Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Direct external imaging of nascent cancer, tumor progression, angiogenesis, and metastasis on internal organs in the fluorescent orthotopic model

Mouse tumor models have undergone profound improvements in the fidelity of emulating human disease. Replacing ectopic s.c. implantation with organ-specific orthotopic implantation reproduces human tumor growth and metastasis. Strong fluorescent labeling with green fluorescent protein along with inexpensive video detectors, positioned externally to the mouse, allows the monitoring of details of tumor growth, angiogenesis, and metastatic spread. However, the sensitivity of external imaging is limited by light scattering in intervening tissue, most especially in skin. Opening a reversible skin-flap in the light path markedly reduces signal attenuation, increasing detection sensitivity many-fold. The observable depth of tissue is thereby greatly increased and many tumors that were previously hidden are now clearly observable. This report presents tumor images and related quantitative growth data previously impossible to obtain. Single tumor cells, expressing green fluorescent protein, were seeded on the brain image through a scalp skin-flap. Lung tumor microfoci representing a few cells are viewed through a skin-flap over the chest wall, while contralateral micrometastases were imaged through the corresponding skin-flap. Pancreatic tumors and their angiogenic microvessels were imaged by means of a peritoneal wall skin-flap. A skin-flap over the liver allowed imaging of physiologically relevant micrometastases originating in an orthotopically implanted tumor. Single tumor cells on the liver arising from intraportal injection also were detectable. Possible future technical developments are suggested by the image, through a lower-abdominal skin-flap, of an invasive prostate tumor expressing both red and green fluorescent proteins in separate colonies.
Improved ultrasonic spectroscopy methods for characterization of dispersive materials

Transmission ultrasonic spectroscopy method has been successfully implemented for the characterization of piezoceramics at high frequencies. There are, however, still some intrinsic error sources that limit the accuracy of the method. In this paper, two improved ultrasonic spectroscopy methods are presented, which can reduce the number of pre-required parameters and reduce another error source. The two improved methods were used to measure the frequency dispersion of phase velocity and attenuation of doped piezoceramic lead zirconate titanate (PZT-5A); results were compared with those obtained from the conventional method. The advantages and limitations of each method are discussed.
Medium density polyethylene composites with functionalized carbon nanotubes

A strong interface between the single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) and polymer matrix is necessary to achieve enhanced mechanical properties of composites. In this work a series of sidewall-functionalized SWNTs have been investigated in order to evaluate the effect of functionalization on SWNT aspect ratio and composite interfacial chemistry and their role on mechanical properties of a medium density polyethylene (MDPE) matrix. Fluorinated nanotubes (F-SWNTs) were used as precursors for subsequent sidewall functionalization with long chain alkyl groups to produce an F-SWNT- C11H23 derivative. The latter was refluorinated to yield a new perfluorinated derivative, F-SWNT- C11FxHy. The functionalized SWNTs as well as the pristine SWNTs were integrated into an MDPE matrix at a 1 wt% loading. The nanotubes and composite materials were characterized with FTIR, Raman spectroscopy, NMR, XPS, AFM, SEM, TGA, DSC and tensile tests. When incorporated into polyethylene, the new perfluorinated derivative, F-SWNT- C11FxHy, yielded the highest tensile strength value among all nanotube/MDPE composite samples, showing a 52% enhancement in comparison with the neat MDPE. The 1 wt% SWNT/MDPE composite contained nanotubes with a larger aspect ratio but, due to a lack of interfacial chemistry, it resulted in less improvement in mechanical properties compared to the composites made with the fluorinated SWNT derivatives.
PRELIMINARY VALIDATION OF THE SPORT FAN MOTIVATION SCALE

Factors believed to be motivations responsible for sport fandom include eustress, self-esteem, escape, entertainment, economic, aesthetic, group affiliation, and family needs. However, these factors have been untested empirically, and a valid and reliable measure of sport fan motivation has been unavailable to researchers. The current two studies were an attempt to develop such a measure. The construction and validation of a 23-item Likert-scale measure, the Sport Fan Motivation Scale, are described. Discussion centers on possible uses for the instrument.
Murine MusD Retrotransposon: Structure and Molecular Evolution of an “Intracellularized” Retrovirus

ABSTRACT We had previously identified active autonomous copies of the MusD long terminal repeat-retrotransposon family, which have retained transpositional activity. These elements are closely related to betaretroviruses but lack an envelope (env) gene. Here we show that these elements encode strictly intracellular virus-like particles that can unambiguously be identified by electron microscopy. We demonstrate intracellular maturation of the particles, with a significant proportion of densely packed cores for wild-type MusD but not for a protease mutant. We show that the molecular origin of this unexpected intracellular localization is solely dependent on the N-terminal part of the Gag protein, which lacks a functional sequence for myristoylation and plasma membrane targeting: replacement of the N-terminal domain of the MusD matrix protein by that of its closest relative—the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus—led to targeting of the MusD Gag to the plasma membrane, with viral particles budding and being released into the cell supernatant. These particles can further be pseudotyped with a heterologous envelope protein and become infectious, thus “reconstituting” a functional retrovirus prone to proviral insertions. Consistent with its retroviral origin, a sequence with a constitutive transport element-like activity can further be identified at the MusD 3′ untranslated region. A molecular scenario is proposed that accounts for the transition, during evolution, from an ancestral infectious betaretrovirus to the strictly intracellular MusD retrotransposon, involving not only the loss of the env gene but also an inability to escape the cell—via altered targeting of the Gag protein—resulting de facto in the generation of a very successful “intracellularized” insertional mutagen.
Applying SMES to smooth short-term power fluctuations in wind farms

Variability in power output is a characteristic of wind energy, resulting in an adverse impact over the power system. In order to reduce the wind power impact over the power quality, a SMES is applied to smooth short-term fluctuations in wind farms. An independent power control strategy is used for the SMES. An indirect wind power control strategy based on compensating the power fluctuations by SMES is investigated. The simulation results show that the short-term power fluctuations can be smoothed and the system voltage deviations can be properly damped, which verify the effectiveness of the control strategy of SMES.
An Investigation of the Impact of Organization Size on Data Quality Issues

Data quality issues have become increasingly critical for information systems applications in organizations of all sizes. This paper presents results from a large-scale Australian survey of Australian CPA members. The research investigates major stakeholdersâ€™ opinions on the importance of critical success factors affecting data quality and the actual performance on each of those factors. The results reveal whether dissimilarly-sized organizations differ in the way they measure the importance and performance of critical success factors for data quality in accounting information systems.
Reconfiguring Parallel State Machine Replication

State Machine Replication (SMR) is a well-known technique to implement fault-tolerant systems. In SMR, servers are replicated and client requests are deterministically executed in the same order by all replicas. To improve performance in multi-processor systems, some approaches have proposed to parallelize the execution of non-conflicting requests. Such approaches perform remarkably well in workloads dominated by non-conflicting requests. Conflicting requests introduce expensive synchronization and result in considerable performance loss. Current approaches to parallel SMR define the degree of parallelism statically. However, it is often difficult to predict the best degree of parallelism for a workload and workloads experience variations that change their best degree of parallelism. This paper proposes a protocol to reconfigure the degree of parallelism in parallel SMR on-the-fly. Experiments show the gains due to reconfiguration and shed some light on the behavior of parallel and reconfigurable SMR.
Registration of terrestrial laser scanning data using planar patches and image data

The fully automatic registration of terrestrial scan data is still a major topic for many research groups. Existent methods used in commercial software often use artificial markers which are placed in the scene and measured from each scan position. This is a reliable method to get the transformation parameters, but it is not very efficient. These manual or semi-automated registration techniques should be substituted by new methods in order to make terrestrial laser scanning also profitable for larger projects. In this paper we present a registration method based on the extraction of planar patches from 3D laser scanning data. A search technique is used to find corresponding patches in two overlapping scan positions. Since laser scanning instruments are nowadays often equipped with an additional image sensor, we also use the image information to improve the registration process. Assuming that the calibration parameters of a hybrid sensor system are known, the extracted planar patches can be textured automatically. The correlation between corresponding textured patches can be calculated and the registration method is improved by shifting the patches until they fit best.
Cytokine Responses in Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-Infected Macrophages In Vitro: Possible Relevance to Pathogenesis

ABSTRACT The pathogenesis of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) remains unclear. Macrophages are key sentinel cells in the respiratory system, and it is therefore relevant to compare the responses of human macrophages to infections with the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and other respiratory viruses. Primary human monocyte-derived macrophages were infected with SARS-CoV in vitro. Virus replication was monitored by measuring the levels of positive- and negative-strand RNA, by immunofluorescence detection of the SARS-CoV nucleoprotein, and by titration of the infectious virus. The gene expression profiles of macrophages infected with SARS-CoV, human coronavirus 229E, and influenza A (H1N1) virus were compared by using microarrays and real-time quantitative reverse transcriptase PCR. Secreted cytokines were measured with an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. SARS-CoV initiated viral gene transcription and protein synthesis in macrophages, but replication was abortive and no infectious virus was produced. In contrast to the case with human coronavirus 229E and influenza A virus, there was little or no induction of beta interferon (IFN-β) in SARS-CoV-infected macrophages. Furthermore, SARS-CoV induced the expression of chemokines such as CXCL10/IFN-γ-inducible protein 10 and CCL2/monocyte chemotactic protein 1. The poor induction of IFN-β, a key component of innate immunity, and the ability of the virus to induce chemokines could explain aspects of the pathogenesis of SARS.
Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations

For much of human evolution, the natural world was one of the most important contexts of children's maturation. Indeed, the experience of nature was, and still may be, a critical component of human physical, emotional, intellectual, and even moral development. Yet scientific knowledge of the significance of nature during the different stages of childhood is sparse. This book provides scientific investigations and thought-provoking essays on children and nature. Children and Nature incorporates research from cognitive science, developmental psychology, ecology, education, environmental studies, evolutionary psychology, political science, primatology, psychiatry, and social psychology. The authors examine the evolutionary significance of nature during childhood; the formation of children's conceptions, values, and sympathies toward the natural world; how contact with nature affects children's physical and mental development; and the educational and political consequences of the weakened childhood experience of nature in modern society.
Evaluating the conventional and class-modular architectures feedforward neural network for handwritten word recognition

We evaluate the use of the conventional architecture feedforward MLP (multiple layer perception) and class-modular for the handwriting recognition and it also compares the results obtained with previous works in terms of recognition rate. We present a feature set in full detail to work with handwriting recognition. The experiments showed that the class-modular architecture is better than conventional architecture. The obtained average recognition rates were 77.08% using the conventional architecture and 81.75% using the class-modular.
Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times

This book represents the first objective, comprehensive survey of the evidence for life after death provided by 'near-death' experiences. Carol Zalewski demonstrates that the eyewitness account of life after death is a common motif in the folklore and religious literature of the world, and shows that medieval Christian visionary narratives in particular offer surprisingly close parallels to the modern stories. In her discussion of the similarities and differences between the medieval and modern 'otherworld journey' narratives, she sheds light on modern cultural attitudes toward death and religion.
Implantable Defibrillators and Prevention of Sudden Death in Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is the most common cause of sudden cardiac death in young people, including trained athletes. The implantable cardioverter‐defibrillator (ICD), although initially designed as a treatment for older patients with coronary artery disease, has more recently proved to be a safe and effective therapeutic intervention in young patients with HCM, both for primary or secondary prevention of sudden death. The largest such report of >500 patients showed that the ICD intervened appropriately to abort ventricular tachycardia/fibrillation (VT/VF) in 20% of patients over an average follow‐up period of only 3.7 years, at a rate of about 4% per year in those patients implanted prophylactically, and often with considerable delays of up to 10 years. Extensive experience with high‐risk HCM patients showed that appropriate device discharges for VT/VF occur with similar frequency in patients with 1, 2, or ≥3 noninvasive risk markers. Despite the extreme morphology characteristic of HCM, often with massive degrees of left ventricular (LV) hypertrophy and/or LV outflow tract obstruction, ICDs performed in a highly effective fashion, with failure to convert life‐threatening arrhythmias extraordinarily rare. In conclusion, in a large high‐risk HCM cohort, ICD interventions for life‐threatening ventricular tachyarrhythmias were frequent and highly effective in restoring normal rhythm. An important proportion of ICD discharges occurred in primary prevention patients with only one risk factor. Therefore, a single marker of high risk may represent sufficient evidence to justify the recommendation for a prophylactic ICD in selected patients with HCM.
The Relational Ontology of Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach: Incorporating Social and Individual Causes

Abstract While Sen has written extensively on the social factors of capabilities, the exact nature of these social factors and how they interact to form and influence capabilities is contested and unclear. Consequently, how to coherently integrate social components into capability research remains a concern for those attempting to put the capability approach to practical use. This paper proposes one approach to understanding and integrating the social nature of capabilities. Building upon two recent contributions by Martins, we argue that underpinning Sen’s notion of capabilities is an ontological conception of a relational society. In this perspective, an individual’s capabilities emerge from the combination and interaction of individual‐level capacities and the individual’s relative position vis‐à‐vis social structures that provide reasons and resources for particular behaviors. Crucially, this conception of society is predicated upon a contextual notion of causality that is flexible enough to incorporate both individual and social causes into social analysis.
Kinetic Memory Based on the Enzyme-Limited Competition

Cellular memory, which allows cells to retain information from their environment, is important for a variety of cellular functions, such as adaptation to external stimuli, cell differentiation, and synaptic plasticity. Although posttranslational modifications have received much attention as a source of cellular memory, the mechanisms directing such alterations have not been fully uncovered. It may be possible to embed memory in multiple stable states in dynamical systems governing modifications. However, several experiments on modifications of proteins suggest long-term relaxation depending on experienced external conditions, without explicit switches over multi-stable states. As an alternative to a multistability memory scheme, we propose “kinetic memory” for epigenetic cellular memory, in which memory is stored as a slow-relaxation process far from a stable fixed state. Information from previous environmental exposure is retained as the long-term maintenance of a cellular state, rather than switches over fixed states. To demonstrate this kinetic memory, we study several models in which multimeric proteins undergo catalytic modifications (e.g., phosphorylation and methylation), and find that a slow relaxation process of the modification state, logarithmic in time, appears when the concentration of a catalyst (enzyme) involved in the modification reactions is lower than that of the substrates. Sharp transitions from a normal fast-relaxation phase into this slow-relaxation phase are revealed, and explained by enzyme-limited competition among modification reactions. The slow-relaxation process is confirmed by simulations of several models of catalytic reactions of protein modifications, and it enables the memorization of external stimuli, as its time course depends crucially on the history of the stimuli. This kinetic memory provides novel insight into a broad class of cellular memory and functions. In particular, applications for long-term potentiation are discussed, including dynamic modifications of calcium-calmodulin kinase II and cAMP-response element-binding protein essential for synaptic plasticity.
Interaction between Pirenzepine and Ninjinto, a Traditional Japanese Herbal Medicine, on the Plasma Gut-Regulated Peptide Levels in Humans

The Japanese herbal medicine (Kampo) Ninjinto has been used for the treatment of gastroenteritis, esogastritis, gastric atony, gastrectasis, vomiting, and anorexia. The pharmacological effects of Ninjinto on the gastrointestine are due to changes in the levels of gut-regulated peptide, such as motilin, somatostatin, calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP), substance P, and vasoactive intestinal polypeptide (VIP). The release of these peptides is controlled by acetylcholine (ACh) from the preganglionic fibers of the parasympathetic nerve. Thus, we examined the effects of the selective M1 muscarinic receptor antagonist pirenzepine on the elevation of Ninjinto-induced plasma the area under the plasma gut-regulated peptide concentration-time curve from 0 to 240 min (AUC0→240 min) in humans. Oral pretreatment with pirenzepine significantly reduced the Ninjinto-induced elevation of plasma motilin and substance P release (AUC0→240 min). Combined treatment with Ninjinto and pirenzepine significantly increased the release of plasma somatostatin (AUC0→240 min) compared with administration of Ninjinto alone or placebo. Ninjinto appeared to induce the release of substance P and motilin into plasma mainly through the activation of M1 muscarinic receptors, and pirenzepine may affect the pharmacologic action of Ninjinto by the elevation of plasma substance P, motilin, and somatostatin.
Measurement of Reverse Cholesterol Transport Pathways in Humans: In Vivo Rates of Free Cholesterol Efflux, Esterification, and Excretion

Background Reverse cholesterol transport from peripheral tissues is considered the principal atheroprotective mechanism of high-density lipoprotein, but quantifying reverse cholesterol transport in humans in vivo remains a challenge. We describe here a method for measuring flux of cholesterol though 3 primary components of the reverse cholesterol transport pathway in vivo in humans: tissue free cholesterol (FC) efflux, esterification of FC in plasma, and fecal sterol excretion of plasma-derived FC. Methods and Results A constant infusion of [2,3-13C2]-cholesterol was administered to healthy volunteers. Three-compartment SAAM II (Simulation, Analysis, and Modeling software; SAAM Institute, University of Washington, WA) fits were applied to plasma FC, red blood cell FC, and plasma cholesterol ester 13C–enrichment profiles. Fecal sterol excretion of plasma-derived FC was quantified from fractional recovery of intravenous [2,3-13C2]-cholesterol in feces over 7 days. We examined the key assumptions of the method and evaluated the optimal clinical protocol and approach to data analysis and modeling. A total of 17 subjects from 2 study sites (n=12 from first site, age 21 to 75 years, 2 women; n=5 from second site, age 18 to 70 years, 2 women) were studied. Tissue FC efflux was 3.79±0.88 mg/kg per hour (mean ± standard deviation), or ≍8 g/d. Red blood cell–derived flux into plasma FC was 3.38±1.10 mg/kg per hour. Esterification of plasma FC was ≍28% of tissue FC efflux (1.10±0.38 mg/kg per hour). Recoveries were 7% and 12% of administered [2,3-13C2]-cholesterol in fecal bile acids and neutral sterols, respectively. Conclusions Three components of systemic reverse cholesterol transport can be quantified, allowing dissection of this important function of high-density lipoprotein in vivo. Effects of lipoproteins, genetic mutations, lifestyle changes, and drugs on these components can be assessed in humans. (J Am Heart Assoc. 2012;1:e001826 doi: 10.1161/JAHA.112.001826.)