Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Simple facet joint repair with dynamic pedicular system: Technical note and case series

Purpose: Facet joints are important anatomical structures for the stability of spine. Surgical or degenerative damage to a facet joint may lead to spinal instability and causes clinical problems. This article explains the importance of facet joints, reviews facet replacement systems, and describes a simple and effective method for facet replacement after surgical removal of facet joints. Materials and Methods: Ten patients were operated with the diagnosis of unilateral nerve root compression secondary to facet degeneration. The hypertrophic facet joints were removed with microsurgical techniques and the roots were decompressed. Then, a unilateral artificial facet joint was created using two hinged screws and a dynamic rod. Results: The clinical outcome of all the patients was determined good or excellent at second and last follow-up (mean 13.3 months) controls using visual analog scale (VAS) and Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) scores. Radiological evaluations also demonstrated no implant-related complications. Conclusions: The authors suggest that, if removal of a facet joint is necessary to decompress the nerve roots, the joint can be replaced by a construct composed of two hinged screws connected by a dynamic rod. This simple system mimics the function of a normal facet joint and is an effective technique for unilateral facet joint replacement.
A 0.34-THz varactor-less scalable standing wave radiator array with 5.9% tuning range in 130nm BiCMOS

A 1×4 scalable mm-wave power generation and radiation array is designed using a standing wave harmonic oscillator architecture. A varactor-less scheme has been used to improve the tuning range above 300 GHz. The circuit with on chip patch antennas is implemented in a 130nm SiGe process with 215 GHz of fmax and is measured to provide 5.9% tuning range, -10.5 dBm total radiated power and 1.2 dBm EIRP at 342 GHz while consuming 425 mW DC power from 1.8 V supply voltage.
Location of the Mesopontine Neurons Responsible for Maintenance of Anesthetic Loss of Consciousness

The transition from wakefulness to general anesthesia is widely attributed to suppressive actions of anesthetic molecules distributed by the systemic circulation to the cerebral cortex (for amnesia and loss of consciousness) and to the spinal cord (for atonia and antinociception). An alternative hypothesis proposes that anesthetics act on one or more brainstem or diencephalic nuclei, with suppression of cortex and spinal cord mediated by dedicated axonal pathways. Previously, we documented induction of an anesthesia-like state in rats by microinjection of small amounts of GABAA-receptor agonists into an upper brainstem region named the mesopontine tegmental anesthesia area (MPTA). Correspondingly, lesioning this area rendered animals resistant to systemically delivered anesthetics. Here, using rats of both sexes, we applied a modified microinjection method that permitted localization of the anesthetic-sensitive neurons with much improved spatial resolution. Microinjected at the MPTA hotspot identified, exposure of 1900 or fewer neurons to muscimol was sufficient to sustain whole-body general anesthesia; microinjection as little as 0.5 mm off-target did not. The GABAergic anesthetics pentobarbital and propofol were also effective. The GABA-sensitive cell cluster is centered on a tegmental (reticular) field traversed by fibers of the superior cerebellar peduncle. It has no specific nuclear designation and has not previously been implicated in brain-state transitions. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT General anesthesia permits pain-free surgery. Furthermore, because anesthetic agents have the unique ability to reversibly switch the brain from wakefulness to a state of unconsciousness, knowing how and where they work is a potential route to unraveling the neural mechanisms that underlie awareness itself. Using a novel method, we have located a small, and apparently one of a kind, cluster of neurons in the mesopontine tegmentum that are capable of effecting brain-state switching when exposed to GABAA-receptor agonists. This action appears to be mediated by a network of dedicated axonal pathways that project directly and/or indirectly to nearby arousal nuclei of the brainstem and to more distant targets in the forebrain and spinal cord.
Eliciting Private Information from Selfish Agents

Author(s): Frongillo, Rafael M. | Advisor(s): Papadimitriou, Christos H | Abstract: Ever since the Internet opened the floodgates to millions of users, each looking after theirown interests, modern algorithm design has needed to be increasingly robust to strategicmanipulation. Often, it is the inputs to these algorithms which are provided by strategicagents, who may lie for their own benefit, necessitating the design of algorithms whichincentivize the truthful revelation of private information - but how can this be done? This is afundamental question with answers from many disciplines, from mechanism design to scoringrules and prediction markets. Each domain has its own model with its own assumptions, yetall seek schemes to gather private information from selfish agents, by leveraging incentives.Together, we refer to such models as elicitation.This dissertation unifies and advances the theory of incentivized information elicitation.Using tools from convex analysis, we introduce a new model of elicitation with a matchingcharacterization theorem which together encompass mechanism design, scoring rules, prediction markets, and other models. This lays a firm foundation on which the rest of thedissertation is built.It is natural to consider a setting where agents report some alternate representation oftheir private information, called a property, rather than reporting it directly. We extendour model and characterization to this setting, revealing even deeper ties to convex analysisand convex duality, and we use these connections to prove new results for linear, smoothnonlinear, and finite-valued properties. Exploring the linear case further, we show a newfour-fold equivalence between scoring rules, prediction markets, Bregman divergences, andgeneralized exponential families.Applied to mechanism design, our framework offers a new perspective. By focusing onthe (convex) consumer surplus function, we simplify a number of existing results, from theclassic revenue equivalence theorem, to more recent characterizations of mechanism implementability.Finally, we follow a line of research on the interpretation of prediction markets, relatinga new stochastic framework to the classic Walrasian equilibrium and to stochastic mirrordescent, thereby strengthening ties between prediction markets and machine learning.
N-terminal polyglutamine-containing fragments inhibit androgen receptor transactivation function

Abstract Several neurodegenerative diseases, including Kennedy's disease (KD), are associated with misfolding and aggregation of polyglutamine (polyQ)-expansion proteins. KD is caused by a polyQ-expansion in the androgen receptor (AR), a key player in male sexual differentiation. Interestingly, KD patients often show signs of mild-to-moderate androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) resulting from AR dysfunction. Here, we used the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to investigate the molecular mechanism behind AIS in KD. Upon expression in yeast, polyQ-expanded N-terminal fragments of AR lacking the hormone binding domain caused a polyQ length-dependent growth defect. Interestingly, while AR fragments with 67 Q formed large, SDS-resistant inclusions, the most pronounced toxicity was observed upon expression of 102 Q fragments which accumulated exclusively as soluble oligomers in the 100–600 kDa range. Analysis using a hormone-dependent luciferase reporter revealed that full-length polyQ-expanded AR is fully functional in transactivation, but becomes inactivated in the presence of the corresponding polyQ-expanded N-terminal fragment. Furthermore, the greatest impairment of AR activity was observed upon interaction of full-length AR with soluble AR fragments. Taken together, our results suggest that soluble polyQ-containing fragments bind to full-length AR and inactivate it, thus providing insight into the mechanism behind AIS in KD and possibly other polyglutamine diseases, such as Huntington's disease.
Modulation of antioxidant enzymes, reactive oxygen species, and glutathione levels in manganese superoxide dismutase‐overexpressing NIH/3T3 fibroblasts during the cell cycle

NIH/3T3 mouse embryo fibroblasts were transfected with the cDNA for manganese superoxide dismutase (MnSOD). Previous studies showed characteristic unique AE profiles in nonsynchronous populations of parental, control plasmid‐transfected, and MnSOD‐overexpressing NIH/3T3 cell lines. However, the present study showed that during S and M phases of the cell cycle, antioxidant enzyme (AE) levels were altered in MnSOD‐overexpressing cell lines towards levels in S and M phases of parental and control plasmid‐transfected cells. Because of the demonstration that MnSOD overexpression inhibits cell growth in both nonmalignant and malignant cells, the present study was designed to measure AEs, reactive oxygen species (ROS), and glutathione levels in various phases of the cell cycle in both parental NIH/3T3 cells and NIH/3T3 cells overexpressing MnSOD, to try to determine whether AEs, ROS, and glutathione levels could have a possible regulatory role in cell cycle progression. In all cell lines studied, ROS levels were lower in M than S phase of the cell cycle. Total glutathione and glutathione disulfide levels were greatly increased during the M phase of the cell cycle compared with quiescence and S phase in all cell lines studied. This suggests that oxidative stress exists in M phase of the cell cycle with total glutathione levels increased to decrease oxidative stress. Analysis of MnSOD‐overexpressing cell clones showed a correlation of decreased cell growth with an increase in ROS in S phase of the cell cycle and a decrease in glutathione in mitosis. The data strongly suggest that specific levels of cell redox state are necessary for cells to successfully progress through the various phases of the cell cycle. J. Cell. Physiol. 177:148–160, 1998. © 1998 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Antiviral therapy for respiratory tract infections

Viruses are important pathogens causing respiratory tract infections both in the community and health‐care facility settings. They are extremely common causes of morbidity in the competent hosts and some are associated with significant mortality in the compromised individuals. With wider application of molecular techniques, novel viruses are being described and old viruses are found to have new significance in different epidemiological and clinical settings. Some of these emerging pathogens may have the potential to cause pandemics or global spread of a severe disease, as exemplified by severe acute respiratory syndrome and avian influenza. Antiviral therapy of viral respiratory infections is often unnecessary in the competent hosts because most of them are self‐limiting and effective agents are not always available. In the immunocompromised individuals or for infections caused by highly pathogenic viruses, such as avian influenza viruses (AIV), antiviral treatment is highly desirable, despite the fact that many of the agents may not have undergone stringent clinical trials. In immunocompetent hosts, antiviral therapy can be stopped early because adaptive immune response can usually be mounted within 5–14 days. However, the duration of antiviral therapy in immunosuppressed hosts depends on clinical and radiological resolution, the degree and duration of immunosuppression, and therefore maintenance therapy is sometimes needed after the initial response. Immunotherapy and immunoprophylaxis appear to be promising directions for future research. Appropriate and targeted immunomodulation may play an important adjunctive role in some of these infections by limiting the extent of end‐organ damage and multi‐organ failure in some fulminant infections.
Design and Modelling Immersive Game Contents System for Virtual Reality Technology

Early in 1990, virtual reality technique based on computer graphics was introduced in internal computer engineering. This virtual reality is appeared technology that set a trend to develop product and environment focused on human. This paper introduces the trend and feature through case studies about the game contents system for immersive interaction among these virtual reality techniques. Moreover, we design it by using UML(Unified Modeling Language) and propose methodology about immersive system for the future game use a virtual reality technique focused on human.
Reputation and Reliability in Collective Goods

An important organizational innovation enabled by the revolution in information technologies is `open source' production which converts private commodities into essentially public goods. Similar to other public goods, incentives for reputation and group identity appear to motivate contributions to open source projects, overcoming the social dilemma inherent in producing such goods. In this paper we examine how contributor motivations affect the type of contributions made to the open source online encyclopedia Wikipedia. As expected, we find that registered participants, motivated by reputation and commitment to the Wikipedia community, make many contributions with high reliability. Surprisingly, however, we find the highest reliability from the vast numbers of anonymous `Good Samaritans' who contribute only once. Our findings of high reliability in the contributions of both Good Samaritans and committed `zealots' suggest that open source production succeeds by altering the scope of production such that a critical mass of contributors can participate.
Loss of Ectodomain Shedding Due to Mutations in the Metalloprotease and Cysteine-rich/Disintegrin Domains of the Tumor Necrosis Factor-α Converting Enzyme (TACE)*

Tumor necrosis factor-α converting enzyme (TACE), a multidomain protease essential for development and disease, releases the ectodomains from many transmembrane proteins in a regulated fashion. To understand the mechanism underlying the regulation of TACE activity, we sought to identify the cause of ectodomain shedding deficiencies in two mutated CHO sublines designated M1 and M2. Transfection of expression vectors for human and mouse TACE restored ectodomain shedding of TNF-α and TGF-α, suggesting that defects in the TACE gene contribute to the phenotype of M1 and M2 cells. The overall levels of endogenous TACE forms in M1 cells were significantly lower than those found in their parental cells, whereas only TACE zymogen, but not its mature form, was detectable in M2 cells. Molecular analyses suggested that M1 cells contained only one expressible TACE allele encoding an M435I point mutation in the catalytic center of the protease, and M2 cells produced two TACE variants with distinct point mutations in the catalytic domain (C225Y) and the cysteinerich/disintegrin domain (C600Y). Overexpression of the C225Y and C600Y TACE by transient transfection largely compensated for maturation defects in the variants but failed to restore TNF-α and TGF-α release in the shedding-defective CHO cell lines and fibroblasts derived from TACE-null mouse embryo. Further mutagenesis and functional analyses demonstrated that Cys600 was absolutely essential for ectodomain shedding, suggesting that Cys600, similar to Cys225, participates in disulfide bonding, which is critical for both the processing and catalysis of TACE.
Protest-State Interaction : A VAR Analysis of the French Labor Movement

In general, it is very hard to conceptualize the very nature of adaptive behaviors. One of the most crucial problems is the lack of relevant theoretical sources necessary for constructing a general theory of dissident-state interaction. Difficulties in collecting relevant data provide another problem. There always exists a certain degree of scarcity of relevant data that allows researchers to investigate the dynamic nature of dissident-state interaction over a long period of time in various dimensions. Thus, the primary purpose of this article is to validate the methodological applicability of dynamic time-series econometric modeling to the study of protest, in particular, to that of protest-state interaction dynamism? in other words, adaptation. This article examines the theoretical plausibility of applying an advanced time-series econometric model to the study of dissidentstate interaction by introducing the Vector Auto-Regressions (VARs) model, which has been intermittently adopted by the students of terrorism studies. The results show that the direct use of “a Vector Auto-Regressions model”is helpful for explaining a dynamic model of interaction between dissidents and state, especially in such a democratic country as France. Another interesting finding is that the result of variance decompositions reveals? though that of Granger-causality test does not endorse any causal relation between the number of protest participants (LPRO) and the level of protest’s organizational power (LOSD)? that the two series exhibit important co-movements. The correlation coefficient between error terms is 0.586, which is relatively higher than any other coefficients in the model. This means that LPRO and the number of state force (LSF) are the dominant factors of protest-state interaction. Relative to their dominance, the other variables demonstrate relatively small impact on each other.
Oxidation State of a Polyurethane Membrane after Plasma Etching

Low moduli cell culture substrates can be used to apply dynamic mechanical strain to cells, by surface deformation. Understanding the surface interaction with cells is critical to improving cell adhesion and normal growth. A medical grade polyurethane (PU), Chronoflex AL 80A, was modified by oxygen plasma etching and characterised by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Etching resulted in increased cross-linking at the isocyanate bond and formation of new oxygen moieties. The model, derived from patent data and XPS data of the unetched PU, indicated that the additional oxygen was likely to be hydroxyl and carbonyl groups. Etched membranes enhanced protein adhesion, resulting in full surface coverage compared to unetched PU. The etched PU supported cell adhesion and spreading, while the unetched PU was not conducive to monolayer formation.
A comparison of once versus twice per week training on leg press strength in women.

AIM The purpose of this study was to compare strength differences between 2 groups of untrained women, who performed a single set of the leg press exercise once or twice per week. METHODS Twenty-one women were divided randomly into 2 groups: Group 1 (n=10) performed a single set of the leg press exercise once per week, while Group 2 (n=11) performed a single set of the leg press exercise twice per week for a period of 8 weeks. Throughout the duration of the study, an amount of resistance was utilized that allowed for a single set of 6 to 10 repetitions to muscular failure. At the conclusion of the study, subjects were tested for their 6-RM strength. A 2x2 ANOVA was used to compare strength differences. The a level was set at 0.05 in order for differences to be considered significant. RESULTS The 2x2 ANOVA demonstrated that strength increases were significant between tests (P=0.0001), but not significant between groups (P=0.757). CONCLUSIONS These results indicate that performing a single set of the leg press once or twice per week results in statistically similar strength gains in untrained women.
Norplant: reversible implant contraception.

Through 2 years of comparative clinical trials Norplant a subdermal contraceptive implant system containing the synthetic progestin levonorgestrel has had a net cumulative pregnancy rate of 0.4 per 100. This rate was significantly below rates for another implant contraceptive and for the TCu 200 IUD. The major side effect of the method has been irregular bleeding. The experience of the pilot clinical study through 3 years and the release rates of levonorgestrel from the implanted capsules indicate that a single administration of Norplant will provide effective protection against pregnancy for at least 5 years. (Authors)
Bypass: Providing secure DHT routing through bypassing malicious peers

Much research has been devoted to the development of efficient distributed hash tables (DHTs). While many works have studied DHT systems, few have examined their security issues. For example, chord and other DHT implementations rely on the cooperation of individual peers to route requests. Consequently, any malicious node can drop and misroute messages at will, censoring the access of honest peers to content. In this paper, we introduce bypass, a novel DHT routing protocol designed to mitigate routing attacks. A key distinguishing feature of bypass from other implementations is a feedback-based filtering protocol that allows peers to avoid adversarial nodes when routing to the correct holders of a key. Our experimental results show that in principle bypass can achieve a lookup success rate close to theoretical bounds.
Temporal and contextual orchestration of cardiac fate by WNT-BMP synergy and threshold

Cardiomyogenic development proceeds with a cascade of intricate signalling events that operate in a temporo‐spatial fashion to specify cardiac cell fate during early embryogenesis. In fact, conflicting reports exist regarding the role of Wnt/β‐catenin signalling during cardiomyogenesis. Here, we describe a dose‐dependent and temporal effect of Wnt/β‐catenin signalling on in vitro cardiomyogenesis using embryonic stem cells (ESCs) as a model system. We could demonstrate that canonical Wnt activation during early stage of differentiation either through ligand or by GSK3β inhibition helped in maintaining Oct4 and Nanog expressions, and in parallel, it promoted mesoderm and endoderm inductions. In contrast, it led to attenuation in cardiomyogenesis that was reversed by moderate concentration of DKK1, but not soluble Fz8. However, higher DKK1 could also block cardiomyogenesis, suggesting thereby governance of a particular signalling threshold underlying this developmental event. Interestingly, Wnt signalling activation at early stage modulated BMP4 expression in a stage‐specific manner. Wnt activation, synchronized with BMP4 and brachyury up‐regulation at early stage, correlated well with mesoderm induction. Conversely, Wnt activation led to BMP4 and Wnt5a down‐regulation at late stage culminating in cardiomyogenic attenuation. Our findings suggested the existence of precise regulatory machinery with context‐dependent role of Wnt for fine tuning mesoderm induction and its derivatives, through establishment of Wnt gradient during ESCs’ differentiation. Moreover, contrary to mere activation/inhibition, a specific threshold of Wnt and BMP and their synergy seemed necessary for providing the guiding cues in orchestrating mesoderm induction and subsequent cardiomyogenesis.