Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tumor Necrosis Factor Activates a Conserved Innate Antiviral Response to Hepatitis B Virus That Destabilizes Nucleocapsids and Reduces Nuclear Viral DNA

ABSTRACT Tumor necrosis factor (TNF) is critical for the control of hepatitis B virus (HBV) in the clinical setting and in model systems. TNF induces noncytopathic suppression and clearance of HBV in animal models, possibly through reduction of viral nucleocapsids, but the mechanism is not well described. Here, we demonstrate the molecular mechanism and broad host range for TNF action against HBV. We show that TNF rapidly blocks HBV replication by promoting destabilization of preexisting cytoplasmic viral nucleocapsids containing viral RNA and DNA, as well as empty nucleocapsids. TNF destabilized human HBV nucleocapsids in a variety of human hepatocytic cell lines and in primary rat hepatocytes and also destabilized duck HBV (DHBV) nucleocapsids in chicken hepatocytic cells. Lysates from TNF-treated uninfected cells also destabilized HBV nucleocapsids in vitro. Moreover, inhibition of DHBV DNA replication by TNF blocks nuclear accumulation of the viral transcription template, maintenance of which is essential for the establishment and maintenance of chronic infection. We show that TNF destabilization of HBV nucleocapsids does not involve ubiquitination or methylation of the viral core protein and is not mediated by the nitric oxide free radical arm of the TNF pathway. These results define a novel antiviral mechanism mediated by TNF against multiple types of HBVs in different species.
Skp2 is oncogenic and overexpressed in human cancers

Skp2 is a member of the F-box family of substrate-recognition subunits of SCF ubiquitin–protein ligase complexes that has been implicated in the ubiquitin-mediated degradation of several key regulators of mammalian G1 progression, including the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p27, a dosage-dependent tumor suppressor protein. In this study, we examined Skp2 and p27 protein expression by immunohistochemistry in normal oral epithelium and in different stages of malignant oral cancer progression, including dysplasia and oral squamous cell carcinoma. We found that increased levels of Skp2 protein are associated with reduced p27 in a subset of oral epithelial dysplasias and carcinomas compared with normal epithelial controls. Tumors with high Skp2 (>20% positive cells) expression invariably showed reduced or absent p27 and tumors with high p27 (>20% positive cells) expression rarely showed Skp2 positivity. Increased Skp2 protein levels were not always correlated with increased cell proliferation (assayed by Ki-67 staining), suggesting that alterations of Skp2 may contribute to the malignant phenotype without affecting proliferation. Skp2 protein overexpression may lead to accelerated p27 proteolysis and contribute to malignant progression from dysplasia to oral epithelial carcinoma. Moreover, we also demonstrate that Skp2 has oncogenic potential by showing that Skp2 cooperates with H-RasG12V to malignantly transform primary rodent fibroblasts as scored by colony formation in soft agar and tumor formation in nude mice. The observations that Skp2 can mediate transformation and is up-regulated during oral epithelial carcinogenesis support a role for Skp2 as a protooncogene in human tumors.
NIST and IEEE Challenge for MagPieR: The Fastest Mobile Microrobots in the World

Recent advances in micro/nanotechnologies and microelectromechanical systems have enabled micromachined mobile agents. Highly dynamic mobile microrobots are believed to open the gate for various future applications. However, at the submillimeter scale, the adhesion effects dominate physics, especially in the air environment. Although many studies have been performed to avoid or reduce this effect, the sticking phenomena are still one of the biggest challenges in achieving highly dynamic micromobile robots. Subsequently, intrinsic challenges at the given scale (hundreds of micrometers) are the powering technique themselves. Although often designed from active materials, actuation may only be performed by means of various external fields that often require a lot of space around the scene. In this context, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the IEEE initiated an annual state-of-the art microrobotics challenge, boosting the development of novel mobile agents with precise and highly dynamic propulsion mechanisms and controllability. During our first participation in this competition in 2010, the French team Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) proposed a magnetic and piezoelectric mobile microrobot called MagPieR, which dramatically enhanced the propulsion speed to 28 ms for the so-called 2-mm dash task. It literally cut the former record to a quarter. In the meantime, during the 2011 challenge, MagPieR won the mobility challenge thanks to some optimized coil setup and control law. The continuous technical advances in terms of dynamic performance are now shifting, and the focus of the next challenge is more agile-demanding and controllable tasks. Combining different physical effects is a promising key for the future of highly dynamic mobile microsystems and associated applications in micromanipulation, microassembly, or minimally invasive surgery.
Concern or apathy: the attitude of the public toward urban air pollution

It is important to understand public attitudes when designing policy instruments to motivate actions. Attitude is partially socially constructed and thus must be studied locally rather than inferred from other settings. This study explored public attitudes toward air pollution among Beijing residents through interviews and thematic analysis. In contrast to previous studies mostly focusing on a certain dimension of attitudes, we attempted to show an initial picture of attitudes in three dimensions, knowledge and belief, perception and concern, and covert and overt behaviors, and identify underlying factors accounting for such attitudes. The results showed that the interviewees largely knew the sources and impacts of air pollution but also demonstrated misunderstandings; half of them perceived air pollution as ‘severe’ and three-fourths of them showed little concern about air pollution; their protective and mitigation responsive behaviors were inadequate. Factors affecting such attitudes, both existing and missing in current literature, were identified. Perceived air pollution is determined by sensory cues and imagination, and mediated by lived experiences and place identity. Lack of concern about air pollution can largely be explained by a feeling of uncontrollability and the crowding effect in competing for attention. This lack is further influenced by the perceived benefits of living in large cities, perceived fairness of the impact across the population, and perceived delay of the health impacts posed by air pollution. Protective behaviors, specifically wearing facemasks, are influenced by perceived severity, vulnerability, efficacy, and barriers. Mitigation behavior, which refers to reducing car use in this case, is discouraged by a lack of feeling responsible and by perceived inconvenience and ineffectiveness. At an academic level, the results of this exploratory study are expected to provide a base for further investigations of factors affecting public attitudes. From a policy perspective, the results should provide information for designing policy instruments to raise awareness and motivate actions to cope with air pollution.
A Logspace Solution to the Word and Conjugacy problem of Generalized Baumslag-Solitar Groups

Baumslag-Solitar groups were introduced in 1962 by Baumslag and Solitar as examples for finitely presented non-Hopfian two-generator groups. Since then, they served as examples for a wide range of purposes. As Baumslag-Solitar groups are HNN extensions, there is a natural generalization in terms of graph of groups. Concerning algorithmic aspects of generalized Baumslag-Solitar groups, several decidability results are known. Indeed, a straightforward application of standard algorithms leads to a polynomial time solution of the word problem (the question whether some word over the generators represents the identity of the group). The conjugacy problem (the question whether two given words represent conjugate group elements) is more complicated; still decidability has been established by Anshel and Stebe for ordinary Baumslag-Solitar groups and for generalized Baumslag-Solitar groups independently by Lockhart and Beeker. However, up to now no precise complexity estimates have been given. In this work, we give a LOGSPACE algorithm for both problems. More precisely, we describe a uniform TC^0 many-one reduction of the word problem to the word problem of the free group. Then we refine the known techniques for the conjugacy problem and show that it can be solved in LOGSPACE. Moreover, for ordinary Baumslag-Solitar groups also conjugacy is AC^0-Turing-reducible to the word problem of the free group. Finally, we consider uniform versions (where also the graph of groups is part of the input) of both word and conjugacy problem: while the word problem still is solvable in LOGSPACE, the conjugacy problem becomes EXPSPACE-complete.
Eye Faction Along with Glisten Psychiatry Using Human Computer Interface

- Eye movement and blink analysis has achieved its peak technology and less expensive. With the availability of high speed processors and inexpensive webcams , more and more people have become interested in real time applications that involve image processing . one of the promising field in artificial intelligence is HCI(Human Computer Interface ) which aims to use human features (e.g. face, hands) to interact with the computer. One way to achieve that is to capture the desired feature with a webcam and monitor its action in order to translate it to some events that communicate with the computer With the growth of attention about computer vision, the interest in HCI has increased proportionally. There are different human features and monitoring devices used to achieve HCI. In this project we were interested only in works that involved the use of facial feature Eye and webcam. We notice a large diversity of the facial features are selected and the way are detected and tracked, and the functionality that they presented for the HCI.
Manufacturing blood ex vivo: a futuristic approach to deal with the supply and safety concerns

Blood transfusions are routinely done in every medical regimen and a worldwide established collection, processing/storage centers provide their services for the same. There have been extreme global demands for both raising the current collections and supply of safe/adequate blood due to increasingly demanding population. With, various risks remain associated with the donor derived blood, and a number of post collection blood screening and processing methods put extreme constraints on supply system especially in the underdeveloped countries. A logistic approach to manufacture erythrocytes ex-vivo by using modern tissue culture techniques have surfaced in the past few years. There are several reports showing the possibilities of RBCs (and even platelets/neutrophils) expansion under tightly regulated conditions. In fact, ex vivo synthesis of the few units of clinical grade RBCs from a single dose of starting material such as umbilical cord blood (CB) has been well established. Similarly, many different sources are also being explored for the same purpose, such as embryonic stem cells, induced pluripotent stem cells. However, the major concerns remain elusive before the manufacture and clinical use of different blood components may be used to successfully replace the present system of donor derived blood transfusion. The most important factor shall include the large scale of RBCs production from each donated unit within a limited time period and cost of their production, both of these issues need to be handled carefully since many of the recipients among developing countries are unable to pay even for the freely available donor derived blood. Anyways, keeping these issues in mind, present article shall be focused on the possibilities of blood production and their use in the near future.
Partial discharge recognition in gas insulated switchgear based on multi-information fusion

Partial discharge (PD) recognition is an important tool for online monitoring of gas insulated switchgear (GIS) and diagnosing existing defects. At present, there are two different types of data patterns used for analysis and evaluation of PD signals: phase resolved partial discharge (PRPD) mode and time resolved partial discharge (TRPD) mode. Using different types of data patterns separately can lead to inconsistent or even conflicted recognition results, but the two types of data patterns having complementary information between each other can be used together for data fusion. Dempster-Shafer (DS) evidence theory is introduced to address the problem of evidence conflict and low fusion efficiency. First, two sub-networks for PD recognition are established and compared employing the back propagation neural network (BPNN) learning algorithm under the two modes respectively. Secondly, to minimize (with possible elimination of) the possibility of misclassification, a new fusion decision-making system for PD recognition is proposed on the basis of fusing the results from the sub-networks. Finally, extensive field experiments on two artificial defects are conducted in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method in this paper. The classification results reveal that the proposed method significantly outperforms the ways of using only single type of data patterns. The method proposed in this paper reduces the uncertainty and effectively improves the credibility of diagnosis.
Perceptions of Authority and the Power Strategies Used by Clergymen

This study tested the assumption that there is a direct correspondence between a clergyman's perception of his authority and the power strategies he uses to influence his congregation. Southern Baptist and Roman Catholic clergymen (N = 96) responded to a mail-survey. The results provided weak support for the assumption that clergymen use preferentially those strategies consistent with their basis of authority. The single incidence of a correspondence was between identifying with charismatic authority (i.e., being directly chosen by God) and using charismatic strategies, such as demonstrating that the gift of grace is within the clergyman. Identification with charismatic and traditional authority was associated with the greater use of strategies intended to influence the congregation. These results were discussed in terms of the existence of a hierarchy of authority bases, with authority which is perceived to be more closely associated with God being related to the use of more strategies to influence congregations.
Control flow modeling in statistical simulation for accurate and efficient processor design studies

Designing a new microprocessor is extremely time-consuming. One of the contributing reasons is that computer designers rely heavily on detailed architectural simulations, which are very time-consuming. Recent work has focused on statistical simulation to address this issue. The basic idea of statistical simulation is to measure characteristics during program execution, generate a synthetic trace with those characteristics and then simulate the synthetic trace. The statistically generated synthetic trace is orders of magnitude smaller than the original program sequence and hence results in significantly faster simulation. This paper makes the following contributions to the statistical simulation methodology. First, we propose the use of a statistical flow graph to characterize the control flow of a program execution. Second, we model delayed update of branch predictors while profiling program execution characteristics. Experimental results show that statistical simulation using this improved control flow modeling attains significantly better accuracy than the previously proposed HLS system. We evaluate both the absolute and the relative accuracy of our approach for power/performance modeling of superscalar microarchitectures. The results show that our statistical simulation framework can be used to efficiently explore processor design spaces.
Consensus proposals for classification of the family Hepeviridae

The family Hepeviridae consists of positive-stranded RNA viruses that infect a wide range of mammalian species, as well as chickens and trout. A subset of these viruses infects humans and can cause a self-limiting acute hepatitis that may become chronic in immunosuppressed individuals. Current published descriptions of the taxonomical divisions within the family Hepeviridae are contradictory in relation to the assignment of species and genotypes. Through analysis of existing sequence information, we propose a taxonomic scheme in which the family is divided into the genera Orthohepevirus (all mammalian and avian hepatitis E virus (HEV) isolates) and Piscihepevirus (cutthroat trout virus). Species within the genus Orthohepevirus are designated Orthohepevirus A (isolates from human, pig, wild boar, deer, mongoose, rabbit and camel), Orthohepevirus B (isolates from chicken), Orthohepevirus C (isolates from rat, greater bandicoot, Asian musk shrew, ferret and mink) and Orthohepevirus D (isolates from bat). Proposals are also made for the designation of genotypes within the human and rat HEVs. This hierarchical system is congruent with hepevirus phylogeny, and the three classification levels (genus, species and genotype) are consistent with, and reflect discontinuities in the ranges of pairwise distances between amino acid sequences. Adoption of this system would include the avoidance of host names in taxonomic identifiers and provide a logical framework for the assignment of novel variants.
Concurrent Clustering for Human ID in Multi-source Datasets with Active Learning

The Problem: This project seeks to develop a general framework for simultaneously clustering features across multiple disparate modalities for the purpose of automated model selection and classification. We approach this problem within the context of a multi-source human identification system developed by Kim, Ivanov, and Poggio [3], and hope to classify novel audio/visual data sequences using subject models learned from a partially-labeled multi-modal database of past experience.
Do Losartan and Atenolol have Differential Effects on BNP and Central Haemodynamic Parameters?

Introduction. It has been suggested that angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACE-Is) and angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs) have a differential effect on brachial and aortic haemodynamics. This is why they seem to have beneficial effects that are beyond brachial blood pressure (BP) lowering. We aimed to investigate if this was the case with losartan when compared to atenolol. We also investigated the differential effect of losartan and atenolol on the prognostic marker, brain type natriuretic peptide (BNP). Methods. We studied 17 patients who were similar to those in the Losartan Intervention For Endpoint reduction in hypertension (LIFE) study. Patients were randomised to receive four months of losartan and atenolol in a crossover fashion. Main outcome measures were BNP and Augmentation index (AIx), which gives an indication of central haemodynamics. Brachial pulse wave velocity (PWV) and time to reflected wave (Tr) were measured as an indication of vascular stiffness. Results. BNP was significantly lower on losartan than atenolol (p=0.007). AIx was lower on losartan than atenolol (p=0.03), however, this result was not significant when heart rate was considered as a covariate (p=0.09). Heart rate was significantly lower on atenolol than losartan (p=0.03). There was no difference between treatments for both brachial PWV and Tr (p=0.2 and p=0.99, respectively). Conclusion. The benefits seen when losartan was compared to atenolol in the LIFE trial may be due to a reduction in BNP. We failed to detect a differential effect in central compared to peripheral haemodynamics when losartan was compared to atenolol.
Elevated C-Reactive Protein in Adolescents: Roles of Stress and Coping

Objective Psychological stress can up-regulate inflammatory processes and increase disease risk. In the context of stress, differences in how individuals cope might have implications for health. The goal of this study was to evaluate associations among stress, coping, and inflammation in a sample of African American and white adolescents. Methods Adolescents (n = 245) completed self-report measures of stressful life events and coping, provided daily diary reports of interpersonal conflict for 7 days, and provided fasting blood samples for assessment of C-reactive protein (CRP). Results In regression analyses adjusted for age, sex, race, body mass index, smoking, and socioeconomic status, there were no significant associations between stress and CRP, but significant interactions between stress and coping emerged. For adolescents reporting more unpleasant stressful life events in the past 12 months, positive engagement coping was inversely associated with CRP (&bgr;= −.19, p < .05), whereas coping was not significantly associated with CRP for adolescents reporting fewer stressful life events. Positive engagement coping was significantly and inversely associated with CRP in the context of interpersonal stress, whether measured as stressful life events reflecting interpersonal conflict (e.g., arguments with parents or siblings, conflict between adults in the home, and friendship ended) or frequency of arguments with others reported in daily diaries. Disengagement coping was unrelated to CRP. Conclusions Findings suggest that positive engagement coping is associated with lower levels of inflammation, but only when adolescents are challenged by significant stress.
Red Meat Intake, Doneness, Polymorphisms in Genes that Encode Carcinogen-Metabolizing Enzymes, and Colorectal Cancer Risk

Colorectal cancer literature regarding the interaction between polymorphisms in carcinogen-metabolizing enzymes and red meat intake/doneness is inconsistent. A case-control study was conducted to evaluate the interaction between red meat consumption, doneness, and polymorphisms in carcinogen-metabolizing enzymes. Colorectal cancer cases diagnosed 1997 to 2000, ages 20 to 74 years, were identified through the population-based Ontario Cancer Registry and recruited by the Ontario Family Colorectal Cancer Registry. Controls were sex-matched and age group-matched random sample of Ontario population. Epidemiologic and food questionnaires were completed by 1,095 cases and 1,890 controls; blood was provided by 842 and 1,251, respectively. Multivariate logistic regression was used to obtain adjusted odds ratio (OR) estimates. Increased red meat intake was associated with increased colorectal cancer risk [OR (>5 versus ≤2 servings/wk), 1.67 (1.36-2.05)]. Colorectal cancer risk also increased significantly with well-done meat intake [OR (>2 servings/wk well-done versus ≤2 servings/wk rare-regular), 1.57 (1.27-1.93)]. We evaluated interactions between genetic variants in 15 enzymes involved in the metabolism of carcinogens in overcooked meat (cytochrome P450, glutathione S-transferase, UDP-glucuronosyltransferases, SULT, NAT, mEH, and AHR). CYP2C9 and NAT2 variants were associated with colorectal cancer risk. Red meat intake was associated with increased colorectal cancer risk regardless of genotypes; however, CYP1B1 combined variant and SULT1A1-638G>A variant significantly modified the association between red meat doneness intake and colorectal cancer risk. In conclusion, well-done red meat intake was associated with an increased risk of colorectal cancer regardless of carcinogen-metabolizing genotype, although our data suggest that persons with CYP1B1 and SULT1A1 variants had the highest colorectal cancer risk. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2008;17(11):3098–107)