Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Antimicrobial Activity of the Extract and Isolated Compounds from Baccharis dracunculifolia D. C. (Asteraceae)

Baccharis dracunculifolia D.C. (Asteraceae) is the most important plant source of the Brazilian green propolis. Since propolis is known for its antimicrobial activity, the aim of this work was to evaluate the antimicrobial activities of B. dracunculifolia and some of its isolated compounds. The results showed that the leaves extract of B. dracunculifolia (BdE) presents antifungal and antibacterial activities, especially against Candida krusei and Cryptococcus neoformans, for which the BdE showed IC50 values of 65 μg mL −1 and 40 μg mL−1, respectively. In comparison to the BdE, it was observed that the green propolis extract (GPE) showed better antimicrobial activity, displaying an IC50 value of 9 μg mL−1 against C. krusei. Also, a phytochemical study of the BdE was carried out, affording the isolation of ursolic acid (1), 2α-hydroxy-ursolic acid (2), isosakuranetin (3), aromadendrin-4′-methylether (4), baccharin (5), viscidone (6), hautriwaic acid lactone (7), and the clerodane diterpene 8. This is the first time that the presence of compounds 1, 2, and 8 in B. dracunculifolia has been reported. Among the isolated compounds, 1 and 2 showed antibacterial activity against methicillin- resistant Staphylococcus aureus, displaying IC50 values of 5 μg mL−1 and 3 μg mL−1, respectively. 3 was active against C. neoformans, showing an IC50 value of 15 μg mL−1 and a MIC value of 40 μg mL−1, while compounds 4→8 were inactive against all tested microorganisms. The results showed that the BdE, similar to the GPE, displays antimicrobial activity, which may be related to the effect of several compounds present in the crude extract.
Performance of the GeneXpert CT/NG Assay Compared to That of the Aptima AC2 Assay for Detection of Rectal Chlamydia trachomatis and Neisseria gonorrhoeae by Use of Residual Aptima Samples

ABSTRACT There are currently no commercially available molecular assays for the detection of Chlamydia trachomatis and Neisseria gonorrhoeae in rectal swabs with regulatory approval. We compared the Cepheid GeneXpert CT/NG assay with the GenProbe Aptima Combo2 assay, using 409 rectal swabs. Using Aptima as the gold standard, the sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values of GeneXpert for the detection of C. trachomatis and N. gonorrhoeae were 86%, 99.2%, 92.5%, and 98.4% and 91.1%, 100%, 100%, and 98.6%, respectively. Despite significant dilution of samples prior to GeneXpert testing, the assay performed well with excellent specificity.
A Low Dimensional Approach on Network Characterization

In many applications, one may need to characterize a given network among a large set of base networks, and these networks are large in size and diverse in structure over the search space. In addition, the characterization algorithms are required to have low volatility and with a small circle of uncertainty. For large datasets, these algorithms are computationally intensive and inefficient. However, under the context of network mining, a major concern of some applications is speed. Hence, we are motivated to develop a fast characterization algorithm, which can be used to quickly construct a graph space for analysis purpose. Our approach is to transform a network characterization measure, commonly formulated based on similarity matrices, into simple vector form signatures. We shall show that the similarity matrix can be represented by a dyadic product of two N-dimensional signature vectors; thus the network alignment process, which is usually solved as an assignment problem, can be reduced into a simple alignment problem based on separate signature vectors.
Distributed Watchpoints : Debugging Very Large Ensembles of Robots ( Extended Abstract )

We describe a debugging tool for modular robotics that introduces the concept of distributed watchpoint triggers. This technique can initiate debugging actions (system halt, global snapshot, logging, etc.) in an ensemble of robots based on temporal, physical, and logical conditions distributed over multiple robots. Our technique is specifically designed to be effective in debugging modular robotic ensembles, where many important types of failure conditions can be detected within small, physically connected subsets of the total ensemble.
Mitigation of linear and nonlinear impairments in high-speed optical networks by using LDPC-coded turbo equalization

We study a turbo equalization scheme based on low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded turbo equalization (TE). This scheme is suitable for simultaneous: (i) suppression of intra-channel nonlinearities, (ii) chromatic dispersion compensation, and (iii) polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) compensation. LDPC coding is based on large girth (g ges 8) block-circulant codes, and maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) equalizer is based on Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv (BJCR) algorithm. The ultimate channel capacity limits, assuming an independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) source are reported as well. In the presence of intrachannel nonlinearities the LDPC-coded TE provides almost 12 dB improvement over BCJR equalizer at BER of 10-8. For an NRZ system operating at 10 Gb/s with residual dispersion of 11200 ps/nm and for differential group delay of 50 ps, the LDPC-coded TE is only 1 dB away from the i.i. d channel capacity. The efficiency of LDPC-coded TE in PMD compensation is demonstrated experimentally, with decoding performed off line.
Shellable and Cohen-Macaulay partially ordered sets

In this paper we study shellable posets (partially ordered sets), that is, finite posets such that the simplicial complex of chains is shellable. It is shown that all admissible lattices (including all finite semimodular and supersolvable lattices) and all bounded locally semimodular finite posets are shellable. A technique for labeling the edges of the Hasse diagram of certain lattices, due to R. Stanley, is generalized to posets and shown to imply shellability, while Stanley's main theorem on the Jordan-Holder sequences of such labelings remains valid. Further, we show a number of ways in which shellable posets can be constructed from other shellable posets and complexes. These results give rise to several new examples of Cohen-Macaulay posets. For instance, the lattice of subgroups of a finite group G is Cohen-Macaulay (in fact shellable) if and only if G is supersolvable. Finally, it is shown that all the higher order complexes of a finite planar distributive lattice are shellable.
EVALUATION OF THE ERROR OF A STEREOPHOTOGRAMMETRIC SYSTEM AS A FUNCTION OF THE OBJECT POSITION WITH RESPECT TO THE CALIBRATION GRID

In this paper, we propose an experimental method for quantitative description of the error expected from a stereophotogrammetric measurement system. The dimensioning error clearly appears as a function of the difference between the positions of the object and of the calibration grid, which is an intuitively appealing result. This result is useful for the future derivation of a closed-form formula for the dimensioning error; it is also useful for the development of automatic measurement systems that can load the most appropriate calibration parameters after a rough estimate of the distance from the cameras to an object of interest.
Prevention of Ethanol-Induced Liver Injury in Rats by an Agonist of Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor-γ, Pioglitazone

Agonists of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR)-γ have been shown to reduce tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α)-induced insulin resistance. On the other hand, sensitization of Kupffer cells to lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and their production of TNF-α are critical for progression of alcoholic liver injury. This study was intended to determine whether pioglitazone, a PPAR-γ agonist, could prevent alcohol-induced liver injury. Rats were given ethanol (5 g/kg b.wt.) and pioglitazone (500 μg/kg) once every 24 h intragastrically. Ethanol for 8 weeks caused pronounced steatosis, necrosis, and inflammation in the liver. These pathological parameters were diminished greatly by pioglitazone. Kupffer cells were sensitized to LPS after ethanol for 4 weeks as evidenced by aggravation of liver pathology induced by LPS (5 mg/kg) and enhancement of LPS (100 ng/ml)-induced intracellular Ca2+ concentration elevation in Kupffer cells. The parameters were diminished by treatment with pioglitazone. LPS-induced TNF-α production by Kupffer cells from the 4-week ethanol group was 3 to 4 times higher than control. This increase was blunted by 70% with pioglitazone. Gut permeability was 10-fold higher in the 4-week ethanol group, and pioglitazone treatment did not change the value. Inclusion of TNF-α in culture media of Kupffer cells enhanced CD14 expression, LPS-induced intracellular Ca2+ concentration response, and production of TNF-α. These results indicate that pioglitazone prevents alcoholic liver injury through abrogation of Kupffer cell sensitization to LPS.
Adherence to the Mediterranean Diet is Associated with Better Sleep Quality in Italian Adults

Background: Sleep quality has been associated with human health and diseases, including cognitive decline and dementia; however major determinants of sleep disorders are largely unknown. The aim of this study was to evaluate the association between sleep quality and adherence to the Mediterranean dietary pattern in a sample of Italian adults. Methods: A total of 1936 individuals were recruited in the urban area of Catania during 2014–2015 through random sampling. A food frequency questionnaire and validated instruments were used to assess the adherence to the Mediterranean diet and sleep quality (Pittsburg sleep quality index). Multivariate logistic regressions were performed to determine the association between exposure and outcome. Results: A total of 1314 individuals (67.9% of the cohort) reported adequate sleep quality: for each point increase of the Mediterranean diet score, individuals were 10% more likely to have adequate sleep quality. In an additional analysis stratifying the sample by weight status, the association between sleep quality and high adherence to the Mediterranean diet was observed only among normal/overweight individuals but not in obese participants. Conclusions: high adherence to a Mediterranean diet is associated with better sleep quality either toward direct effect on health or indirect effects through improvement of weight status.
Mortality of acute mesenteric ischemia remains unchanged despite significant increase in utilization of endovascular techniques

Introduction In this study, we evaluated if increase in utilization of endovascular surgery has affected in-hospital mortality rates among patients with acute mesenteric ischemia. Methods The National Inpatient Sample (2003–2011) was queried for acute mesenteric ischemia using ICD-9 code for acute mesenteric ischemia (557.1). This cohort was divided into patients treated with open vascular surgery (open vascular group) and by endovascular therapies (endovascular group) based on the ICD-9CM procedure codes. Multivariable logistic regression was used to determine temporal trend for mortality while adjusting for confounding variables. Results There was 1.45-fold increase in utilization of endovascular techniques in this study. In-hospital mortality rate, total median charges and length of stay were significantly lower among the endovascular group than the open vascular group despite having significantly higher Elixhauser comorbidities index (3 ± 0.1 vs. 2.7 ± 0.1, p = .003). Over the course of the study period, there was no change in the overall mortality rate despite higher endovascular utilization. Factors associated with increased mortality included age, open surgical repair (Odds ratio: 1.45, 95% Confidence Interval: 1.10–1.91, p = .016) and bowel resection Odds ratio: 2.88, 95% Confidence Interval: 2.01–4.12). Conclusion The mortality rate for acute mesenteric ischemia remains unchanged throughout this contemporary study. Open surgical intervention, bowel resection and age were associated with increased mortality. Endovascular group patients had better survival despite higher morbidity indices.
Clinical Vocabulary and Clinical Finding Concepts in Medical Literature

Clinical decision support systems necessitate a disease knowledge base, which comprises a set of clinical findings for each disease. To efficiently represent the findings, this paper explores the relationship between clinical vocabulary and findings in medical literature through quantitative and qualitative analysis of representative disease databases. Although the data volume and the analyzed features are limited, the observations suggested the following. First, there are sets of clinical findings that are essential for physicians, but the majority of findings in medical literature are not the essential ones. Second, deviation of term frequency for clinical findings vocabulary is minimal, and clinical findings require appropriate grammar for efficient representation of findings. Third, appropriate mapping of clinical findings with clinical vocabulary would allow the efficient expression of clinical findings.
Dynamics of Distraction: Competition among Auditory Streams Modulates Gain and Disrupts Inter-Trial Phase Coherence in the Human Electroencephalogram

Auditory distraction is a failure to maintain focus on a stream of sounds. We investigated the neural correlates of distraction in a selective-listening pitch-discrimination task with high (competing speech) or low (white noise) distraction. High-distraction impaired performance and reduced the N1 peak of the auditory Event-Related Potential evoked by probe tones. In a series of simulations, we explored two theories to account for this effect: disruption of sensory gain or a disruption of inter-trial phase consistency. When compared to these simulations, our data were consistent with both effects of distraction. Distraction reduced the gain of the auditory evoked potential and disrupted the inter-trial phase consistency with which the brain responds to stimulus events. Tones at a non-target, unattended frequency were more susceptible to the effects of distraction than tones within an attended frequency band.
Developing an EEG-based on-line closed-loop lapse detection and mitigation system

In America, 60% of adults reported that they have driven a motor vehicle while feeling drowsy, and at least 15–20% of fatal car accidents are fatigue-related. This study translates previous laboratory-oriented neurophysiological research to design, develop, and test an On-line Closed-loop Lapse Detection and Mitigation (OCLDM) System featuring a mobile wireless dry-sensor EEG headgear and a cell-phone based real-time EEG processing platform. Eleven subjects participated in an event-related lane-keeping task, in which they were instructed to manipulate a randomly deviated, fixed-speed cruising car on a 4-lane highway. This was simulated in a 1st person view with an 8-screen and 8-projector immersive virtual-reality environment. When the subjects experienced lapses or failed to respond to events during the experiment, auditory warning was delivered to rectify the performance decrements. However, the arousing auditory signals were not always effective. The EEG spectra exhibited statistically significant differences between effective and ineffective arousing signals, suggesting that EEG spectra could be used as a countermeasure of the efficacy of arousing signals. In this on-line pilot study, the proposed OCLDM System was able to continuously detect EEG signatures of fatigue, deliver arousing warning to subjects suffering momentary cognitive lapses, and assess the efficacy of the warning in near real-time to rectify cognitive lapses. The on-line testing results of the OCLDM System validated the efficacy of the arousing signals in improving subjects' response times to the subsequent lane-departure events. This study may lead to a practical on-line lapse detection and mitigation system in real-world environments.
Propiconazole Is a Specific and Accessible Brassinosteroid (BR) Biosynthesis Inhibitor for Arabidopsis and Maize

Brassinosteroids (BRs) are steroidal hormones that play pivotal roles during plant development. In addition to the characterization of BR deficient mutants, specific BR biosynthesis inhibitors played an essential role in the elucidation of BR function in plants. However, high costs and limited availability of common BR biosynthetic inhibitors constrain their key advantage as a species-independent tool to investigate BR function. We studied propiconazole (Pcz) as an alternative to the BR inhibitor brassinazole (Brz). Arabidopsis seedlings treated with Pcz phenocopied BR biosynthetic mutants. The steady state mRNA levels of BR, but not gibberellic acid (GA), regulated genes increased proportional to the concentrations of Pcz. Moreover, root inhibition and Pcz-induced expression of BR biosynthetic genes were rescued by 24epi-brassinolide, but not by GA3 co-applications. Maize seedlings treated with Pcz showed impaired mesocotyl, coleoptile, and true leaf elongation. Interestingly, the genetic background strongly impacted the tissue specific sensitivity towards Pcz. Based on these findings we conclude that Pcz is a potent and specific inhibitor of BR biosynthesis and an alternative to Brz. The reduced cost and increased availability of Pcz, compared to Brz, opens new possibilities to study BR function in larger crop species.
Discriminative multi-modality non-negative sparse graph model for action recognition

A discriminative multi-modality non-negative sparse (DMNS) graph model is proposed in this paper. In the model, features in each modality are first projected into the Mahalanobis space by a transformation learned for this modality, a multi-modality non-negative sparse graph is then constructed in the Mahalanobis space with shared coefficients across modalities. Both the labeled and unlabeled data can be introduced into the graph, and label propagation can then be performed to predict labels of the unlabeled samples. Extensive experiments over two benchmark datasets demonstrate the advantages of the proposed DMNS-graph method over the state-of-the-art methods.
A common red algal origin of the apicomplexan, dinoflagellate, and heterokont plastids

The discovery of a nonphotosynthetic plastid in malaria and other apicomplexan parasites has sparked a contentious debate about its evolutionary origin. Molecular data have led to conflicting conclusions supporting either its green algal origin or red algal origin, perhaps in common with the plastid of related dinoflagellates. This distinction is critical to our understanding of apicomplexan evolution and the evolutionary history of endosymbiosis and photosynthesis; however, the two plastids are nearly impossible to compare due to their nonoverlapping information content. Here we describe the complete plastid genome sequences and plastid-associated data from two independent photosynthetic lineages represented by Chromera velia and an undescribed alga CCMP3155 that we show are closely related to apicomplexans. These plastids contain a suite of features retained in either apicomplexan (four plastid membranes, the ribosomal superoperon, conserved gene order) or dinoflagellate plastids (form II Rubisco acquired by horizontal transfer, transcript polyuridylylation, thylakoids stacked in triplets) and encode a full collective complement of their reduced gene sets. Together with whole plastid genome phylogenies, these characteristics provide multiple lines of evidence that the extant plastids of apicomplexans and dinoflagellates were inherited by linear descent from a common red algal endosymbiont. Our phylogenetic analyses also support their close relationship to plastids of heterokont algae, indicating they all derive from the same endosymbiosis. Altogether, these findings support a relatively simple path of linear descent for the evolution of photosynthesis in a large proportion of algae and emphasize plastid loss in several lineages (e.g., ciliates, Cryptosporidium, and Phytophthora).
Grounding Semantics in Olfactory Perception

Multi-modal semantics has relied on feature norms or raw image data for perceptual input. In this paper we examine grounding semantic representations in olfactory (smell) data, through the construction of a novel bag of chemical compounds model. We use standard evaluations for multi-modal semantics, including measuring conceptual similarity and cross-modal zero-shot learning. To our knowledge, this is the first work to evaluate semantic similarity on representations grounded in olfactory data.
Comparison of Trichoplusia ni BTI-Tn-5B1-4 (high five) and Spodoptera frugiperda Sf-9 insect cell line metabolism in suspension cultures.

Nutrient utilization and byproduct accumulation were monitored in Spodoptera frugiperda Sf-9 and Trichoplusia ni BTI-Tn-5B1-4 (High Five) cell lines during growth and following viral infection in suspension cultures in order to develop a better understanding of cell metabolism and to acquire information relevant to large scale fed-batch bioreactors. The utilization of glucose, dissolved oxygen, and amino acids were monitored in Sf-9 cell cultures grown in Sf-900 II serum-free medium (SFM) and in High Five cell cultures grown in both Sf-900 II and Express Five SFM. Using the optimal medium for each cell line, i.e., Sf-900 II SFM for Sf-9 cells and Express Five SFM for High Five cells, the cell growth rate, maximum cell density, specific glucose and glutamine utilization rates, and specific alanine production rate were comparable during cell growth. In addition, the expression level of recombinant human tissue plasminogen activator was comparable in the two cell lines on a per cell basis. It was found, however, that lactate and ammonia accumulated in High Five cell cultures, but not in Sf-9 cell cultures. In addition, High Five cells utilized asparagine more rapidly than glutamine, whereas Sf-9 cells consumed only minimal asparagine, and the oxygen utilization rate was significantly higher in High Five cell cultures. It was also found that the medium had a significant effect on High Five cell metabolism, e.g., the specific glucose utilization rate and the specific lactate and alanine production rates were significantly higher in Sf-900 II SFM than in Express Five SFM. In addition, the maximum cell density and specific asparagine utilization rate were significantly higher in Express Five SFM.