Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Toxicity and immunomodulatory effects of interleukin-2 after autologous bone marrow transplantation for hematologic malignancies.

Autologous bone marrow transplantation (ABMT) for advanced hematologic malignancies is associated with high relapse rates. Interleukin-2 (IL-2) and lymphokine-activated killer (LAK) cells represent a potentially non-cross-resistant therapeutic modality that might prevent or delay relapses if used early after ABMT at a time when the tumor burden is minimal. However, high-dose chemoradiotherapy and ABMT might increase patients' susceptibility to IL-2 toxicity, and might interfere with immunologic responses to IL-2 in vivo. Therefore, to determine safety, tolerance, and immunomodulatory effects of IL-2 therapy early after ABMT, IL-2 was administered by continuous intravenous infusion to 16 patients 14 to 91 days (median, 33) after ABMT for acute leukemia, lymphoma, or multiple myeloma. Patients were sequentially assigned to escalating IL-2 "induction" doses (0.3 to 4.5 x 10(6) U/m2/d, days 1 to 5), and all patients received a nonescalating IL-2 "maintenance" dose (0.3 x 10(6) U/m2/d, days 12 to 21). Most patients exhibited mild to moderate fever, nausea, diarrhea, and/or skin rash with IL-2 infusions. The maximum tolerated "induction" dose was 3.0 x 10(6) U/m2/d; dose-limiting toxicities were hypotension and thrombocytopenia. All toxicities reversed on stopping the IL-2 infusions, and all patients completed "maintenance. " Postinfusion lymphocytosis was exhibited by patients at all IL-2 dose levels. With the higher IL-2 doses, increased percentages of patients' PBMC expressed CD16 and CD56, with augmented lysis of K562 and Daudi, reflecting the induction of natural killer and circulating LAK effector activities. Increased LAK precursor activity was exhibited by patients at all IL-2 dose levels. Thus, the IL-2 therapy regimen was safely tolerated after ABMT, and pronounced immunomodulatory effects were observed with the higher IL-2 doses. These studies support the planned use of IL-2 and LAK cells after ABMT in an attempt to reduce relapses of advanced hematologic malignancies.
Psychological distress among men suffering from couple infertility in South Africa: a quantitative assessment.

BACKGROUND Recent years have seen a growing interest in the impact of infertility on reproductive health in developing countries. Most of the research which has addressed the psychosocial consequences of infertility in African countries has been qualitative in nature and focused on women. It was the aim of this study to assess psychological distress quantitatively in men suffering from couple infertility living in an urban community in South Africa. METHODS The Symptom Checklist-90-R, a standardized instrument for the measurement of current psychological symptom status, was administered to 120 men upon first presentation to a public health sector infertility clinic (study group) in a tertiary referral centre. The control group comprised 120 men who attended an antenatal clinic with their partner. All men may have previously fathered a child. Raw test scores were converted into standard area T scores and analyzed further. RESULTS Participants in the study group differed in their psychological symptom status when compared with controls. Male partners of infertile couples had significantly elevated mean T scores for all nine primary symptom dimensions as well as the three global markers of distress (P < 0.0001 versus control), but these did not exceed the upper range of normal. CONCLUSIONS When compared with controls, male partners of infertile couples experienced elevated levels of psychological distress, but without, on average, suffering from psychopathology. A comparison with qualitative studies from African countries and with quantitative studies from the Western industrialized world revealed both similarities and differences. Understanding and addressing the male perspective of infertility is an important component of infertility management.
Conditions for the Long‐Term Preservation of a Deep Brine Reservoir in Ceres

We propose a new internal evolution model for the dwarf planet Ceres matching the constraints on Ceres' present internal state from the Dawn mission observations. We assume an interior differentiated into a volatile‐dominated crust and rocky mantle, and with remnant brines in the mantle, all consistent with inferences from the Dawn geophysical observations. Simulations indicate Ceres should preserve a warm crust until present if the crust is rich in clathrate hydrates. The temperature computed at the base of the crust exceeds 220 K for a broad range of conditions, allowing for the preservation of a small amount of brines at the base of the crust. However, a temperature ≥250 K, for which at least 1 wt. % sodium carbonate gets in solution requires a crustal abundance of clathrate hydrates greater than 55 vol.%, a situation possible for a narrow set of evolutionary scenarios.
Detecting Latency Differences in Event-Related BOLD Responses: Application to Words versus Nonwords and Initial versus Repeated Face Presentations

We introduce a new method for detecting differences in the latency of blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) responses to brief events within the context of the General Linear Model. Using a first-order Taylor approximation in terms of the temporal derivative of a canonical hemodynamic response function, statistical parametric maps of differential latencies were estimated via the ratio of derivative to canonical parameter estimates. This method was applied to two example datasets: comparison of words versus nonwords in a lexical decision task and initial versus repeated presentations of faces in a fame-judgment task. Tests across subjects revealed both magnitude and latency differences within several brain regions. This approach offers a computationally efficient means of detecting BOLD latency differences over the whole brain. Precise characterization of the hemodynamic latency and its interpretation in terms of underlying neural differences remain problematic, however.
Secure authorization, access control and data integrity in Bluetooth

The Bluetooth standard has a provision for mutual authentication of connecting devices but not their actual users and allows access control during connection setup only. We propose a user authorization and pairing (UAP) application, that has the ability to perform authentication and authorization of users using role based model. The pairing procedure, which exchanges link key between devices, is also performed as a part of the user authorization process. The integrity of the message is guaranteed by using message authentication codes. We also extend an attack on a short PIN during the pairing procedure for devices compliant with the Bluetooth specification version 1.1.
A Current Meter using a Phototube

To measure velocities of currents automatically, the author has made a recording current meter using a phototube, in which the intermittent photoelectric current is depicted on a chart of a recorder on deck. The speed and direction of water current can be measured respectively by the time intervals and by the intensity of photoelectric current. Experiments on the sea have shown that by using the current meter, the actual under-water conditions can be immediately observed, and fine, accurate and rapid observations of water current have been made possible.
Collective Pattern Specification The Case for Collective Pattern Specification

Many scientific applications are written in a Bulk Synchronous Parallel style, in which regions of pure computation are separated by communication operations. Unless an existing MPI collective operation can be used, these communication operations are usually written as separate message sends and receives, making analysis and optimization difficult. This style of communication also reduces readability and maintainability by hiding the overall collective pattern in a maze of individual messages. Instead we advocate directly specifying (collective) communication operations in a domain-specific language. We further classify applications by their communication patterns, in particular with respect to different nodes’ knowledge of the applications’ patterns and the frequency of pattern changes, showing how a language would benefit each of these classes of applications and the requirements for such a language.
Springing Forward: Changes in Phenology of Native Plant Species in Southern Oregon Prairies as a Result of Experimental Climate Change

Changes in land use, agriculture, and the introduction of invasive species have left prairies of the Pacific Northwest at risk of exacerbated disturbance as a result of changes in climate. A shift in phenology—the timing of biological events (e.g., flowering)—is one of the projected consequences of climate change for many plant species, which may lead to disruptions in community structure such as mismatches in timing of plant-herbivore and plant-pollinator interactions. Shifts and disruptions among prairie species in the Pacific Northwest as a result of climate change are generally unknown. Thus, we examined timing of flowering and seed set under three experimental climate treatments in Selma, Oregon. Treatments included: a control, a 2.5°C increase in temperature, and a 40% reduction in rainfall to mimic extreme drought. From 20 March to 27 May 2016, we visited the climate plots weekly and recorded the abundance of flowering plants and the number of flowers each plant produced for 15 native grass and forb species. Only three produced sufficient flowers to analyze. Sidalcea malviflora ssp virgata, an endemic perennial forb species, flowered earlier but produced fewer plants and flowers per plant in the heated treatments. Navarretia pubescens and Clarkia purpurea, two annual forb species, trended towards flowering earliest in the heated plots, but this was not statistically significant. Continued data collection over the next several years will enable parameterization of a model to predict these plants’ responses to projected climate change, including their predicted future distributions and their annual growth timeline. Oregon Undergraduate Research Journal Kanner, McCullough, and Nock Volume 11 Issue 1 Spring 2017 48
R8s: Inferring Absolute Rates of Molecular Evolution, Divergence times in the Absence of a Molecular Clock

SUMMARY Estimating divergence times and rates of substitution from sequence data is plagued by the problem of rate variation between lineages. R8s version 1.5 is a program which uses parametric, nonparametric and semiparametric methods to relax the assumption of constant rates of evolution to obtain better estimates of rates and times. Unlike most programs for rate inference or phylogenetics, r8s permits users to convert results to absolute rates and ages by constraining one or more node times to be fixed, minimum or maximum ages (using fossil or other evidence). Version 1.5 uses truncated Newton nonlinear optimization code with bound constraints, offering superior performance over previous versions. AVAILABILITY The linux executable, C source code, sample data sets and user manual are available free at http://ginger.ucdavis. edu/r8s.
Efficient Broadcast Mechanism for Cooperative Collision Avoidance Using Power Control

Improving driver’s safety has been an active research area in wireless communication. In particular, the vehicle cooperative collision avoidance (CCA) is one of the most important issues in safety applications. A variety of broadcast protocols has been proposed for vehicular network. However, there is only a few of them dedicatedly designed for the CCA system. In this paper, we propose a novel broadcast mechanism for CCA using the power control technique. The power control rule is based on the safe distance between vehicles. Simulation results show that our approach can significantly reduce the delivery delay and avoid car collision.
Infrared Emission from the Dusty Disk Orbiting GD 362, an Externally Polluted White Dwarf

We report Spitzer Space Telescope photometry between 3.6 and 24 μm and spectroscopy between 5 and 15 μm of GD 362, a white dwarf with an effective temperature near 10,000 K that displays a remarkably high concentration of metals in its photosphere and a thermal infrared excess. We approximately reproduce both the infrared continuum and the very strong 10 μm silicate emission feature with a model of an orbiting dusty disk that is flat out to 50 stellar radii and warped between 50 and 70 stellar radii. The relatively small amount of cold material implied by the weak 24 μm flux argues that the disk lies within the Roche radius of the star, and we may be witnessing a system where an asteroidal-size body has been tidally destroyed. If so, determination of the photospheric metal abundances may measure the bulk composition of an extrasolar minor planet.
Bidirectional Current-Fed Half-Bridge (C) (LC)–(LC ) Configuration for Inductive Wireless Power Transfer System

This paper contributes to the analysis and development of a new power electronics system for bidirectional wireless power transfer (WPT). The major focus is the analysis and implementation of a new current-fed resonant topology with current-sharing and voltage-doubling features. A new bidirectional WPT system with current-fed half-bridge voltage-doubler circuit is proposed and analyzed with series–parallel and series resonant networks. Traditionally used parallel L–C resonant tank in transmitter circuit with current-fed WPT topology causes higher voltage stress across the inverter devices to compensate the reactive power consumed by the loosely coupled coil. In the proposed topology, this is mitigated by adding a suitably designed capacitor in series with the transmitter coil; thus, developing a series–parallel CLC tank. Detailed analysis and design is reported for both grid-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-grid operations. The power flow is controlled through variable frequency modulation. Soft switching of the devices is obtained irrespective of the load current. A proof-of-concept experimental hardware prototype rated at 1.2 kW is developed and tested. Experimental results are presented to verify the analysis and demonstrate the performance of the system with bidirectional power flow.
Network Amplification of Local Fluctuations Causes High Spike Rate Variability, Fractal Firing Patterns and Oscillatory Local Field Potentials

We investigate a model for neural activity in a two-dimensional sheet of leaky integrate-and-fire neurons with feedback connectivity consisting of local excitation and surround inhibition. Each neuron receives stochastic input from an external source, independent in space and time. As recently suggested by Softky and Koch (1992, 1993), independent stochastic input alone cannot explain the high interspike interval variability exhibited by cortical neurons in behaving monkeys. We show that high variability can be obtained due to the amplification of correlated fluctuations in a recurrent network. Furthermore, the cross-correlation functions have a dual structure, with a sharp peak on top of a much broader hill. This is due to the inhibitory and excitatory feedback connections, which cause hotspots of neural activity to form within the network. These localized patterns of excitation appear as clusters or stripes that coalesce, disintegrate, or fluctuate in size while simultaneously moving in a random walk constrained by the interaction with other clusters. The synaptic current impinging upon a single neuron shows large fluctuations at many time scales, leading to a large coefficient of variation (CV) for the interspike interval statistics. The power spectrum associated with single units shows a 1/f decay for small frequencies and is flat at higher frequencies, while the power spectrum of the spiking activity averaged over many cellsequivalent to the local field potentialshows no 1/f decay but a prominent peak around 40 Hz, in agreement with data recorded from cat and monkey cortex (Gray et al. 1990; Eckhorn et al. 1993). Firing rates exhibit self-similarity between 20 and 800 msec, resulting in 1/f-like noise, consistent with the fractal nature of neural spike trains (Teich 1992).
Usefulness of serum procalcitonin as a diagnostic biomarker of infection in children with chronic kidney disease

Introduction Serum procalcitonin (PCT) levels are known to be low in healthy individuals in healthy subjects but are increased in patients with a severe bacterial infection. It has not been extensively studied in children with chronic kidney disease (CKD), treated either with hemodialysis (HD) or with renal transplantation. Material and methods During a 6-month period, blood samples were taken from 102 (55 HD children and 47 renal transplant recipients) children with a strong clinical suspicion of infection. Procalcitonin levels were measured by ELISA. Results Thirty-four/102 cases had proven infections as defined previously. Children with proven infections had a significantly higher PCT (0.920 ±0.24 ng/ml) than those without (0.456 ±0.53 ng/ml), p = 0.04. The ideal cutoff value derived for serum PCT was 0.5 ng/ml. This threshold value established a sensitivity of 94.1% and a specificity of 87.9%. Conclusions This study indicates that significantly increased PCT concentration is a promising predictor of systemic bacterial infection in children with CKD, with good sensitivity and specificity. This study proposes that serum PCT is a convenient index of infection in CKD children at a cutoff value of 0.5 ng/ml.
Transcriptional co‐regulation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae alcohol acetyltransferase gene, ATF1 and Δ‐9 fatty acid desaturase gene, OLE1 by unsaturated fatty acids

The ATF1 gene encodes an alcohol acetyl transferase which catalyzes the synthesis of acetate esters from acetyl CoA and several kinds of alcohols. ATF1 expression is repressed by unsaturated fatty acids or oxygen. Analysis using ATF1‐lacZ fusion plasmid revealed that ATF1 gene expression is widely repressed by a variety of unsaturated fatty acids, and the degree of ATF1 transcriptional repression varies according to the structure of the unsaturated fatty acids. Interestingly, it was noted that the degree of ATF1 transcriptional repression was related to the melting point of unsaturated fatty acids added to the medium. The OLE1 gene, which encodes Δ‐9 fatty acid desaturase, has been reported to be repressed by unsaturated fatty acids. Transcription of OLE1 was also repressed by a wide variety of unsaturated fatty acids under anaerobic conditions. The degree of transcriptional repression of OLE1 was also related to the melting point of the added unsaturated fatty acids. Therefore, it is considered that ATF1 and OLE1 transcription are regulated in response to cell membrane fluidity. As has been reported for OLE1, the repression of ATF1 by unsaturated fatty acids was relieved in a disruptant carrying a faa1 and faa4 double mutation, two fatty acid activation genes. However, the ATF1 transcript in this double gene disruptant was repressed by oxygen. These results suggested that ATF1 transcription was co‐regulated by the same mechanism as the OLE1 gene and that unsaturated fatty acids and oxygen repressed the ATF1 transcript by a different regulation pathway. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
High-efficiency non-isolated dynamic voltage restorer using soft-switching dc-dc converter for parallel-voltage compensation

This paper proposes a high-efficiency non-isolated dynamic voltage restorer (DVR) for the parallel-voltage compensation. Compared with the conventional isolated DVR, the non-isolated DVR using the dc-dc converter can reduce cost, weight, size and losses related with the injection transformer. However, the dc-dc converter of the non-isolated DVR operates under hard-switching operation, increasing switching power losses. The proposed non-isolated DVR using the soft-switching dc-dc converter has zero-voltage switching (ZVS) of all power switches, improving power efficiency. The performance of the proposed DVR has been verified by simulation and experimental results for a 1.0 kW output power prototype system.
West Nile virus infection in 2002: morbidity and mortality among patients admitted to hospital in southcentral Ontario.

BACKGROUND In August and September 2002 an outbreak of West Nile virus (WNV) infection occurred in southern Ontario. We encountered a number of seriously ill patients at our hospitals. In this article we document the clinical characteristics of these cases. METHODS We conducted a retrospective chart review of patients who came to the attention of infectious disease or neurology consultants or the microbiology laboratories at 7 hospitals in the municipalities of Toronto, Peel and Halton, Ont. Patients were included if they had been admitted to hospital or stayed overnight in the emergency department, had serological evidence of WNV infection and had clinical evidence of WNV fever, aseptic meningitis, encephalomyelitis or motor neuronopathy. RESULTS In all, 64 patients met the inclusion criteria; 57 had encephalitis or neuromuscular weakness or both, 5 had aseptic meningitis, and 2 had WNV fever. The mean age was 61 years (range 26-87). The patients were predominantly active, middle-aged or elderly people living independently in the community. Seven patients were immunocompromised A febrile prodromal illness preceded the neurological symptoms in almost all cases. The most common neurological abnormality was decreased level of consciousness; this frequently evolved to severe lower motor neuron neuromuscular weakness. Ataxia and swallowing disorders were frequent and important problems. Sixteen patients (25%) required intubation and mechanical ventilation because of a decreased level of consciousness, inability to clear secretions or respiratory muscle weakness; 9 others had disabling muscle weakness of one or more limbs. Ten patients died. The study patients were in hospital a total of 1856 patient-days, including 532 patient-days in an intensive care unit. Only 28% (13/47) of the patients who survived encephalitis or neuromuscular weakness, or both, were discharged home without additional support. Slow turnaround time for serological test results resulted in delayed diagnosis. INTERPRETATION The 2002 WNV infection outbreak in Ontario caused serious morbidity and mortality in the subset of patients who had encephalitis or neuromuscular weakness severe enough to require hospital admission.