Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dual PI3K- and mTOR-inhibitor PI-103 can either enhance or reduce the radiosensitizing effect of the Hsp90 inhibitor NVP-AUY922 in tumor cells: The role of drug-irradiation schedule

Inhibition of Hsp90 can increase the radiosensitivity of tumor cells. However, inhibition of Hsp90 alone induces the anti-apoptotic Hsp70 and thereby decreases radiosensitivity. Therefore, preventing Hsp70 induction can be a promising strategy for radiosensitization. PI-103, an inhibitor of PI3K and mTOR, has previously been shown to suppress the up-regulation of Hsp70. Here, we explore the impact of combining PI-103 with the Hsp90 inhibitor NVP-AUY922 in irradiated glioblastoma and colon carcinoma cells. We analyzed the cellular response to drug-irradiation treatments by colony-forming assay, expression of several marker proteins, cell cycle progression and induction/repair of DNA damage. Although PI-103, given 24 h prior to irradiation, slightly suppressed the NVP-AUY922-mediated up-regulation of Hsp70, it did not cause radiosensitization and even diminished the radiosensitizing effect of NVP-AUY922. This result can be explained by the activation of PI3K and ERK pathways along with G1-arrest at the time of irradiation. In sharp contrast, PI-103 not only exerted a radiosensitizing effect but also strongly enhanced the radiosensitization by NVP-AUY922 when both inhibitors were added 3 h before irradiation and kept in culture for 24 h. Possible reasons for the observed radiosensitization under this drug-irradiation schedule may be a down-regulation of PI3K and ERK pathways during or directly after irradiation, increased residual DNA damage and strong G2/M arrest 24 h thereafter. We conclude that duration of drug treatment before irradiation plays a key role in the concomitant targeting of PI3K/mTOR and Hsp90 in tumor cells.
Building Graphs To Describe Dynamics, Kinetics, and Energetics in the d-ALa:d-Lac Ligase VanA

The d-Ala:d-Lac ligase, VanA, plays a critical role in the resistance of vancomycin. Indeed, it is involved in the synthesis of a peptidoglycan precursor, to which vancomycin cannot bind. The reaction catalyzed by VanA requires the opening of the so-called “ω-loop”, so that the substrates can enter the active site. Here, the conformational landscape of VanA is explored by an enhanced sampling approach: the temperature-accelerated molecular dynamics (TAMD). Analysis of the molecular dynamics (MD) and TAMD trajectories recorded on VanA permits a graphical description of the structural and kinetics aspects of the conformational space of VanA, where the internal mobility and various opening modes of the ω-loop play a major role. The other important feature is the correlation of the ω-loop motion with the movements of the opposite domain, defined as containing the residues A149–Q208. Conformational and kinetic clusters have been determined and a path describing the ω-loop opening was extracted from these clusters. The determination of this opening path, as well as the relative importance of hydrogen bonds along the path, permit one to propose some key residue interactions for the kinetics of the ω-loop opening.
A simple electric energy router circuit for exchanging active power of AC grids

As the converter exchanging the active powers between AC grids/connection points, electric energy router (EER) gained popularity in grid interconnection, smart grid and energy internet systems. Conventionally, AC/DC with DC/AC i.e. the back-to-back (BTB) converter is the typical choice for EER. However, BTB converters must withstand the high voltage of the AC grid and the power capacity is usually very high. This paper proposes a simple circuit for EER connecting two AC grids or connection points with the same voltage amplitude and phase. This EER can exchange the active power of AC grids by low-voltage converter. Meantime, the power capacity of this EER is much lower than the rating of the exchanged active power. Verification results show validity of the proposed EER circuit.
High‐intensity interval training improves acute plasma volume responses to exercise that is age dependent

Plasma volume (PV) is affected by several factors including age, physical training and, acutely, by exercise intensity. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of 6 weeks of high‐intensity interval training (HIT) on PV and blood pressure (BP) changes among sedentary individuals. Thirty subjects aged between 18 and 71 years [body mass index=30.1(1.2) kg/m2] completed a 6‐weeks HIT program. Anthropometric and fitness variables were obtained at pre‐ and post‐ HIT. PV variations during warm‐up and after supramaximal cycling test (SCT) were calculated using two methods based on Hematocrit (Ht) and Hemoglobin (Hb) measures. After both the warm‐up and SCT, PV decreased significantly among participants at pre‐ and at post‐HIT (P < 0.01). However, PV decreases were significantly greater at pre‐HIT compared with post‐HIT during warm‐up and after SCT (P < 0.01, respectively). In addition, at pre‐HIT, a positive relationship was found between age and both PV variations at warm‐up and after SCT (r2 = 0.55 and r2 = 0.46; P < 0.01 respectively). However, no relationship was found during the post‐HIT period. After SCT and after both visits, only body weight predicted 22% of PV variations. In the current study, a significant relationship was found between systolic and diastolic BP improvements and PV variations in post‐HIT (r2 = 0.54 and r2=0.56, P < 0.05, respectively). Our results suggest that HIT may improve PV values and reduce the effects of age on the decrease in PV. These interventions led to improvements in systolic and diastolic BP values among participants.
The Identification of a Threshold of Long Work Hours for Predicting Elevated Risks of Adverse Health Outcomes

Working long hours has been associated with adverse health outcomes. However, a definition of long work hours relative to adverse health risk has not been established. Repeated measures of work hours among approximately 2,000 participants from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1986-2011), conducted in the United States, were retrospectively analyzed to derive statistically optimized cutpoints of long work hours that best predicted three health outcomes. Work-hours cutpoints were assessed for model fit, calibration, and discrimination separately for the outcomes of poor self-reported general health, incident cardiovascular disease, and incident cancer. For each outcome, the work-hours threshold that best predicted increased risk was 52 hours per week or more for a minimum of 10 years. Workers exposed at this level had a higher risk of poor self-reported general health (relative risk (RR) = 1.28; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.06, 1.53), cardiovascular disease (RR = 1.42; 95% CI: 1.24, 1.63), and cancer (RR = 1.62; 95% CI: 1.22, 2.17) compared with those working 35-51 hours per week for the same duration. This study provides the first health risk-based definition of long work hours. Further examination of the predictive power of this cutpoint on other health outcomes and in other study populations is needed.
Evaluation of arterial stiffness by finger–toe pulse wave velocity: optimization of signal processing and clinical validation

Background: Carotid–femoral pulse wave velocity (PWV) (cf-PWV) is the gold standard for measuring aortic stiffness. Finger–toe PWV (ft-PWV) is a simpler noninvasive method for measuring arterial stiffness. Although the validity of the method has been previously assessed, its accuracy can be improved. ft-PWV is determined on the basis of a patented height chart for the distance and the pulse transit time (PTT) between the finger and the toe pulpar arteries signals (ft-PTT). Method: The objective of the first study, performed in 66 patients, was to compare different algorithms (intersecting tangents, maximum of the second derivative, 10% threshold and cross-correlation) for determining the foot of the arterial pulse wave, thus the ft-PTT. The objective of the second study, performed in 101 patients, was to investigate different signal processing chains to improve the concordance of ft-PWV with the gold-standard cf-PWV. Finger–toe PWV (ft-PWV) was calculated using the four algorithms. Results: The best correlations relating ft-PWV and cf-PWV, and relating ft-PTT and carotid–femoral PTT were obtained with the maximum of the second derivative algorithm [PWV: r2 = 0.56, P < 0.0001, root mean square error (RMSE) = 0.9 m/s; PTT: r2 = 0.61, P < 0.001, RMSE = 12 ms]. The three other algorithms showed lower correlations. The correlation between ft-PTT and carotid–femoral PTT further improved (r2 = 0.81, P < 0.0001, RMSE = 5.4 ms) when the maximum of the second derivative algorithm was combined with an optimized signal processing chain. Conclusion: Selecting the maximum of the second derivative algorithm for detecting the foot of the pressure waveform, and combining it with an optimized signal processing chain, improved the accuracy of ft-PWV measurement in the current population sample. Thus, it makes ft-PWV very promising for the simple noninvasive determination of aortic stiffness in clinical practice.
Function of Plant DExD/H-Box RNA Helicases Associated with Ribosomal RNA Biogenesis

Ribosome biogenesis is a highly complex process that requires several cofactors, including DExD/H-box RNA helicases (RHs). RHs are a family of ATPases that rearrange the secondary structures of RNA and thus remodel ribonucleoprotein complexes. DExD/H-box RHs are found in most organisms and play critical roles in a variety of RNA-involved cellular events. In human and yeast cells, many DExD/H box RHs participate in multiple steps of ribosome biogenesis and regulate cellular proliferation and stress responses. In plants, several DExD/H-box RHs have been demonstrated to be associated with plant development and abiotic stress tolerance through their functions in modulating pre-rRNA processing. In this review, we summarize the pleiotropic roles of DExD/H-box RHs in rRNA biogenesis and other biological functions. We also describe the overall function of the DExD/H-box RH family in ribosome biogenesis based on data from human and yeast.
Depression Severity Prediction Based on Biomarkers of Psychomotor Retardation

This paper addresses the AVEC 2017 ? Depression Sub-Challenge, where the objective is to propose methods which can aid automated prediction of depression severity. In this paper, we specifically focus on biomarkers of psychomotor retardation, which are a key trait of depressive episodes, to propose three sets of methods. We propose a novel set of temporal features (which we called "turbulence features") and show their effectiveness. We offer a novel methodology to target specific craniofacial movements indicative of psychomotor retardation and hence of depression. Further, we present a novel method for quantifying abnormalities of speech spectra of individuals with depression using Fisher vector encoding of spectral low level descriptors (LLDs). So far, in the AVEC challenge on prediction of patient health questionnaire (PHQ) scores on the Test set, we achieve a root mean square error (RMSE) score of 6.34 and a mean absolute error (MAE) score of 5.30, both of which are better than the best results on the AVEC test set as given in the baseline paper i.e. 6.97 and 5.66, respectively. This suggests that our method is a viable proof of concept and may lead to fully automated objective depression screening protocols.
What Do Participants of the Crohn's and Colitis UK (CCUK) Annual York Walk Think of Their Inflammatory Bowel Disease Care? A Short Report on a Survey

There has been a growing interest in a patient-centered model of care in inflammatory bowel disease; however, no relevant study using a mixed methodology has been conducted to date. Thus, our multidisciplinary group aimed to explore the issue of patient involvement in care among the inflammatory bowel disease community. A mixed-methods anonymous survey was conducted during the Crohn's and Colitis UK annual event. Summary statistics were used to describe the sample, and a simple thematic analysis identified key themes in qualitative responses. There were 64 survey respondents, representing 73% of the total family/friend groups participating (N = 87). Overall, 75% of respondents answered that they had the opportunity to discuss their care with their inflammatory bowel disease practitioner and 81% felt their opinions were taken on board and valued. A clear majority (84%) had at some point been treated by a gastroenterologist. In contrast, less than half (44%) had the opportunity for a dietician consultation and only 28% had the opportunity for a psychologist/counselor consultation. Although satisfaction with inflammatory bowel disease care was high, access to specialty services was concerning. Efforts should be made to provide access to mental health practitioners for those with clinically significant anxiety and/or depression.
Effects of Ionizing and Non-Ionizing Radiation on Oxidative Stress and the Total Antioxidant Status in Humans Working in Radiation Environments

Objective: This study was conducted to investigate the effects of ionizing radiation (IR) and non-ionizing radiation (NIR) on oxidative stress and the total antioxidant status (TAS) in men working in radiation environments. Methods: The serum values of total oxidant status (TOS), malondialdehyde (MDA), and protein carbonyl (PC) in men exposed to radiation and a control group were determined. In addition, the values of the total antioxidant status (TAS) were measured in serum, and the oxidative stress index (OSI) was calculated to determine the oxidative stress. Data were analyzed by SPSS 20.0 (Chicago, IL, USA). Results: While the serum values of PC, MDA, TOS, and OSI were significantly higher in the IR group than in the control group, those of TAS were significantly lower (p<0.001, p=0.003, p<0.001, p<0.001, and p= 0.002, respectively). The serum values of PC, TOS, and OSI were significantly higher in the NIR group than in the control group (p<0.001, p=0.021, and p=0.010, respectively). In contrast, there were no significant differences in the values of TAS and MDA (p>0.05 and p>0.05, respectively) in the same groups. Conclusion: Based on these results, we determined that it had been damaged the balance between oxidants and antioxidant status in the IR and NIR groups. This effect of oxidative stress may cause a lot of damage to cellular macromolecules including lipids, proteins, and DNA.
Is Generator Conditioning Causally Related to GAN Performance?

Recent work (Pennington et al, 2017) suggests that controlling the entire distribution of Jacobian singular values is an important design consideration in deep learning. Motivated by this, we study the distribution of singular values of the Jacobian of the generator in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We find that this Jacobian generally becomes ill-conditioned at the beginning of training. Moreover, we find that the average (with z from p(z)) conditioning of the generator is highly predictive of two other ad-hoc metrics for measuring the 'quality' of trained GANs: the Inception Score and the Frechet Inception Distance (FID). We test the hypothesis that this relationship is causal by proposing a 'regularization' technique (called Jacobian Clamping) that softly penalizes the condition number of the generator Jacobian. Jacobian Clamping improves the mean Inception Score and the mean FID for GANs trained on several datasets. It also greatly reduces inter-run variance of the aforementioned scores, addressing (at least partially) one of the main criticisms of GANs.
Has the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder phenotype become more common in children between 2004 and 2014? Trends over 10 years from a Swedish general population sample

BACKGROUND Studies have reported increases in clinically diagnosed and treated attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) during the last decade, but it is unclear if this reflects an increase in the underlying ADHD phenotype. We aimed to clarify if there has been an increase in the prevalence of ADHD-like traits in the general population from 2004 to 2014. METHOD Data were collected from 9-year-old twins (19,271), participating in the population-based Child and Adolescent Twin Study in Sweden between 2004 and 2014. We assessed lifetime ADHD symptoms using the Autism-Tics, ADHD and other Comorbidities inventory. Research proxies for diagnostic-level ADHD and subthreshold ADHD were derived from this scale. We modeled the lifetime prevalence of diagnostic-level and subthreshold ADHD with logistic regression, and assessed mean ADHD scores each year with linear regression. Lifetime prevalence of clinically diagnosed ADHD was retrieved from the National Patient Register and modeled with logistic regression. RESULTS The prevalence of diagnostic-level ADHD based on parent ratings did not differ significantly over time from 2004 to 2014 (OR 1.37; 95% CI: 0.77-2.45; p-value .233). Both subthreshold ADHD and mean ADHD scores increased significantly over time (both p-values <.001). Clinically diagnosed ADHD increased more than fivefold from 2004 to 2014 (OR 5.27, 95% CI: 1.85-14.96). CONCLUSIONS We found no evidence of an increase in ADHD-like traits at the extreme end of the distribution from 2004 to 2014, but small increases in normal and subthreshold variations of ADHD-like traits were observed. This suggests that the increased rates of clinically diagnosed ADHD might reflect changes in diagnostic and treatment practices of ADHD, administrative changes in reporting diagnoses, greater awareness of ADHD, better access to healthcare, or current overdiagnosis, rather than an increase in the ADHD phenotype.
Development of Biopolymer Nanocomposites Based on Polysaccharides Obtained from Red Algae Chondracanthus chamissoi Reinforced with Chitin Whiskers and Montmorillonite

ABSTRACT Polysaccharides from various species of algae have many applications in the food and biomedical industry. The aim of this study was to characterize nanocomposites developed from carrageenan extracted from the red algae Chondracanthus chamissoi and reinforced with montmorillonite and chitin nanowhiskers. The nanocomposites showed improved mechanical properties compared to the biopolymeric matrix. Montmorillonite-reinforced nanocomposites displayed the most favorable properties at 5% of clay concentration; meanwhile, the chitin-nanocomposites showed an improvement in the mechanical properties correlating to the increase in chitin concentration. These results will aid in the development of more environmentally friendly materials. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
Detecting Contour Saliences using Tensor Scale

Tensor scale is a morphometric parameter that unifies the representation of local structure thickness, orientation, and anisotropy, which can be used in several image processing tasks. This paper introduces a new application for tensor scale, which is the detection of saliences on a given contour, based on the tensor scale orientations computed for the entire object and mapped to its contour. For validation purposes, we present a shape descriptor that uses the detected contour saliences. Experimental results are provided, comparing the proposed method with our previous contour salience descriptor (CS). We show that the proposed method can be not only faster and more robust in the detection of salience points than the CS method, but also more effective as a shape descriptor.
Mental health problems of second generation children and adolescents with migration background

Abstract Objective: Despite the growing number of young second-generation immigrant (SGI) children and adolescents, studies about their mental health are rare. The objective of this study was to investigate the mental health problems of SGI children and adolescents in Istanbul, Turkey. Methods: In a clinical sample the mental health of 54 SGIs and 50 native children and adolescents were examined using the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School Aged Children-Present and Lifetime Version (K-SADS-PL) and Children’s Global Assessment Scale. The assessments were carried out by a blinded rater. Results: SGI children had higher rates of psychiatric disorders such as depression (p = 0.001), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (p = 0.011) and anxiety disorders (p = 0.013), more comorbid disorders and lower functionality scores compared to their native counterparts (p = 0.001). Conclusions: SGI children seem to have higher rates of psychiatric disorders most probably due to migration-induced burdens. The professionals treating SGI children should have more awareness for these problems to be able to approach them in a culture and language sensitive way.
Sociocultural Influences on African Americans' Representations of Type 2 Diabetes: A Qualitative Study.

Objective Illness representations, known as patients' beliefs and expectations about an illness, may be influenced by cultural beliefs and personal experiences. This study explored African Americans' perceptions of the sociocultural factors that influence their representations of diabetes. Design Six semi-structured focus groups. Setting Private space at a convenient site. Participants Forty African Americans, aged 45-60 years with type 2 diabetes for at least one year prior. Results Participants perceived that there was a race-mediated effect of how they developed diabetes because of poverty due to past slavery, racial discrimination by health care providers, and the stigma associated with diabetes within the African American community. Participants perceived that poverty influenced African Americans' unhealthy eating habits, which led to diabetes diagnosis among their ancestors and their development of the disease since it was hereditary. Participants also perceived that there was provider ill intention, ie, providers were purposefully making people sick, and their lack of education on diabetes from providers was done on purpose, as information on diabetes was withheld and not shared due to racial discrimination. Perceived stigma by the community led to African Americans' avoidance and denial of the disease, and subsequently the development of diabetes. Conclusions To enhance disease management for African Americans with diabetes, it is important to focus on the sociocultural context of how African Americans view their world that may be influenced by their knowledge of negative historical circumstances and their current provider relationship, which, in turn, may be reflected in their perceptions of diabetes.