Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ethanol Withdrawal Provokes Opening of the Mitochondrial Membrane Permeability Transition Pore in an Estrogen-Preventable Manner

We have reported that the major endogenous estrogen, 17β-estradiol (E2), protects against oxidative injury during ethanol withdrawal (EW) in a cultured hippocampal cell line (HT22). Here, we investigated whether the pro-oxidant nature of EW mediates opening of the mitochondrial membrane permeability transition pore (PTP) in a manner protected by E2. Excess PTP opening provokes mitochondrial membrane swelling (MMS) and the collapse of membrane potential (ΔΨm). HT22 cells were collected at the end of ethanol exposure (100 mM) for 24 h or at 4 h of EW to assess MMS by monitoring absorbance decline at 540 nm and to assess ΔΨm using flow cytometry. Protective effects of E2 on PTP were compared with an antioxidant butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) and an E2 analog, ZYC26 [(3-hydroxy-2-adamantyl(1)-4-methyl-estra-1,3,5(10)-17-one], with higher antioxidant potency than E2. To assess cellular consequences of PTP opening, effects of a PTP inhibitor (cyclosporin A) on EW-induced cell death were assessed using the calcein assay. Major findings were that: 1) EW resulted in rapid MMS and ΔΨm collapse; 2) cyclosporin A attenuated EW-induced cell death; and 3) E2 treatment restricted to the EW phase protected against the PTP opening more prominently than BHT and to a similar degree to ZYC26. These findings suggest that EW provokes PTP opening partly but not entirely through the pro-oxidant nature and that E2 counteracts EW-associated factors to protect against the PTP opening.
A more comprehensive activity analysis of standard online social networking functionalities

Online social networks are popular habitats for many Web users. Research on activity patterns of individual features of online social networking systems is ongoing. Our approach on the study of these patterns is more encompassing than previous efforts. We have created a modern experimental educational online social network for the purpose of the study of network structures and communication phenomena in these websites. In this paper presented are patterns of activity usage of most classic features of online social networks: friends, private massages, forum, blog, photogallery, comment wall. Activity patterns of these features are compared against each other, also by taking into account the main user attribute.
Propofol and Sevoflurane in Subanesthetic Concentrations Act Preferentially on the Spinal Cord: Evidence from Multimodal Electrophysiological Assessment

Background Animal experiments in recent years have shown that attenuation of motor responses by general anesthetics is mediated at least partly by spinal mechanisms. Less is known about the relative potency of anesthetic drugs in suppressing cortical and spinal electrophysiological responses in vivo in humans, particularly those, but not only those, connected with motor responses. Therefore, we studied the effects of sevoflurane and propofol in humans using multimodal electrophysiological assessment. Methods We studied nine healthy volunteers in two sessions during steady state sedation with 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5 &mgr;g/l (targeted plasma concentration) propofol or 0.2 and 0.4 vol% (end-tidal) sevoflurane. Following a 15-min equilibration period, motor responses to transcranial magnetic stimulation and peripheral (H-reflex, F-wave) stimulation were recorded, while electroencephalography and auditory evoked responses were recorded in parallel. Results At concentrations corresponding to two thirds of C50 awake, motor responses to transcranial magnetic stimulation were reduced by approximately 50%, H-reflex amplitude was reduced by 22%, F-wave amplitude was reduced by 40%, and F-wave persistence was reduced by 25%. No significant differences between sevoflurane and propofol were found. At this concentration, the Bispectral Index was reduced by 7%, and the middle-latency auditory evoked responses were attenuated only mildly (Nb latency increased by 11%, amplitude PaNb did not change). In contrast, the postauricular reflex was suppressed by 77%. Conclusions The large effect of both anesthetics on all spinal motor responses, compared with the small effect on electroencephalography and middle-latency auditory evoked responses, assuming that they represent cortical modulation, may suggest that the suppression of motor responses to transcranial magnetic stimulation is largely due to submesencephalic effects.
Characterization of Adherence of NontypeableHaemophilus influenzae to Human Epithelial Cells

ABSTRACT The adherence of 58 nontypeable Haemophilus influenzaeisolates obtained from patients with otitis media or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and obtained from the throats of healthy individuals to Chang and NCI-H292 epithelial cells was compared. Otitis media isolates, but not COPD isolates, adhered significantly more to both cell lines than did throat isolates. Since high-molecular-weight (HMW) proteins are major adhesins of nontypeableH. influenzae, the isolates were screened for HMW protein expression by Western blotting with two polyclonal sera and PCR withhmw-specific primers. Twenty-three of the 32 adhering isolates (72%) and only 1 of the 26 nonadherent strains were HMW protein or hmw gene positive. Among the 32 isolates adhering to either cell line, 5 different adherence patterns were distinguished based on the inhibiting effect of dextran sulfate. UsingH. influenzae strain 12 expressing two well-defined HMW proteins (HMW1 and HMW2) and its isogenic mutants as a reference, we observed HMW1-like adherence to both cell lines for 16 of the 32 adherent isolates. Four others showed HMW2-like adherence to NCI-H292. Of the three other patterns of adherence, one probably also involved HMW protein. Screening of the isolates with six HMW-specific monoclonal antibodies in a whole-cell enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay showed that the HMW proteins of COPD isolates and carrier isolates were more distinct from the HMW proteins from H. influenzae strain 12 than those from otitis media isolates. Characterization of the HMW protein of a COPD isolate by adherence and DNA sequence analysis showed that despite large sequence diversity in the hmwA gene, probably resulting in the antigenic differences, the HMW protein mediated the HMW2-like adherence of this strain.
An Analysis of the Bias-Property of the Sample Auto-Correlation Matrices of Doubly Selective Fading Channels for OFDM Systems

This paper derives the analytic expression of the sample auto-correlation matrix from the least-squared channel estimation of doubly selective fading channels for OFDM systems. According to the expression, the sample auto-correlation matrix reveals the bias property which would cause the model mismatch and therefore deteriorate the performance of channel estimation. Numerical results demonstrate the bias property and corresponding analysis.
Cellular Trafficking of Single and Multistage Vectors

vii Table of Content . ix Table of Figures . xii Abbreviations . xv 1 Background . 1 1.1 Nanomedicine . 1 1.2 Biological Barriers . 3 1.2.1 Endothelial Barrier . 4 1.2.2 Stromal Barrier . 6 1.2. 3 Cellular Barrier . 7 1.3 Secretion of Nanoparticles . 9 1.4 The Multistage System. 11 1.4. 1 Strategy . 11 1.4. 2 S1MP Fabrication . 14 2 Methods . 16 2.1 Cell Culture . 16 2.2 Porous Silicon Particles and Surface Functionalization . 16
Observations on Snakes and Snake Bite in the Eastern Mediterranean Area

This paper is based on the author's experience while working in Israel, Egypt and Cyprus and therefore covers only these areas. From the point of view of its snake fauna, the eastern Mediterranean may be divided geographically into two parts, a northern and a southern area. The northern area, which extends north from the latitude of Jerusalem to include the southern shores of Asia Minor,: the Lebanon, Israel and Cyprus, is a fertile green belt containing some mountainous districts. The southern area, with the exception of the Nile delta, is mainly desert as typified by the Suez Canal zone, the Sinai, the Negev and Aqaba. The basic fauna: of these two areas have little in common, although there is some overlap, especially in Israel where the fauna of the two areas may be found side by side. The fauna of the northern l:\rea is a continuation of that found in the European continent, the common snakes being non-poisonous Colubridre and the only common poisonous snakes being Vipera lebetina and Vipera palcestina. In the southern area the snakes are those specifically associated with the deserts of North Mrica and Arabia as typified by the sand vipers and the Egyptian cobra. In the northern area the poisonous snake is a rarity, whereas in the southern area the majority of snakes are poisonous. This paper describes the commoner snakes found, with a view to their easier identification; the pathological and clinical features of snake bite are discussed and the different forms of treatment reviewed. Only 18 of the 42 or more species found in the area are mentioned; these include all the poisonous species and those of the non-poisonous species which are most frequently found.
Anxiolytic and nootropic activity of Vetiveria zizanioides roots in mice

Background: Vetiveria zizanioides (VZ) (family: Poaceae), an aromatic plant commonly known as “Vetiver“ has been used for various ailments. Concerning the various ailments being listed as the traditional uses of VZ, no mention about anxiety and memory was found. Objective: The present study examined the anxiolytic and memory enhancing activity of ethanolic extract of V. zizanioides (EEVZ) dried roots in mice. Materials and Methods: Activity of EEVZ was assessed using models of anxiety (elevated plus-maze [EPM], light/dark test, hole board test, marble-burying test) and learning and memory (EPM, passive shock avoidance paradigm). Results: EEVZ at doses of 100, 200, and 300 mg/kg b.w. illustrated significant anxiolytic activity indicated by increase in time spent and number of entries in open arm, time spent in lightened area, number of head poking and number marble buried when compared to that of diazepam (1 mg/kg b.w.), a reference standard. The same treatment showed a significant decrease in transfer latency to reach open arm, shock-free zone, and number of mistakes when compared to that of scopolamine (0.3 mg/kg b.w.). EEVZ in all the doses (100, 200, and 300 mg/kg b.w.) significantly decreased mortality in sodium nitrite (250 mg/kg b.w.) induced hypoxia and also significantly increases contraction induced by acetylcholine on rat ileum preparation. Conclusion: The result emanated in the present investigation revealed EEVZ possesses significant anxiolytic and nootropic activity by possibly interplaying with neurotransmitters implicated in anxiety and learning and memory.
Development and Validation of a Continuous Production Concept for Thermoplastic Honeycomb

The continuous production of thermoplastic honeycomb cores is a recent development at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. The production equipment has been improved to deliver high quality material. This equipment is used for the determination of optimum process parameters. This article describes the production equipment, its development, and the experiments that have been carried out.
Fiber nonlinearity mitigation in 428-Gb/s multiband coherent optical OFDM systems

We propose DFT-spread (DFT-S) OFDM within each sub-band of multiband-CO-OFDM to mitigate fiber nonlinearity. For 1000-km standard-single-mode-fiber transmission at 420-Gb/s, 32-band DFT-S CO-OFDM outperforms conventional CO-OFDM and coherent single-carrier by 1.1 and 0.8 dB, respectively.
New copolymer of poly(N‐vinylcarbazole) and poly(p‐phenylenevinylene) for optoelectronic devices

A novel diblock copolymer based on poly(N-vinylcarbazole) PVK and poly(p-phenylenevinylene) (PPV) precursor was synthesized by oxidative cross-linking. The grafting of PPV with PVK moieties was elucidated by infrared absorption analysis. A structural study by X-ray diffraction and a morphological study of the copolymer by scanning and transmission electron microscopy reveal a multiscale one-dimensional self-organization both at the molecular and at the sub-micrometric level. The resulting copolymer exhibits original optical properties compared to those of PVK and PPV ones and presents an improved thermal behavior. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 130: 2839–2847, 2013
Representational signalling in birds

Some animals give specific calls when they discover food or detect a particular type of predator. Companions respond with food-searching behaviour or by adopting appropriate escape responses. These signals thus seem to denote objects in the environment, but this specific mechanism has only been demonstrated for monkey alarm calls. We manipulated whether fowl (Gallus gallus) had recently found a small quantity of preferred food and then tested for a specific interaction between this event and their subsequent response to playback of food calls. In one treatment, food calls thus potentially provided information about the immediate environment, while in the other the putative message was redundant with individual experience. Food calls evoked substrate searching, but only if the hens had not recently discovered food. An identical manipulation had no effect on responses to an acoustically matched control call. These results show that chicken food calls are representational signals: they stimulate retrieval of information about a class of external events. This is the first such demonstration for any non-primate species. Representational signalling is hence more taxonomically widespread than has previously been thought, suggesting that it may be the product of common social factors, rather than an attribute of a particular phylogenetic lineage.
Using OWL in a Pervasive Computing Broker

Computing is moving toward a pervasive context-aware environment in which agents with limited resources will require external support to help them become context-aware. In this paper, we describe an agent based architecture called Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA) to help these agents to acquire, reason about and share context knowledge. A key component in our architecture is an explicit context ontology defined using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). This ontology models the basic concepts of people, agents, places, and presentation events. We also describe a use case scenario and prototype design of CoBrA in an intelligent meeting room environment.
Job opportunities through entertainment: virally spread speech-based services for low-literate users

We explore how telephone-based services might be mass adopted by low-literate users in the developing world. We focus on speech and push-button dialog systems requiring neither literacy nor training. Building on the success of Polly, a simple telephone-based voice manipulation and forwarding system that was first tested in 2011, we report on its first large-scale sustained deployment. In 24/7 operation in Pakistan since May 9, 2012, as of mid-September Polly has spread to 85,000 users, engaging them in 495,000 interactions, and is continuing to spread to 1,000 new people daily. It has also attracted 27,000 people to a job search service, who in turn listened 279,000 times to job ads and forwarded them 22,000 times to their friends. We report users' activity over time and across demographics, analyze user behavior within several randomized controlled trials, and describe lessons learned regarding spread, scalability and sustainability of telephone-based speech-based services.
Building k-nn graphs from large text data

In this paper we present our new design of NNCTPH, a scalable algorithm to build an approximate k-NN graph from large text datasets. The algorithm uses a modified version of Context Triggered Piecewise Hashing to bin the input data into buckets, and uses NN-Descent, a versatile graph-building algorithm, inside each bucket. We use datasets consisting of the subject of spam emails to experimentally test the influence of the different parameters of the algorithm on the number of computed similarities, on processing time, and on the quality of the final graph. We also compare the algorithm with a sequential and a MapReduce implementation of NN-Descent. For our datasets, the algorithm proved to be up to ten times faster than NN-Descent, for the same quality of produced graph. Moreover, the speedup increased with the size of the dataset, making NNCTPH a sensible choice for very large text datasets.
Goal-Oriented Auditory Scene Recognition

How do we understand and interpret complex auditory environments in a way that may depend on some stated goals or intentions? Here, we propose a framework that provides a detailed analysis of the spectrotemporal modulations in the acoustic signal, augmented with a discriminative classifier using multilayer perceptrons. We show that such representation is successful at capturing the non-trivial commonalties within a sound class and differences between different classes. It not only surpasses performance of current systems in the literature by about 21%, but proves quite robust for processing multi-source cases. In addition, we test the role of feature re-weighting in improving feature selectivity and signal-to-noise ratio in the direction of a sound class of interest.
Teaching Software Designing Skills

Research has revealed a significant gap between the thinking patterns and software design habits of students or recent computer science university graduates and those of expert software developers.There may be several causes for this gap, one of which is undoubtedly the fact that throughout their studies students are mostly asked to write software programs of relatively lim-ited scope, and are not usually required to work as part of a team constructing a complex program.In the present paper we will describe a study unit intended to be taught as part of a high school computer science curriculum, which emphasizes the software system aspects. In a study that accompanied the development and actual teaching of the unit, we checked, among other things, whether the students acquired skills for developing a complex software system.
Preparation and Properties of Natural Sand Particles Reinforced Epoxy Composites

An epoxy composite using Cancun natural hydrophobic sand particle as filler material was fabricated in this study. Three point bending tests demonstrated an enhancement of 7.5 and 8.7% in flexural strength and flexural modulus, respectively, of epoxy composite containing 1 wt. -% sand particles without any chemical treatment involved, compared to the pristine epoxy. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) studies revealed that the fracture toughness of the epoxy matrix was enhanced owing to the presence of sand particles in an epoxy/sand composite. Through dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) and thermal mechanical analysis (TMA) methods, it was found that the storage modulus (E 0 ), glass transition temperature (Tg) and dimensional stability of the sand particles/ epoxy composites were increased compared to the pristine epoxy. The friction behavior of epoxy/sand system reflected that the microstructure of epoxy composites was steady. These experimental results suggest that Cancun sand, as a freshly found natural micron porous material, may find promising applications in composite materials.
A Hybrid Instruction Prefetching Mechanism for Ultra Low-Power Multicore Clusters

The instruction memory hierarchy plays a critical role in performance and energy efficiency of ultralow-power (ULP) processors for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) end-nodes. This is mainly due to the extremely tight power envelope and area budgets, which imply small instruction-caches (I-Cache) operating at very low supply voltages (near-threshold). The challenge is aggravated by the fact that multiple processors, fetching in parallel, require plenty of bandwidth from the I-Caches. In this letter, we propose a low-cost and energy efficient hybrid instruction-prefetching mechanism to be integrated with a ULP multicore cluster. We study its performance for a wide range of IoT applications, from cryptography to computer vision, and show that it can effectively improve the hit-rate of almost all of them to above 95% (average performance improvement of over <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2 \times $ </tex-math></inline-formula>). In addition, we designed our prefetcher and integrated it in a 4-cores cluster in 28 nm fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FDSOI) technology. We show that system’s power consumption increases only by about 11% and silicon area by less than 1%. Altogether, a total energy reduction of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.9\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> is achieved, thanks to more than <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2 \times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> performance improvement, enabling a significantly longer battery life.
Conditions for essential instability and essential destabilization of linear stochastic systems

Serving as a great supplement for stochastic stability and stabilization, new notions called essential instability and essential destabilization are introduced. In this way, according to the spectral distribution of an uncontrolled linear time-invariant stochastic system in the complex plane, we distinguish three kinds of stabilities: asymptotical mean square stability, critical stability and essential instability. While dealing with the criteria for essential instability, two methods are involved: the Lyapunov equation approach and the spectral analysis technique, which are the most common ways to characterize system stability.
Internet indirection infrastructure

Attempts to generalize the Internet's point-to-point communication abstraction to provide services like multicast, anycast, and mobility have faced challenging technical problems and deployment barriers. To ease the deployment of such services, this paper proposes an overlay-based Internet Indirection Infrastructure ( I3) that offers a rendezvous-based communication abstraction. Instead of explicitly sending a packet to a destination, each packet is associated with an identifier; this identifier is then used by the receiver to obtain delivery of the packet. This level of indirection decouples the act of sending from the act of receiving, and allows I3 to efficiently support a wide variety of fundamental communication services. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, we have designed and built a prototype based on the Chord lookup protocol.
Ranking by calibrated AdaBoost

This paper describes the ideas and methodologies that we used in the Yahoo learning-to-rank challenge. Our technique is essentially pointwise with a listwise touch at the last combination step. The main ingredients of our approach are 1) preprocessing (querywise normalization) 2) multi-class AdaBoost.MH 3) regression calibration, and 4) an exponentially weighted forecaster for model combination. In post-challenge analysis we found that preprocessing and training AdaBoost with a wide variety of hyperparameters improved individual models significantly, the final listwise ensemble step was crucial, whereas calibration helped only in creating diversity.