Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Degree and Time Sequence of Hypothermic Protection Against Experimental Ischemic Acute Renal Failure

The purpose of this study was to assess the degree, time sequence, and biochemical correlates of hypothermic protection against ischemic acute renal failure. Rats subjected to 40 minutes of bilateral renal artery occlusion (RAO) were made mildly hypothermic (32°-33° C, by cold saline peritoneal lavage) during the following time periods: 1) RAO only, 2) reperfusion only (beginning at 0,15, 30, or 60 minutes after RAO and maintained for 45 minutes), or 3) during and after (0-45 minutes) RAO. Continuously normothermic (37° C) RAO rats served as controls. The control rats developed severe acute renal failure (blood urea nitrogen [BUN], 95 ± 4 mg/dl; creatinine, 2.2 ± 0.1 mg/dl; and extensive tubular necrosis at 24 hours). Hypothermia confined to RAO was highly protective (BUN, 33 ± 5 mg/dl; creatinine, 0.62 ± 0.07 mg/dl; and minimal necrosis). Hypothermia partially preserved ischemic renal adenylate high-energy phosphate (ATP and ADP), increased AMP and inosine monophosphate concentrations, and lessened hypoxanthine/xanthine buildup (assessed at end of RAO). Hypothermia confined to the reflow period (beginning at 0, 15, and 30 minutes) was only mildly protective (e.g., BUN, 58-63 mg/dl); the degree of protection did not differ according to the time of hypothermic onset. Lowering reflow temperature to 26° C had no added benefit. Hypothermia that started at 60 minutes after RAO conferred no protection. Combining ischemic and postischemic hypothermia abolished all renal failure (assessed at 24 hours). This study offers the following conclusions: Mild hypothermia can totally prevent experimental ischemic acute renal failure. Hypothermia is highly effective during ischemia, and it is mildly protective during early reflow; these benefits are additive. During early reflow, hypothermic protection is not critically time dependent. By 60 minutes of reflow, no effect is elicited; this absence of effect possibly signals completion of the reperfusion injury process. Hypothermia's protective effects may be mediated, in part, by improvements in renal adenine nucleotide content and, possibly, by decreasing postischemic oxidant stress. {Circulation Research 1989;65:1263-1269)
Mathematical Analysis of EDCA's Performance on the Control Channel of an IEEE 802.11p WAVE Vehicular Network

Wireless networks for vehicular environments are gaining increasing importance due to their ability to provide a means for stations on the roadside and radio units on board of vehicles to communicate and share safety-related information, thus reducing the probability of accidents and increasing the efficiency of the transportation system. With this goal in mind, the IEEE is currently developing the Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) IEEE 802.11p standard. WAVE devices use the IEEE 802.11's Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) MAC protocol to compete for the transmission medium. This work proposes an analytical tool to evaluate the performance of EDCA under the specific conditions of the so-called control channel (CCH) of a WAVE environment, including the particular EDCA parameter values and the fact that all safety-critical data frames are broadcasted. The protocol is modeled using Markov chains and results related to throughput, frame-error rate, buffer occupancy and delay are obtained under different traffic-load conditions. The main analysis is performed assuming that the CCH works continuously, and then an explanation is given as to the considerations that are needed to account for the fact that activity on the CCH is intermittent.
Project for the National Program of Early Diagnosis of Endometrial Cancer Part II

Rationale: Endometrial cancer recorded a peak incidence in ages 60-64 years in Romania. Since 2013, an increased trend of endometrial cancer occurrence has been registered in urban areas as compared with rural ones. Unfortunately, most of the cancer cases are diagnosed too late, in an advanced stage of the disease, resulting into diminished lifetime expectancy. The first part of the article concentrated on issues such as: the description of the study, results, and discussions regarding the study, definitions and terms, risk factors specific for endometrial carcinomas, presentation of the activities of the Program, etc. Objective: Drafting a national program that will serve as an early diagnosis method of endometrial cancer. This second part of the study continues with the presentation of the activities of the Program, analyzes the human resources and materials needed to implement the Program, presents the strategies and the indicators specific for the implementation of the project. Methods and Results: A standardization of the diagnostic steps was proposed and the focus was on 4 key elements for the early diagnosis of endometrial cancer: The first steps were approached in the first part of the study and the second part of the study investigated the proper monitoring of precursor endometrial lesions or cancer associated endometrial lesions and screening high risk populations (Lynch syndrome, Cowden syndrome). Discussion: Improving medical practice based on diagnostic algorithms and programs improves and increases the lifetime expectancy, due to the fact that endometrial cancer is early diagnosed and treated before it causes serious health problems or even death. Abbreviations: ASCCP = American Society for Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology, CT = Computerized Tomography, HNPCC = Hereditary Nonpolyposis Colorectal Cancer (Lynch syndrome), IHC = Immunohistochemistry, MSI = Microsatellites instability, MSI-H/ MSI-L = high (positive test)/ low (negative test) microsatellites instability, PCR = Polymerase chain reaction, MRI = Magnetic Resonance Imaging, SGO = Society of Gynecologic Oncologists, SHG = Sonohysterography, TVUS = Transvaginal ultrasound
Escherichia coli ras Locus: Its Involvement in Radiation Repair

There are several classes of Escherichia coli mutants defective in radiation repair. These include strains defective in pyrimidine dimer excision, in photoreactivation, in recombination, in repair of X-ray damage, and ultraviolet (UV)-conditional mutants which do not divide after UV. Another mutant (ras−) has been isolated. The ras− has increased UV sensitivity, but only slightly increased X-ray sensitivity (1.5-fold increase). Ability to effect genetic recombination, to reactivate irradiated bacteriophage T1, and to be photoreactivated is normal. UV-induced mutation frequency is greatly increased in the mutant. The ras− apparently lacks the ability to repair some UV damage in the bacterial cell but can repair UV damage to bacteriophage DNA. The ras locus is located between lac and purE on the chromosome map.
Spherical planetary nebulae

By examining their mass loss history and their distribution in the galaxy, I argue that spherical planetary nebulae (PNe) form a special group among all planetary nebulae. The smooth surface brightness of most spherical PNe suggests that their progenitors did not go through a final intensive wind (FIW, also termed superwind) phase. While ~70% of the PNe of all other PNe groups are closer to the galactic center than the sun is, only ~30% of spherical PNe are; ~70% of them are farther away from the galactic center. These, plus the well-known high scale height above the galactic plane of spherical PNe, suggest that the progenitors of spherical PNe are low mass stars having low metallicity. Although many stars have these properties, only ~10% of all PNe are spherical. By comparing the galactic distribution of spherical PNe to the metallicity evolution in the galaxy, I find that the critical metallicity above which no spherical PNe are formed is ${\rm [Fe/H]} \sim -0.4$. I explain this as well as other properties of spherical PNe in the context of the companion model for shaping PNe, arguing that spherical PNe are formed from stars that have no close companion, stellar or substellar, orbiting them. I discuss the connection of the proposed scenario to the recent finding of extrasolar planets and to the presence of blue horizontal branch stars in globular clusters.
How Mutational Networks Shape Evolution: Lessons from RNA Models

Recent advances in molecular biology and computation have enabled evolutionary biologists to develop models that explicitly capture molecular structure. By including complex and realistic maps from genotypes to phenotypes, such models are yielding important new insights into evolutionary processes. In particular, computer simulations of evolving RNA structure have inspired a new conceptual framework for thinking about patterns of mutational connectivity and general theories about the nature of evolutionary transitions, the evolutionary ascent of nonoptimal phenotypes, and the origins of mutational robustness and modular structures. Here, we describe this class of RNA models and review the major conceptual contributions they have made to evolutionary biology.
Ultrastructure of a magnetotactic spirillum

The ultrastructure of a magnetotactic bacterium (strain MS-1) was examined by transmission, scanning, and scanning-transmission electron microscopy. The organism resembled other spirilla in general cell morphology, although some differences were detected at the ultrastructural level. Electron-dense particles within magnetotactic cells were shown by energy-dispersive X-ray analysis to be localizations containing iron. A non-magnetotactic variant of strain MS-1 lacked these novel bacterial inclusion bodies. A chain of these particles traversed each magnetotactic cell in a specific arrangement that was consistent from cell to cell, seemingly associated with the inner surface of the cytoplasmic membrane. Each particle was surrounded by an electron-dense layer separated from the particle surface by an electron-transparent region. The term "magnetosome" is proposed for the electron-dense particles with their enveloping layer(s) as found in this and other magnetotactic bacteria.
Morphological Generation of German for SMT

We participated in the ACL WMT 2009 shared task for translati on of German to English, and English to German. We used the Moses open source system, combined with m orphological processing. For German to English, we had the only constraint system comparable wit h the open-data systems. One of the reasons the system performed well was strong reduction of the German vocabulary, through a simplistic corpusdriven algorithm with minimal linguistic knowledge, which performed aggressive inflection removal and compound splitting. For the English to German task, we submitted a two-step syste m. In the first step we translated English to the reduced German representation (the same representat ion which we used as the input to our German to English system). In the second step, we built another Mose s system to “translate” the reduced German representation back to normal German through the addition o f i flection and merging of split compound words. This two-step system was the worst constraint system ubmitted (and in fact the only constraint system that differed from all other constraint systems whic h otherwise scored as a group). Our presentation at the Research Workshop of the Israel Scie nce Foundation on Machine Translation and Morphologically-rich Languages will describe work don e as a direct reaction to the poor performance of our English to German system, and to the poor performance o f SMT systems in general for this translation task. Our current English to German system for news translat ion improves by 0.84 BLEU over the baseline and uses sophisticated morphological generation based on S MOR, the University of Stuttgart morphological analyzer/generator of German, and BitPar, a state-of-theart parser of German also developed in-house.
Jointly Learning Non-negative Projection and Dictionary with Discriminative Graph Constraints for Classification

Sparse coding with dictionary learning (DL) has shown excellent classification performance. Despite the considerable number of existing works, how to obtain features on top of which dictionaries can be better learned remains an open and interesting question. Many current prevailing DL methods directly adopt well-performing crafted features. While such strategy may empirically work well, it ignores certain intrinsic relationship between dictionaries and features. We propose a framework where features and dictionaries are jointly learned and optimized. The framework, named joint non-negative projection and dictionary learning (JNPDL), enables interaction between the input features and the dictionaries. The non-negative projection leads to discriminative parts-based object features while DL seeks a more suitable representation. Discriminative graph constraints are further imposed to simultaneously maximize intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Experiments on both image and image set classification show the excellent performance of JNPDL by outperforming several state-of-the-art approaches.
Adaptive radiation in Lesser Antillean lizards: molecular phylogenetics and species recognition in the Lesser Antillean dwarf gecko complex, Sphaerodactylus fantasticus

The time associated with speciation varies dramatically among lower vertebrates. The nature and timing of divergence is investigated in the fantastic dwarf gecko Sphaerodactylus fantasticus complex, a nominal species that occurs on the central Lesser Antillean island of Guadeloupe and adjacent islands and islets. This is compared to the divergence in the sympatric anole clade from the Anolis bimaculatus group. A molecular phylogenetic analysis of numerous gecko populations from across these islands, based on three mitochondrial DNA genes, reveals several monophyletic groups occupying distinct geographical areas, these being Les Saintes, western Basse Terre plus Dominica, eastern Basse Terre, Grand Terre, and the northern and eastern islands (Montserrat, Marie Galante, Petite Terre, Desirade). Although part of the same nominal species, the molecular divergence within this species complex is extraordinarily high (27% patristic distance between the most divergent lineages) and is compatible with this group occupying the region long before the origin of the younger island arc. Tests show that several quantitative morphological traits are correlated with the phylogeny, but in general the lineages are not uniquely defined by these traits. The dwarf geckos show notably less nominal species‐level adaptive radiation than that found in the sympatric southern clade of Anolis bimculatus, although both appear to have occupied the region for a broadly similar period of time. Nevertheless, the dwarf gecko populations on Les Saintes islets are the most morphologically distinct and are recognized as a full species (Sphaerodactylus phyzacinus), as are anoles on Les Saintes (Anolis terraealtae).
Representation of Action in Occipito-temporal Cortex

A fundamental question for social cognitive neuroscience is how and where in the brain the identities and actions of others are represented. Here we present a replication and extension of a study by Kable and Chatterjee [Kable, J. W. , & Chatterjee, A. Specificity of action representations in the lateral occipito-temporal cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 1498–1517, 2006] examining the role of occipito-temporal cortex in these processes. We presented full-cue movies of actors performing whole-body actions and used fMRI to test for action- and identity-specific adaptation effects. We examined a series of functionally defined regions, including the extrastriate and fusiform body areas, the fusiform face area, the parahippocampal place area, the lateral occipital complex, the right posterior superior temporal sulcus, and motion-selective area hMT+. These regions were analyzed with both standard univariate measures as well as multivoxel pattern analyses. Additionally, we performed whole-brain tests for significant adaptation effects. We found significant action-specific adaptation in many areas, but no evidence for identity-specific adaptation. We argue that this finding could be explained by differences in the familiarity of the stimuli presented: The actions shown were familiar but the actors performing the actions were unfamiliar. However, in contrast to previous findings, we found that the action adaptation effect could not be conclusively tied to specific functionally defined regions. Instead, our results suggest that the adaptation to previously seen actions across identities is a widespread effect, evident across lateral and ventral occipito-temporal cortex.
Learning-Based Abstractions for Nonlinear Constraint Solving

We propose a new abstraction refinement procedure based on machine learning to improve the performance of nonlinear constraint solving algorithms on large-scale problems. The proposed approach decomposes the original set of constraints into smaller subsets, and uses learning algorithms to propose sequences of abstractions that take the form of conjunctions of classifiers. The core procedure is a refinement loop that keeps improving the learned results based on counterexamples that are obtained from partial constraints that are easy to solve. Experiments show that the proposed techniques significantly improved the performance of state-of-the-art constraint solvers on many challenging benchmarks. The mechanism is capable of producing intermediate symbolic abstractions that are also important for many applications and for understanding the internal structures of hard constraint solving problems.
Scapular Dyskinesis and Its Relation to Shoulder Injury

Abstract The scapula plays a key role in nearly every aspect of normal shoulder function. Scapular dyskinesis—altered scapular positioning and motion—is found in association with most shoulder injuries. Basic science and clinical research findings have led to the identification of normal three‐dimensional scapular kinematics in scapulohumeral rhythm and to abnormal kinematics in shoulder injury, the development of clinical methods of evaluating the scapula (eg, scapular assistance test, scapular retraction test), and the formulation of rehabilitation guidelines. Primary scapular presentations such as scapular winging and snapping should be managed with a protocol that is focused on the scapula. Persons with associated conditions such as shoulder impingement, rotator cuff disease, labral injury, clavicle fracture, acromioclavicular joint injury, and multidirectional instability should be evaluated for scapular dyskinesis and treated accordingly.
Exploration and Curiosity in Robot Learning and Inference (Dagstuhl Seminar 11131)

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 11131 ``Exploration and Curiosity in Robot Learning and Inference''. This seminar was concerned with answering the question: how should a robot choose its actions and experiences so as to maximise the effectiveness of its learning? }. The seminar brought together workers from three fields: machine learning, robotics and computational neuroscience. The seminar gave an overview of active research, and identified open research problems. In particular the seminar identified the difficulties in moving from theoretically well grounded notions of curiosity to practical robot implementations.
The role of membrane acid/base transporters and carbonic anhydrases for cellular pH and metabolic processes

ACIDOSIS AND PROTON HOMEOSTASIS IN CELLS AND TISSUES Acidosis in the brain may severely impair a variety of functions, including synaptic transmission, metabolic energy supply, membrane transport and other processes (Ruusuvuori and Kaila, 2014). Transport of acid–base equivalents across the cell membrane of neurons and glial cells also results in pH changes in the extracellular spaces. Cytosolic and extracellular buffer capacity and the activity of carbonic anhydrases contribute to shape pH changes, which can be elicited by neuronal activity, neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, metabolic processes, active cellular pH regulation, and secondary transporters carrying acid– base equivalents, and in turn these pH changes can affect neuronal functions (Deitmer and Rose, 1996; Chesler, 2003). The free H+ concentration in cells is in the nanomolar range, and the high buffer capacity of cells provides a reservoir of acid equivalents in the millimolar range. In other words, there is a pool of protons in rapid exchange between buffer sites and free solution, with 105 or more protons being buffered for each proton in solution. At a blood pH of 7.4, and 7.2–7.3 in the extracellular spaces of brain tissue (Cragg et al., 1977; Ruusuvuori and Kaila, 2014), and with a negative membrane potential of between −50 and −90 mV in mammalian brain cells, H+ has to be continuously extruded to maintain a physiological cytosolic pH of 7.0–7.3. Nevertheless, pH changes may peak well outside this range, at least for short time periods, and may be considered as H+ signals, sometimes even with neurotransmitter function (Deitmer and Rose, 1996; Du et al., 2014). The net extrusion of acid from neurons and glial cells is accomplished by secondary active transport, wherein the efflux of H+ or the influx of HCO3 is coupled to Na+ influx, utilizing energy stored in the transmembrane Na+ gradient. pH regulation in these cells involves a variety of membrane acid–base carriers, including sodium– hydrogen exchange, sodium–bicarbonate cotransport, and sodium-dependent and sodium-independent chloride– bicarbonate exchange. In addition, there are a number of acid/base-coupled carriers, which are linked to the transport of metabolites, such as lactate and amino acids. The lactate transport via monocarboxylate transporters (MCTs) has been suggested to play a major role for the supply of energy to neurons, and led to the “Astrocyte-to-Neuron Lactate Shuttle Hypothesis” (ANLSH; Pellerin and Magistretti, 1994).
Reward interdependence: The effect on decision making process in virtual teams

This study investigated the effect of reward interdependence on performance and decision making process in virtual teams. 30 tams participated in a simulated task based on internet. The level of reward interdependence was manipulating the percentage of team performance and individual performance in the calculation method of salary. The results showed that the performance was highest in the group with low level of reward interdependence, whose decision making was of adventure and strategy that were essential to the task implementing.