA polymerase I transcription factor SL-1 binds to upstream binding factor

Transcription of the 45S rRNA genes is carried out by RNA polymerase I and at least two trans-acting factors, upstream binding factor (UBF) and SL-1. We have examined the hypothesis that SL-1 and UBF interact. Coimmunoprecipitation studies using an antibody to UBF demonstrated that TATA-binding protein, a subunit of SL-1, associates with UBF in the absence of DNA. Inclusion of the detergents sodium dodecyl sulfate and deoxycholate disrupted this interaction. In addition, partially purified UBF from rat cell nuclear extracts and partially purified SL-1 from human cells coimmunoprecipitated with the anti-UBF antibody after mixing, indicating that the UBF-SL-1 complex can re-form. Treatment of UBF-depleted extracts with the anti-UBF antibody depleted the extracts of SL-1 activity only if UBF was added to the extract prior to the immunodepletion reaction. Furthermore, SL-1 activity could be recovered in the immunoprecipitate. Interestingly, these immunoprecipitates did not contain RNA polymerase I, as a monospecific antibody to the 194-kDa subunit of RNA polymerase I failed to detect that subunit in the immunoprecipitates. Treatment of N1S1 cell extracts with the anti-UBF antibody depleted the extracts of SL-1 activity but not TFIIIB activity, suggesting that the binding of UBF to SL-1 is specific and not solely mediated by an interaction between UBF and TATA-binding protein, which is also a component of TFIIIB. These data provide evidence that UBF and SL-1 interact.