Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distinct Roles for Histone Methyltransferases G9a and GLP in Cancer Germ-Line Antigen Gene Regulation in Human Cancer Cells and Murine Embryonic Stem Cells

The H3K9me2 histone methyltransferases G9a and GLP repress Mage-a class cancer germ-line (CG) antigen gene expression in murine embryonic stem (ES) cells, but the role of these enzymes in CG antigen gene regulation in human cancer cells is unknown. Here we show that whereas independent or dual knockdown of G9a and GLP in human cancer cells leads to reduced global and CG antigen promoter–associated H3K9me2 levels, it does not activate CG antigen gene expression. Moreover, CG antigen gene repression is maintained following pharmacologic targeting of G9a or treatment of G9a knockdown cells with the histone deacetylase inhibitor trichostatin A. However, G9a knockdown cells display increased sensitivity to CG antigen gene activation mediated by the DNA methyltransferase inhibitor decitabine. To account for these findings, we examined DNA methylation at CG antigen gene promoters in both cell types. We found robust DNA hypomethylation in G9a/GLP targeted murine ES cells but a lack of DNA methylation changes in G9a/GLP targeted human cancer cells; intriguingly, this distinction also extended to markers of global DNA methylation. These data reveal that G9a/GLP is required for DNA methylation of CG antigen genes and genomic DNA in murine ES cells, but not human cancer cells, and implicate DNA methylation status as the key epigenetic mechanism involved in CG antigen gene repression. (Mol Cancer Res 2009;7(6):851–62)
A case study of a virtual audience in a reconstruction of an ancient Roman Odeon in Aphrodisias

The benefits of including virtual humans into cultural heritage reconstructions are twofold: the realism of architectural models is increased by populating them; and, as well, it allows to preserve the intangible heritage describing how people in historical times behaved. We present a case study, where we create an interactive real-time scenario of a virtual audience in an ancient Roman odeon in Aphrodisias. Based on historical sources, we reconstruct both the building and the people. Inhabited virtual heritage applications require careful balancing of computational resources between the visualization of environment and the visualization of people. We describe several techniques that allow us to achieve high visual quality for a large number of virtual humans rendered together with a complex architectural model while still keeping interactive framerates. An important part of the heritage recontruction is the authoring, we propose a comprehensive framework for authoring of crowd scenarios.
Inferior mesenteric artery embolization for persistent postpartum hemorrhage after sufficient bilateral iliac arteries embolization: safety and efficacy in eight patients.

OBJECTIVE To assess the safety and efficacy of transcatheter arterial embolization (TAE) of the inferior mesenteric artery (IMA) for the management of post-partum hemorrhage (PPH). METHODS A retrospective analysis was performed regarding eight patients (mean age, 34.4 y; age range, 31 - 40 y) who underwent TAE of the IMA for PPH between March 2001 and September 2018. Obstetric records, including maternal characteristics, clinical manifestations, complications, and clinical outcomes, as well as TAE details were obtained. RESULTS All eight patients had primary PPH and the vaginal delivery mode. CT scans of two patients showed active bleeding from the lower uterus or hematoma and with the origin of contrast extravasation abutting the adjacent rectum. In seven patients, an aortogram or IMA arteriogram following persistent vaginal bleeding after sufficient embolization of the bleeding focus from the bilateral iliac arteries, found the bleeding focus of the IMA, while in one patient, the IMA bleeding focus was found at the second session 4 h after the first session. TAE of the IMA was technically successful in all eight patients and cessation of bleeding without repeated TAE or additional hemostatic surgery was achieved in all patients after TAE of the IMA. There were neither procedure-related complications nor bowel ischemia during follow-up. CONCLUSION TAE of the IMA for PPH was safe and effective with successful hemostasis. Bleeding from the IMA should be suspected when there is persistent vaginal bleeding after sufficient embolization of bleeders from the bilateral iliac arteries. ADVANCES IN KNOWLEDGE Bleeding from the IMA should be suspected when there is persistent vaginal bleeding after sufficient embolization of bleeders from the bilateral iliac arteries.
Endoscopic transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion: a comprehensive review

ABSTRACT Introduction: Endoscopic spine surgery has been developed as a minimally invasive technique for decompression in patients with lumbar disc herniation or lumbar stenosis. Recent reports have described the use of endoscopic technology in lumbar fusion surgeries, especially for transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion (TLIF). This review aimed to summarize the current techniques of endoscopic TLIF and to discuss the benefits, limitations, and future perspectives of endoscopic lumbar fusion surgery. Areas covered: This review covered the English-language medical literature published in Medline and focused specifically on endoscopic technologies incorporated into minimally invasive TLIF. The endoscopic TLIF techniques are categorized here according to the properties of the endoscope: percutaneous endoscopic TLIF, biportal endoscopic TLIF, and microendoscopic TLIF. Even though most authors have reported favorable clinical and radiological outcomes of endoscopic TLIF, such evidence originates mainly from case series. Expert opinion: Although the current level of evidence is low and the technical relevance of the technique is controversial, the key concept and early results of endoscopic TLIF are promising. Technical advancements to improve safety and reduce technical complexity, as well as comparative cohort studies and randomized clinical trials with long-term follow-up are required to promote the adoption of endoscopic TLIF in clinical practice.
New Insights Into the Differentiation of Megakaryocytes From Hematopoietic Progenitors.

Megakaryocytes are hematopoietic cells, which are responsible for the production of blood platelets. The traditional view of megakaryopoiesis describes the cellular journey from hematopoietic stem cells, through a hierarchical series of progenitor cells, ultimately to a mature megakaryocyte. Once mature, the megakaryocyte then undergoes a terminal maturation process involving multiple rounds of endomitosis and cytoplasmic restructuring to allow platelet formation. However, recent studies have begun to redefine this hierarchy and shed new light on alternative routes by which hematopoietic stem cells are differentiated into megakaryocytes. In particular, the origin of megakaryocytes, including the existence and hierarchy of megakaryocyte progenitors, has been redefined, as new studies are suggesting that hematopoietic stem cells originate as megakaryocyte-primed and can bypass traditional lineage checkpoints. Overall, it is becoming evident that megakaryopoiesis does not only occur as a stepwise process, but is dynamic and adaptive to biological needs. In this review, we will reexamine the canonical dogmas of megakaryopoiesis and provide an updated framework for interpreting the roles of traditional pathways in the context of new megakaryocyte biology.
OPTIMAL CONTROL FOR SWITCHED DELAY SYSTEMS

Based on the calculus of variation, an optimal switching control problem for switched autonomous systems with time-delay is studied. The switching times in a sequence of fixed vector fields are the sole control variables and the subsystems do not require a refractory period, which can bring more generality. The analytic expressions for the partial derivatives of the given performance cost with respect to the control variables are derived. Furthermore, necessary conditions for a stationary solution are obtained for the switched delay systems with separable modes. Finally, the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method are demonstrated by two examples.
Nanoparticles restore lysosomal acidification defects: Implications for Parkinson and other lysosomal-related diseases

ABSTRACT Lysosomal impairment causes lysosomal storage disorders (LSD) and is involved in pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases, notably Parkinson disease (PD). Strategies enhancing or restoring lysosomal-mediated degradation thus appear as tantalizing disease-modifying therapeutics. Here we demonstrate that poly(DL-lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) acidic nanoparticles (aNP) restore impaired lysosomal function in a series of toxin and genetic cellular models of PD, i.e. ATP13A2-mutant or depleted cells or glucocerebrosidase (GBA)-mutant cells, as well as in a genetic model of lysosomal-related myopathy. We show that PLGA-aNP are transported to the lysosome within 24 h, lower lysosomal pH and rescue chloroquine (CQ)-induced toxicity. Re-acidification of defective lysosomes following PLGA-aNP treatment restores lysosomal function in different pathological contexts. Finally, our results show that PLGA-aNP may be detected after intracerebral injection in neurons and attenuate PD-related neurodegeneration in vivo by mechanisms involving a rescue of compromised lysosomes.
A knowledge-based intelligent system for control of dirt recognition process in the smart washing machines

In this paper, we propose an intelligence approach based on fuzzy logic to modeling human intelligence in washing clothes. At first, an intelligent feedback loop is designed for perception-based sensing of dirt inspired by human color understanding. Then, when color stains leak out of some colored clothes the human probabilistic decision making is computationally modeled to detect this stain leakage and thus the problem of recognizing dirt from stain can be considered in the washing process. Finally, we discuss the fuzzy control of washing clothes and design and simulate a smart controller based on the fuzzy intelligence feedback loop.
A Novel Trend Symbolic Aggregate Approximation for Time Series

Symbolic Aggregate approximation (SAX) is a classical symbolic approach in many time series data mining applications. However, SAX only reflects the segment mean value feature and misses important information in a segment, namely the trend of the value change in the segment. Such a miss may cause a wrong classification in some cases, since the SAX representation cannot distinguish different time series with similar average values but different trends. In this paper, we present Trend Feature Symbolic Aggregate approximation (TFSAX) to solve this problem. First, we utilize Piecewise Aggregate Approximation (PAA) approach to reduce dimensionality and discretize the mean value of each segment by SAX. Second, extract trend feature in each segment by using trend distance factor and trend shape factor. Then, design multi-resolution symbolic mapping rules to discretize trend information into symbols. We also propose a modified distance measure by integrating the SAX distance with a weighted trend distance. We show that our distance measure has a tighter lower bound to the Euclidean distance than that of the original SAX. The experimental results on diverse time series data sets demonstrate that our proposed representation significantly outperforms the original SAX representation and an improved SAX representation for classification.
Long-tailed distributions of inter-event times as mixtures of exponential distributions

Inter-event times of various human behaviour are apparently non-Poissonian and obey long-tailed distributions as opposed to exponential distributions, which correspond to Poisson processes. It has been suggested that human individuals may switch between different states, in each of which they are regarded to generate events obeying a Poisson process. If this is the case, inter-event times should approximately obey a mixture of exponential distributions with different parameter values. In the present study, we introduce the minimum description length principle to compare mixtures of exponential distributions with different numbers of components (i.e. constituent exponential distributions). Because these distributions violate the identifiability property, one is mathematically not allowed to apply the Akaike or Bayes information criteria to their maximum-likelihood estimator to carry out model selection. We overcome this theoretical barrier by applying a minimum description principle to joint likelihoods of the data and latent variables. We show that mixtures of exponential distributions with a few components are selected, as opposed to more complex mixtures in various datasets, and that the fitting accuracy is comparable to that of state-of-the-art algorithms to fit power-law distributions to data. Our results lend support to Poissonian explanations of apparently non-Poissonian human behaviour.
Why RTS-CTS is not your ideal wireless LAN multiple access protocol

Although request-to-send clear-to-send (RTS-CTS) has been introduced as a uniform improvement over carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) in a wireless LAN environment, it is not. As it tries to solve the hidden-stations problem of CSMA, it creates new problems derived from the interaction among its control and data packets. We systematically identify and classify the sequences of events where CSMA and RTS-CTS depart from an ideal behavior, and we define a reference configuration and an analytical model on the basis of which a comparative study of protocol performance is made. The results show that RTS-CTS falls short of an ideal protocol, in some cases performing even worse than CSMA. This is especially noticeable in situations where the interaction between control packets in RTS-CTS prevents transmissions that under CSMA could occur concurrently and successfully.
GPU SM Warp Warp Block Warp Warp Block SM Warp

Utilizing a GPU to perform general purpose computation is called GPGPU. The high theoretical performance of GPU draws attention to GPGPU. CUDA supplies a platform for the developers of GPU applications. In CUDA programming model, massive threads are allocated to GPU’s calculation units. Besides, CUDA has various kinds of memories on GPU. These memories have different features of access latency, capacity, and so on. Therefore, to produce high-performance GPU programs, developers should consider how to allocate the massive threads to cores and which memory should be used for storing data. Hence, developers should have deep understanding of the GPU architecture and CUDA APIs. To address this problem, we propose an auto tuning framework for GPU programs, and explain an implementation of a preprocessor for the framework, in this paper.
The Moderating Role of Market, Firm and Supply Chain Factors on the Relationship between Information Technology Practices and Supply Chain Agility

In complex business environment, most firms are facing pressures to respond proactively to the environmental factors rapidly and be innovative and effective in order to survive. Therefore, or-ganizations are required to be agile, and have the right information at the right time to make better decisions. In this paper, we examine the linkage between information technology practices (ITP) and supply chain agility (SCA). This study also analyzes the moderating role of market, firm and supply chain factors on the relationship between ITP and SCA. The data collection instrument used was a questionnaire which was administrated to a total sample of 500 respondents from food and beverages industry in peninsular Malaysia. The number of questionnaire collected was only 130 (26%) and the number of usable questionnaire was 100 (20%). The analyses involved statistical methods such as reliability and validity tests, correlation analysis and multiple regressions. The result suggested that ITP have positive impact on SCA. These findings suggest that firm should consider ITP that can improve SCA.
Understanding Urban Dynamics via Context-Aware Tensor Factorization with Neighboring Regularization

Recent years have witnessed the world-wide emergence of mega-metropolises with incredibly huge populations. Understanding residents mobility patterns, or urban dynamics, thus becomes crucial for building modern smart cities. In this paper, we propose a Neighbor-Regularized and context-aware Non-negative Tensor Factorization model (NR-cNTF) to discover interpretable urban dynamics from urban heterogeneous data. Different from many existing studies concerned with prediction tasks via tensor completion, NR-cNTF focuses on gaining urban managerial insights from spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal patterns. This is enabled by high-quality Tucker factorizations regularized by both POI-based urban contexts and geographically neighboring relations. NR-cNTF is also capable of unveiling long-term evolutions of urban dynamics via a pipeline initialization approach. We apply NR-cNTF to a real-life data set containing rich taxi GPS trajectories and POI records of Beijing. The results indicate: 1) NR-cNTF accurately captures four kinds of city rhythms and seventeen spatial communities; 2) the rapid development of Beijing, epitomized by the CBD area, indeed intensifies the job-housing imbalance; 3) the southern areas with recent government investments have shown more healthy development tendency. Finally, NR-cNTF is compared with some baselines on traffic prediction, which further justifies the importance of urban contexts awareness and neighboring regulations.
Partitioned neighborhood spanners of minimal outdegree

A geometric spanner with vertex set P IRD is a sparse approximation of the complete Euclidean graph determined by P. We introduce the notion of partitioned neighborhood graphs (PNGs), unifying and generalizing most constructions of spanners treated in literature. Two important parameters characterizing their properties are the outdegree k IN and the stretch factor f 1 describing the ‘quality’ of approximation. PNGs have been thuroughly investigated with respect to small values of f . We, on the other hand, present in this work results about feasable values of k — so to say the other extreme. The aim of minimizing this parameter rather than the first one arises from two observations: a) It determines the amount of space required for storing PNGs. b) Many algorithms employing a (previously constructed) spanner have running times depending on its outdegree. Our results include, for fixed dimensions D as well as asymptotically, upper and lower bounds on this optimal value of k. The upper bounds are constructive and yield efficient algorithms for actually computing the corresponding graphs. 1Partially supported by EU ESPRIT Long Term Research Project 20244 (ALCOM-IT) and DFG Grants Me872/7-1 and Me872/4-1
A Sub-μs wake-up time power gating technique with bypass power line for rush current support

A sub-mus wake-up power gating technique was developed for low power SOCs. It uses two types of power switches and separated power lines bypassing rush current to suppress power supply voltage fluctuations. We applied this technique to a heterogeneous dual-core microprocessor fabricated in 90 nm CMOS technology. When wake-up time on the 2M-gate scale circuit was set to 0.24 mus, the supply voltage fluctuation was suppressed to 2.5 mV.
Harnessing the power of social media: how can it help in axial spondyloarthritis research?

PURPOSE OF REVIEW Axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) is a chronic inflammatory rheumatic disease that is relatively unknown among the general public. Most patients with axSpA are young or middle-aged adults and more likely to use some social media. This review highlights trends in the application of social media and different ways in which these tools do already or may benefit clinical research, delivery of care, and education in rheumatology, particularly in the field of axSpA. RECENT FINDINGS This article discusses four areas in the biomedical field that social media has infused with novel ideas: (i) the use of patient-generated health data from social media to learn about their disease experience, (ii) delivering health education and interventions, (iii) recruiting study participants, and (iv) reform, transfer, and disseminate medical education. We conclude with promising studies in rheumatology that have incorporated social media and suggestions for future directions. SUMMARY Rheumatologists now have the opportunity to use social media and innovate on many aspects of their practice. We propose further exploration of multiple ways in which social media might help with the identification, diagnosis, education, and research study enrollment of axSpA patients. However, standardization in study design, reporting, and managing ethical and regulatory aspects will be required to take full advantage of this opportunity.
Why is heartache associated with sadness? Sadness is represented by specific physical pain through verbal knowledge

People describe sadness as “heartache. ” The link between sadness and physical pain such as heartache has been empirically proven; however, the mental foundations that support the connection between sadness and pain remain unclear. The present study hypothesized that the connection between sadness and specific physical pain is established by concepts referred to as “sadness-pain concept,” which are internalized based on features relating to interactions between the body and external situations. We examined the use of pain-related onomatopoeias as metaphorical words for expressing sadness, setting three primary goals for our study: (i) to identify sadness-pain words usable for both sadness and physical pains, (ii) to determine the specific sadness-pain words used for certain sadness situations, and (iii) to reveal the pain-related characteristics that are linked to such sadness situations. Sixty-nine participants were asked to rate 28 pain-onomatopoeic words in terms of the types of emotions, sadness situations, body parts, and characteristics of pain respectively. Consequently, seven words were identified as sadness-pain words. Furthermore, the specific sadness situations related to each sadness-pain word were determined. Situation-dependent sadness-pain words, for example, zukin zukin for loss, were found to be associated with specific body parts and pain properties. These findings indicate that the shared representation of sadness and physical pain as an emotional concept is based on interactions between the body and external situations.
Synthesis and characterization of a novel long-alkyl-chain ester-substituted benzimidazole gelator and its octan-1-ol solvate.

The synthesis of a novel benzimidazole derivative with a long-chain-ester substituent, namely methyl 8-[4-(1H-benzimidazol-2-yl)phenoxy]octanoate, (3), is reported. Ester (3) shows evidence of aggregation in solution and weak gelation ability with toluene. The octan-1-ol solvate, methyl 8-[4-(1H-benzimidazol-2-yl)phenoxy]octanoate octan-1-ol monosolvate, C22H26N2O3·C8H18O, (4), exhibits a four-molecule hydrogen-bonded motif in the solid state, with N-H.O hydrogen bonds between benzimidazole molecules and O-H.N hydrogen bonds between the octan-1-ol solvent molecules and the benzimidazole unit. The alkyl chains of the ester and the octan-1-ol molecules are in unfolded conformations. The phenylene ring is canted by 10.27 (6)° from the plane of the benzimidazole ring system. H.C contacts make up 20.7% of the Hirshfeld surface coverage. Weak C-H. π interactions involving the benzimidazole alkyl chain and three aromatic rings are observed.