Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Drug exposure in early pregnancy might be related to the effects of increased maternal progesterone in implantation period

Abstract Aim: This short communication aims to evaluate the relation in between drug exposure time and early pregnancy regarding gestational weeks. Methods: The study covers the referrals made to the Department of Pharmacology for a teratogenic consultation in a 3-year period. From the recordings of pregnant women, the last menstrual period and the starting date of medication were used to determine the time of prescription with regard to gestational weeks. Results: In all of the three years, potentially teratogenic medication was prescribed more frequently in the 3rd, 4th and 5th gestational weeks (in between 15–35 days of pregnancy). Approximately 75% of the pregnant women in the study were prescribed with drugs, most frequently with analgesics, antibiotics, gastrointestinal drugs and antidepressants, in these gestational weeks. Conclusions: The timing of prescriptions in early pregnancy frequently coincides with the increased levels of maternal progesterone in implantation period. Progesterone may lead to negative mood symptoms of an increased pain perception, anxiety, irritability and aggression in some of the pregnant women and therefore causes an increased stress condition which in turn may result in pain, infection and inflammation in the individual. Taking the frequently used medications into consideration, the reason for prescriptions in this period might be related to the symptoms originating from the effects of progesterone. Future studies are needed to better demonstrate this association of drug exposure and effects of maternal progesterone in early pregnancy.
CCCTC-Binding Factor Acts as a Heterochromatin Barrier on Herpes Simplex Viral Latent Chromatin and Contributes to Poised Latent Infection

ABSTRACT Herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) establishes latent infection in neurons via a variety of epigenetic mechanisms that silence its genome. The cellular CCCTC-binding factor (CTCF) functions as a mediator of transcriptional control and chromatin organization and has binding sites in the HSV-1 genome. We constructed an HSV-1 deletion mutant that lacked a pair of CTCF-binding sites (CTRL2) within the latency-associated transcript (LAT) coding sequences and found that loss of these CTCF-binding sites did not alter lytic replication or levels of establishment of latent infection, but their deletion reduced the ability of the virus to reactivate from latent infection. We also observed increased heterochromatin modifications on viral chromatin over the LAT promoter and intron. We therefore propose that CTCF binding at the CTRL2 sites acts as a chromatin insulator to keep viral chromatin in a form that is poised for reactivation, a state which we call poised latency. IMPORTANCE Herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) is a human pathogen that persists for the lifetime of the host as a result of its ability to establish latent infection within sensory neurons. The mechanism by which HSV-1 transitions from the lytic to latent infection program is largely unknown; however, HSV-1 is able to coopt cellular silencing mechanisms to facilitate the suppression of lytic gene expression. Here, we demonstrate that the cellular CCCTC-binding factor (CTCF)-binding site within the latency associated transcript (LAT) region is critical for the maintenance of a specific local chromatin structure. Additionally, loss of CTCF binding has detrimental effects on the ability to reactivate from latent infection. These results argue that CTCF plays a critical role in epigenetic regulation of viral gene expression to establish and/or maintain a form of latent infection that can reactivate efficiently. Herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) is a human pathogen that persists for the lifetime of the host as a result of its ability to establish latent infection within sensory neurons. The mechanism by which HSV-1 transitions from the lytic to latent infection program is largely unknown; however, HSV-1 is able to coopt cellular silencing mechanisms to facilitate the suppression of lytic gene expression. Here, we demonstrate that the cellular CCCTC-binding factor (CTCF)-binding site within the latency associated transcript (LAT) region is critical for the maintenance of a specific local chromatin structure. Additionally, loss of CTCF binding has detrimental effects on the ability to reactivate from latent infection. These results argue that CTCF plays a critical role in epigenetic regulation of viral gene expression to establish and/or maintain a form of latent infection that can reactivate efficiently.
Transitions in physiological coupling between heartbeat and pulse across sleep stages

Objective: The aim of this study is to investigate the coupling behavior between heartbeat and pulse of blood flow at different sleep stages, and to explore the feasibility of using this coupling strength for automatic sleep staging. Approach: The electrocardiogram and photoplethysmography signals are recorded during sleep, and R-wave-to-R-wave intervals (RRI) and pulse-to-pulse intervals (PPI) are extracted respectively. The detrended cross-correlation analysis (DCCA) is applied to quantify long-range cross correlations between the RRIs and PPIs across sleep stages. The DCCA scaling exponents are used as the indicator of coupling strength between heartbeat and pulse, and are compared with detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) scaling exponents of RRIs and PPIs in the application of sleep stage discrimination. Main results: We find the DCCA scaling exponents between RRIs and PPIs decrease monotonously from wake, REM sleep to light and deep sleep, indicating that the coupling strength between heartbeat and pulse are reduced gradually when entering deep sleep. Statistical analysis shows that the DCCA scaling exponents possess better discrimination ability between wake/REM sleep and light/deep sleep, compared with DFA scaling exponents of RRIs and PPIs. Significance: Our study reveals the coupling strength between heartbeat and pulse changes regularly across sleep stages, which may help understand the regulation mechanism underlying the cardiovascular system. The DCCA scaling exponents between RRIs and PPIs can be used as an indicator for measuring vigilance level and automatic sleep staging.
Total Hip Replacement for the Treatment of End Stage Arthritis of the Hip: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background Evolvements in the design, fixation methods, size, and bearing surface of implants for total hip replacement (THR) have led to a variety of options for healthcare professionals to consider. The need to determine the most optimal combinations of THR implant is warranted. This systematic review evaluated the clinical effectiveness of different types of THR used for the treatment of end stage arthritis of the hip. Methods A comprehensive literature search was undertaken in major health databases. Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and systematic reviews published from 2008 onwards comparing different types of primary THR in patients with end stage arthritis of the hip were included. Results Fourteen RCTs and five systematic reviews were included. Patients experienced significant post-THR improvements in Harris Hip scores, but this did not differ between impact types. There was a reduced risk of implant dislocation after receiving a larger femoral head size (36 mm vs. 28 mm; RR = 0.17, 95% CI: 0.04, 0.78) or cemented cup (vs. cementless cup; pooled odds ratio: 0.34, 95% CI: 0.13, 0.89). Recipients of cross-linked vs. conventional polyethylene cup liners experienced reduced femoral head penetration and revision. There was no impact of femoral stem fixation and cup shell design on implant survival rates. Evidence on mortality and complications (aseptic loosening, femoral fracture) was inconclusive. Conclusions The majority of evidence was inconclusive due to poor reporting, missing data, or uncertainty in treatment estimates. The findings warrant cautious interpretation given the risk of bias (blinding, attrition), methodological limitations (small sample size, low event counts, short follow-up), and poor reporting. Long-term pragmatic RCTs are needed to allow for more definitive conclusions. Authors are encouraged to specify the minimal clinically important difference and power calculation for their primary outcome(s) as well CONSORT, PRISMA and STROBE guidelines to ensure better reporting and more reliable production and assessment of evidence.
'Schizophrenia' on Twitter: Content Analysis of Greek Language Tweets

Twitter is an online space whose users can create and share ideas and information instantly. The term schizophrenia is frequently used in a stigmatizing way in Greek language. In Greece, Twitter is the tenth most popular website. Tweets related to schizophrenia in Greek language, have not been investigated. We aimed to examine schizophrenia Tweets in comparison with other illness (diabetes). Deductive content analysis was applied. Schizophrenia Tweets (n=239), tended to be more negative, medically inappropriate, sarcastic, and used non-medically than diabetes Tweets (n=205). Our findings confirm the frequent, non-medical misuse of the term 'schizophrenia' in online sources written in Greek language. These results show that mental health education interventions are needed to raise awareness among the general population, in order to eliminate stigmatizing behaviors. Future anti-stigma actions, could also raise awareness among Internet users about the importance of, avoiding using medical terms in negative or sarcastic ways, and eliminate any potential stigmatizing content.
Information literacy for visually impaired teachers in Pakistan

There are more than 285 million blind and visually impaired people in the world, 90% of whom live in developing countries. The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a study on visually impaired school teachers in Pakistan in order to examine how they identify, explore, select, organize, create, present, assess and apply information (IFLA’s Information Literacy Empowering Eight model) in teaching and everyday life. Interviews were conducted in January 2015 with 55 visually impaired teachers in 10 schools for the blind located in the province of Khyber PukhtunKhwa, Pakistan. The study also explores their ability to find, evaluate, and apply pedagogical information. Collected data revealed information on different aspects of information literacy skills. Although basic skills of the studied population were assessed; the study found that visually impaired teachers are highly skilled in terms of organizing the information and they prefer to take personal responsibility while searching for required information. They were found less skilled in using and apply new tools for information searching and lacking in ability to present the data effectively. This is the first research on the information literacy skills of visually impaired teachers in Pakistan. Results are useful for planners and experts to integrate IFLA’s E8 model of information literacy into several courses taught at the blind schools in order to enable the disadvantaged community to benefit from the information literacy skills.
This is a repository copy of Structure-from-motion in Spherical Video using the von Mises-Fisher Distribution

In this paper we present a complete pipeline for computing structure-from-motion from sequences of spherical images. We revisit problems from multiview geometry in the context of spherical images. In particular, we propose methods suited to spherical camera geometry for the spherical-n-point problem (estimating camera pose for a spherical image) and calibrated spherical reconstruction (estimating the position of a 3D point from multiple spherical images). We introduce a new probabilistic interpretation of spherical structure-from-motion which uses the von Mises-Fisher distribution to model noise in spherical feature point positions. This model provides an alternate objective function that we use in bundle adjustment. We evaluate our methods quantitatively and qualitatively on both synthetic and real world data and show that our methods developed for spherical images outperform straightforward adaptations of methods developed for perspective images. As an application of our method, we use the structure-from-motion output to stabilise the viewing direction in fully spherical video.
Effects of Hatching Time on Behavior and Weight Development of Chickens

The length of the embryonic period varies both among and within species and can affect the individual phenotype in many ways, both physiologically and behaviorally. In chickens, the hatch window may last 24–48 hours (up to 10% of the incubation time), and studies have shown that incubation length may affect post-hatch growth and physiology. However, little is known about effects on behavior. We therefore investigated how behavior variation correlates with hatching time in the early life of chickens. We also measured egg weight and egg weight loss in relation to hatching time, as well as post-hatch growth. For females, there was a negative correlation between hatch time and body weight from day 4 and throughout the experiment. For males, such a correlation was only observed when testing all hatched males up until day 10. The birds were exposed to a number of behavioral tests, and a principal components analysis was performed on the variables, resulting in four components. For the largest component, termed “Passivity”, a tendency of a difference was found between early and middle male hatchers. Furthermore, a significant difference between early and middle male hatchers was found in the second component, termed “Response to novelty”. In a spatial learning test, late hatchers tended to learn slower. The behavior of females was not significantly affected by hatching time in any of these tests. This study is among the first to demonstrate a link between time of hatching and early behavior in a precocial species like the chicken, and may help shedding light on the evolutionary trade-offs between incubation length and post-hatch traits. The results may also be relevant from a perspective of stress coping and therefore also for animal welfare and productivity in the chicken industry. The mechanisms linking hatching time with post-hatch phenotype remain to be investigated.
Coverage and fault detection of the output-uniqueness test selection criteria

This paper studies the whitebox coverage and fault detection achieved by Output Uniqueness, a newly proposed blackbox test criterion, using 6 web applications. We find that output uniqueness exhibits average correlation coefficients of 0.85, 0.83 and 0.97 with statement, branch and path coverage respectively. More interestingly, output uniqueness finds 92% of the real faults found by branch coverage (and a further 47% that remained undetected by such whitebox techniques). These results suggest that output uniqueness may provide a useful surrogate when whitebox techniques are inapplicable and an effective complement where they are.
Understanding the possibility of image-guided thermal ablation for pulmonary malignancies.

There is a debate regarding the ideal treatment for inoperable patients with pulmonary malignancies. Although surgery has been the gold standard of care for centuries, other local therapies are applicable for patients with early stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and oligometastatic disease from various types of malignancies.
TRIM25 Is Required for the Antiviral Activity of Zinc Finger Antiviral Protein

ABSTRACT Zinc finger antiviral protein (ZAP) is a host factor that specifically inhibits the replication of certain viruses by binding to viral mRNAs and repressing the translation and/or promoting the degradation of target mRNA. In addition, ZAP regulates the expression of certain cellular genes. Here, we report that tripartite motif-containing protein 25 (TRIM25), a ubiquitin E3 ligase, is required for the antiviral activity of ZAP. Downregulation of endogenous TRIM25 abolished ZAP's antiviral activity. The E3 ligase activity of TRIM25 is required for this regulation. TRIM25 mediated ZAP ubiquitination, but the ubiquitination of ZAP itself did not seem to be required for its antiviral activity. Downregulation of endogenous ubiquitin or overexpression of the deubiquitinase OTUB1 impaired ZAP's activity. We provide evidence indicating that TRIM25 modulates the target RNA binding activity of ZAP. These results uncover a mechanism by which the antiviral activity of ZAP is regulated. IMPORTANCE ZAP is a host antiviral factor that specifically inhibits the replication of certain viruses, including HIV-1, Sindbis virus, and Ebola virus. ZAP binds directly to target mRNA, and it represses the translation and promotes the degradation of target mRNA. While the mechanisms by which ZAP posttranscriptionally inhibits target RNA expression have been extensively studied, how its antiviral activity is regulated is not very clear. Here, we report that TRIM25, a ubiquitin E3 ligase, is required for the antiviral activity of ZAP. Downregulation of endogenous TRIM25 remarkably abolished ZAP's activity. TRIM25 is required for ZAP optimal binding to target mRNA. These results help us to better understand how the antiviral activity of ZAP is regulated.
A Tale of Two Fashions: An Empirical Study on the Performance of Native Apps and Web Apps on Android

The prevalent smartphones have become the major entrance to accessing services on the Internet. On smartphones, users can have two options as the clients, i.e., native apps and Web apps. There have been several debates about native apps and Web apps. However, major service providers such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook provide both native apps and Web apps to end-users. Essentially, the performance differences between these two types of apps haven’t been addressed. Indeed, the performance differences make non-trivial impacts on apps development, deployment, and distribution. In this article, we conduct a measurement study on the performance of native apps and Web apps on Android smartphones. Specifically, we want to explore given the same functionalities, do Web apps always perform poorly compared to native apps. We select 328 services from some popular providers, covering various domains such as e-commerce, map, social networking, and entertainment. With HTTP-level trace analysis, we demystify the workflows on how native apps and Web apps deliver services on mobile devices, respectively. Then, we characterize the performance differences between native apps and Web apps with the metrics including the number of requests, response time, data drain, and energy consumption. We find that the performance of Web apps is better than native apps in more than 31 percent cases. Our derived knowledge can suggest some recommendations to improve the performance for mobile apps.
The influence of single-leg landing direction on lower limbs biomechanics.

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to investigate whether different directions of single-leg landing tasks would influence lower limbs joints biomechanics. METHODS Using a controlled and experimental design, thirty physically active male subjects (age: 26.4±4.4 years; height: 180.5±3.7 cm; weight: 79.8:±4.4 kg), by dropping down from the top of a wooden box of 31 cm height, performed three one-leg landing tasks featured by different landing directions: frontward (FL), lateral (LL), and rotational (RL). The trunk and lower limbs` joints biomechanical responses were assessed through a laboratory setup consisting in a 6-camera motion capture system synchronized with force plates. A repeated measures one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to investigate the main effects of the landing directions on the lower limbs joints biomechanics during the main phases of interest of the landing tasks. RESULTS The results indicated two major findings: 1) FL resulted in an advantageous active whole-body configuration; 2) the lower limbs' joints adopted different and specific energy absorption strategies between the landing tasks. CONCLUSIONS This study indicates that the different landing tasks likely generate meaningful changes in in whole body biomechanics and specific lower limbs joints kinetic and kinematic responses. Such outcomes might be used by clinicians towards a practical approach in selecting either assessment modalities or exercise interventions.
Postural Strategies and Sensory Integration: No Turning Point between Childhood and Adolescence

In this study, we investigated the sensory integration to postural control in children and adolescents from 5 to 15 years of age. We adopted the working hypothesis that considerable body changes occurring during these periods may lead subjects to under-use the information provided by the proprioceptive pathway and over-use other sensory systems such as vision to control their orientation and stabilize their body. It was proposed to determine which maturational differences may exist between the sensory integration used by children and adolescents in order to test the hypothesis that adolescence may constitute a specific phase in the development of postural control. This hypothesis was tested by applying an original protocol of slow oscillations below the detection threshold of the vestibular canal system, which mainly serves to mediate proprioceptive information, to the platform on which the subjects were standing. We highlighted the process of acquiring an accurate sensory and anatomical reference frame for functional movement. We asked children and adolescents to maintain a vertical stance while slow sinusoidal oscillations in the frontal plane were applied to the support at 0.01 Hz (below the detection threshold of the semicircular canal system) and at 0.06 Hz (above the detection threshold of the semicircular canal system) with their eyes either open or closed. This developmental study provided evidence that there are mild differences in the quality of sensory integration relative to postural control in children and adolescents. The results reported here confirmed the predominance of vision and the gradual mastery of somatosensory integration in postural control during a large period of ontogenesis including childhood and adolescence. The youngest as well as the oldest subjects adopted similar qualitative damping and segmental stabilization strategies that gradually improved with age without reaching an adult's level. Lastly, sensory reweighting for postural strategies as assessed by very slow support oscillations presents a linear development without any qualitative turning point between childhood and adolescence.
High-Efficiency Colloidal Quantum Dot Photovoltaic Devices Using Chemically Modified Heterojunctions

High-efficiency colloidal quantum dot photovoltaic devices (CQDPVs) are achieved by improving the interfacial charge extraction via chemical modification of PbS-CQD/ZnO heterojunctions. Simple treatment of the heterojunctions using a chemical modifier, 1,2-ethanedithiol, effectively reduces the interband trap sites of the ZnO nanoparticles (ZnO-np) by passivation of the notorious intrinsic oxygen-deficient defects. As a result, the interfacial bimolecular recombinations between (i) trapped electrons in the ZnO-np layers and the holes in the CQD layers and (ii) accumulated electrons in the CQD layers and the holes in the CQD layers are suppressed. Consequently, the power conversion efficiency of the chemically modified CQDPVs reached a certified power conversion efficiency of 10.14% with decent air stability. Notably, the entire device fabrication process, including chemical modification, could be performed at room temperature under ambient atmosphere.