Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ghrelin attenuates hepatocellular injury and liver fibrogenesis in rodents and influences fibrosis progression in humans

There are no effective antifibrotic therapies for patients with liver diseases. We performed an experimental and translational study to investigate whether ghrelin, an orexigenic hormone with pleiotropic properties, modulates liver fibrogenesis. Recombinant ghrelin was administered to rats with chronic (bile duct ligation) and acute (carbon tetrachloride) liver injury. Hepatic gene expression was analyzed by way of microarray analysis and quantitative polymerase chain reaction. The hepatic response to chronic injury was also evaluated in wild‐type and ghrelin‐deficient mice. Primary human hepatic stellate cells were used to study the effects of ghrelin in vitro. Ghrelin hepatic gene expression and serum levels were assessed in patients with chronic liver diseases. Ghrelin gene polymorphisms were analyzed in patients with chronic hepatitis C. Recombinant ghrelin treatment reduced the fibrogenic response, decreased liver injury and myofibroblast accumulation, and attenuated the altered gene expression profile in bile duct–ligated rats. Moreover, ghrelin reduced the fibrogenic properties of hepatic stellate cells. Ghrelin also protected rats from acute liver injury and reduced the extent of oxidative stress and inflammation. Ghrelin‐deficient mice developed exacerbated hepatic fibrosis and liver damage after chronic injury. In patients with chronic liver diseases, ghrelin serum levels decreased in those with advanced fibrosis, and ghrelin gene hepatic expression correlated with expression of fibrogenic genes. In patients with chronic hepatitis C, polymorphisms of the ghrelin gene (−994CT and −604GA) influenced the progression of liver fibrosis. Conclusion: Ghrelin exerts antifibrotic effects in the liver and may represent a novel antifibrotic therapy. (HEPATOLOGY 2010;51:974–985.)
Revenue Motives and Trade Liberalization in an Endogenous Tariff Model

Governments in more developed economies partially compensate import-competing industries when world prices fall, i.e. they lean against the wind. In less developed economies we often observe liberalization in response to the same shock. We use a political-support maximization model with revenue motives to derive conditions under which a rational policy-maker would respond to lower world prices by reducing tariff protection for an import-competing industry. An initial tariff that exceeds the maximum revenue level proves necessary but not sufficient for politically optimal liberalization following a fall in the world price of the importable good.
Exploring Life through Logic Programming : Logic Programming in Bioinformatics

This chapter provides a broad overview of how logic programming, and in particular Answer Set Programming, can be used to model and solve some popular and challenging classes of problems in the general domain of bionformatics. In particular, the chapter explores the use of ASP in Genomics studies, such as Haplotype inference and Phylogenetic inference, in Structural studies, such as RNA secondary structure prediction and Protein structure prediction, and in Systems Biology. The chapter offers a brief introduction to biology and bioinformatics and working ASP code fragments for the various problems investigated.
A molecular perspective on lithium-ammonia solutions.

A detailed molecular orbital (MO) analysis of the structure and electronic properties of the great variety of species in lithium-ammonia solutions is provided. In the odd-electron, doublet states we have considered: e-@(NH3)n (the solvated electron, likely to be a dynamic ensemble of molecules), the Li(NH3)4 monomer, and the [Li(NH3)4+. e-@(NH3)n] ion-pairs, the Li 2s electron enters a diffuse orbital built up largely from the lowest unoccupied MOs of the ammonia molecules. The singly occupied MOs are bonding between the hydrogen atoms; we call this stabilizing interaction H-->H bonding. In e-@(NH3)n the odd electron is not located in the center of the cavities formed by the ammonia molecules. Possible species with two or more weakly interacting electrons also exhibit H-->H bonding. For these, we find that the singlet (S=0) states are slightly lower in energy than those with unpaired (S=1, 2.) spins. TD-DFT calculations on various ion-pairs show that the three most intense electronic excitations arise from the transition between the SOMO (of s pseudosymmetry) into the lowest lying p-like levels. The optical absorption spectra are relatively metal-independent, and account for the absorption tail which extends into the visible. This is the source of Sir Humphry Davy's "fine blue colour" first observed just over 200 years ago.
Composite Software Diversification

Many techniques of software vulnerability exploitation rely on deep and comprehensive analysis of vulnerable program binaries. If a copy of the vulnerable software is available to attackers, they can compose their attack scripts and payloads by studying the sample copy and launch attacks on other copies of the same software in deployment. By transforming software into different forms before deployment, software diversification is considered as an effective mitigation of attacks originated from malicious binary analyses.Essentially, developing a software diversification transformation is nontrivial because it has to preserve the original functionality, provide strong enough unpredictability, and introduce negligible cost. Enlightened by research in other areas, we seek to apply different diversification transformations to the same program for a synergy effect such that the resulting hybrid transformations can have boosted diversification effects with modest cost. We name this approach the composite software diversification.Although the concept is straightforward, it becomes challenging when searching for satisfactory compositions of primitive transformations that maximize the synergy effect and make a balance between effectiveness and cost. In this work, we undertake an in-depth study and develop a reasonably well working selection strategy to find a transformation composition that performs better than any single transformation used in the composition. We believe our work can provide guidelines for practitioners who would like to improve the design of diversification tools in the future.
Cancer risk in the rubber industry: a review of the recent epidemiological evidence.

OBJECTIVES: To examine the recent epidemiological evidence on cancer risk among workers in the rubber industry. METHODS: Epidemiological studies published after the last detailed review by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in 1982 were reviewed. 12 cohort studies in nine countries that examined distinct populations of workers in the rubber industry, seven industry based nested case-control studies, 48 community based case-control studies in 16 countries, and 23 studies based on administrative data that reported risks for employment in the rubber industry were identified. RESULTS: Excess risks of bladder cancer, lung cancer, and leukaemia were found in most studies, with risks above 1.5 in about half of the studies. A moderate excess risk for laryngeal cancer was consistent across studies. Excess risks were found in a few studies for cancers of the oesophagus, stomach, colon, liver, pancreas, skin, prostate, kidney, brain, and thyroid, and for malignant lymphoma and multiple myeloma, but overall results were not consistent for these neoplasms. CONCLUSIONS: Magnitude of the observed risks varied considerably between studies, but overall the findings indicate the presence of a widespread moderate increased cancer risk among rubber workers. The most consistent results were for bladder, laryngeal, and lung cancer and for leukaemia. Excess risks were also found for other neoplasms but an evaluation of the consistency of the findings is difficult because of the possible selective reporting of results. Recent studies do not provide information associating specific exposures with cancer risk. The preventive measures taken in the rubber industry in recent years may decrease risks, but this has not been documented yet in epidemiological studies.
B 98 , 115426 ( 2018 ) Optical harmonic generation in monolayer group-VI transition metal dichalcogenides

Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) This material is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, and duplication or sale of all or part of any of the repository collections is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for your research use or educational purposes in electronic or print form. You must obtain permission for any other use. Electronic or print copies may not be offered, whether for sale or otherwise to anyone who is not an authorised user. Autere, Anton; Jussila, Henri; Marini, Andrea; Saavedra, J. R.M. ; Dai, Yunyun; Säynätjoki, Antti; Karvonen, Lasse; Yang, He; Amirsolaimani, Babak; Norwood, Robert A. ; Peyghambarian, Nasser; Lipsanen, Harri; Kieu, Khanh; De Abajo, F. Javier García; Sun, Zhipei
Between the cup and the lip Angel Asensio

The paper states that, although Post Keynesian interest rules may be feasible and sustainable in favourable circumstances, there is a shared difficulty as for the setting of long-term interest rates in a context of strong uncertainty and shifting liquidity preference. According to Keynes theory of the interest rate, the variation in the longterm interest rate that authorities are seeking for must correspond to the market convention, in order to preserve the state of the confidence and avoid disruptive shifts in the demand for money. It is argued that authorities should therefore announce a long-term interest rate target in accordance with the normative objective the opinion has debated on and agreed with. Also, such a conventional target cannot be very distant from the current rate, and the short-term rates authorities control should be adjusted gradually (but not slowly). Moving the interest rate convention is harder to get in the context of the current crisis, because of the deleterious effects on private and public accounts, and thereby on the state of confidence, that the innumerable amounts of bad debts have carried. We put forward strong arguments in favour of reducing the amount of bad debts by means of temporary large public deficits and accommodating monetary policies (which is not to say permanent large deficits and inflationary policies), even though long-term interest rate do not respond much to the short-term impulses of central banks.
A low power CMOS LNA for 1–10GHz application

This paper presents a 1–10GHz low power and low noise amplifier(LNA) with resistive-feedback configuration. The design consists of two resistive-feedback amplifier. In order to reduce the chip area, resistive-feedback inverter is adopt for input matching. The output stage adopt basic topology of a resistive feedback for output matching, and add two inductor for inductive peaking at high-band. The implemented LNA shows a peak gain of 10.5dB , the input reflection coefficient S11 lower than −8dB and output reflection S22 are lower than −10.8dB, and NF of 4.2∼5.2dB between 1∼10GHz while consuming 12.65mw through a 1.5V supply. The chip was fabricated in TSMC 0.18um CMOS process.
Edge- and substrate-based effects for watercolor stylization

We investigate characteristic edge- and substrate-based effects for watercolor stylization. These two fundamental elements of painted art play a significant role in traditional watercolors and highly influence the pigment's behavior and application. Yet a detailed consideration of these specific elements for the stylization of 3D scenes has not been attempted before. Through this investigation, we contribute to the field by presenting ways to emulate two novel effects: dry-brush and gaps & overlaps. By doing so, we also found ways to improve upon well-studied watercolor effects such as edge-darkening and substrate granulation. Finally, we integrated controllable external lighting influences over the watercolorized result, together with other previously researched watercolor effects. These effects are combined through a direct stylization pipeline to produce sophisticated watercolor imagery, which retains spatial coherence in object-space and is locally controllable in real-time.
Bouligand Derivatives and Robustness of Support Vector Machines for Regression

We investigate robustness properties for a broad class of support vector machines with non-smooth loss functions. These kernel methods are inspired by convex risk minimization in infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces. Leading examples are the support vector machine based on the e -insensitive loss function, and kernel based quantile regression based on the pinball loss function. Firstly, we propose with the Bouligand influence function (BIF) a modification of F.R. Hampel's influence function. The BIF has the advantage of being positive homogeneous which is in general not true for Hampel's influence function. Secondly, we show that many support vector machines based on a Lipschitz continuous loss function and a bounded kernel have a bounded BIF and are thus robust in the sense of robust statistics based on influence functions.
The effect of 5-aminoimidazole-4-carboxamide-ribonucleoside was mediated by p38 mitogen activated protein kinase signaling pathway in FRO thyroid cancer cells

Background/Aims 5'-Adenosine monophosphate (AMP)-activated protein kinase (AMPK) is a cellular energy sensor that monitors intracellular AMP/adenosine triphosphate (ATP) ratios and is a key regulator of the proliferation and survival of diverse malignant cell types. In the present study, we investigated the effect of activating AMPK by 5-aminoimidazole-4-carboxamide-ribonucleotide (AICAR) in thyroid cancer cells. Methods We used FRO thyroid cancer cells harboring the BRAFV600E mutation to examine the effect of AICAR on cell proliferation and cell survival. We also evaluated the involvement of mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathways in this effect. Results We found that AICAR treatment promoted AMPK activation and suppressed cell proliferation and survival by inducing p21 accumulation and activating caspase-3. AICAR significantly induced activation of p38 MAPK, and pretreatment with SB203580, a specific inhibitor of the p38 MAPK pathway, partially but significantly rescued cell survival. Furthermore, small interfering RNA targeting AMPK-α1 abolished AICAR-induced activation of p38 MAPK, p21 accumulation, and activation of caspase-3. Conclusions Our findings demonstrate that AMPK activation using AICAR inhibited cell proliferation and survival by activating p38 MAPK and proapoptotic molecules in FRO thyroid cancer cells. These results suggest that the AMPK and p38 MAPK signaling pathways may be useful therapeutic targets to treat thyroid cancer.
Job burnout among technicians and nurses of Northern Iran

Staff burnout is increasingly noticed as a research issue in the mental-health field. Regarding the importance and key role of nurses and technicians in health care services, this study aimed to evaluate job burnout in relation to education, age and occupation. This study was a correlational and descriptive cross-sectional study that selected all nurses and technicians working on Mazandaran University of Medical Science. The job burnout of participants measured through Maslach occupational burnout inventory. The gathered from participants data analysed by correlation and T-test method through SPSS software. The finding showed the nurses had high level of job burnout. Job experiences and age were in relation to job burnout. There was no relationship between marital status and job burnout. The personnel with higher education presented higher level of job burnout than staff that holds the lower degree of education. Job's burnout was related to factors such as age, job experiences and education level. Considering importance and sensitivity of health care professional's job some suggestions explained in this research.
Practice of Epidemiology Development and Use of Touch-Screen Audio Computer-assisted Self-Interviewing in a Study of American Indians

This article describes the development and usability of an audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (ACASI) questionnaire created to collect dietary, physical activity, medical history, and other lifestyle data in a population of American Indians. Study participants were part of a cohort of American Indians living in the southwestern United States. Data were collected between March 2004 and July 2005. Information for evaluating questionnaire usability and acceptability was collected from three different sources: baseline study data, auxiliary background data, and a short questionnaire administered to a subset of study participants. For the subset of participants, 39.6% reported not having used a computer in the past year. The ACASI questionnaires were well accepted: 96.0% of the subset of participants reported finding them enjoyable to use, 97.2% reported that they were easy to use, and 82.6% preferred them for future questionnaires. A lower educational level and infrequent computer use in the past year were predictors of having usability trouble. These results indicate that the ACASI questionnaire is both an acceptable and a preferable mode of data collection in this population.
Multi-stage PCA image coding

Principal component analysis (PCA), a statistical processing technique, converts the data set to a lower dimensional feature space which reserve yet most of the internal information of the original data and reduces redundancy through the projection of data based on a proper orthonormal basis. PCA provides an efficient representation of the data compression. In this paper, we use Multi-stage PCA for image coding and partition the data set into some clusters with eigenvectors of a covariance matrix. Multi-stage clustering method can effectively remove redundancy and increase the numbers of principal components to improve the retrieved effect of certain clusters with complex structures. Using the proposed method, the retrieved image quality is relatively better and fewer storage variables are recorded.
Statistical processing of video for detection of events in space and time

Recently, advanced video processing systems have been developed for numerous applications, such as surveillance, tracking, monitoring, object and event detection. The large size of this data and the wide range of detectable events or objects render the automation of various video processing procedures necessary. The proposed system first finds the pixels where activities occur by processing the higher order statistics of luminance changes between accumulated video frames. Once these pixels are extracted, sequential likelihood ratio based change detection techniques are applied to find at which frames activities occur. The resulting system is novel, as it can localize actions both in space and in time, in a theoretically sound manner. Testing takes place with real video sequences, to demonstrate its effectiveness.
Model-based 3D pose estimation for pick-and-place application

Due to the recent development of industrial automation, some applications have been improved with computer vision techniques. One important task is to recognize and estimate the 3D pose of the object in the scene. In this work, we use a depth camera to capture the 3D information of a scene, and proposed a 3D pose estimation algorithm. A main difficulty of the 3D object recognition and pose estimation is the captured data may have noise from the environment light, shadow or sensors. In general, the reference model and target model are captured from the same depth camera, so they will have similar data structures. However, in our work, we consider the target model generated from Computer-Aided-Design, and the reference model is captured from the depth camera. The data from different sources will cause the estimation error. In this work, we have addressed this problem. Finally, we develop the simulation system for our proposed method, and also simulate a manipulator to accomplish the pick-and-place task.
Transgene Expression in Microalgae—From Tools to Applications

Microalgae comprise a biodiverse group of photosynthetic organisms that reside in water sources and sediments. The green microalgae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii was adopted as a useful model organism for studying various physiological systems. Its ability to grow under both photosynthetic and heterotrophic conditions allows efficient growth of non-photosynthetic mutants, making Chlamydomonas a useful genetic tool to study photosynthesis. In addition, this green alga can grow as haploid or diploid cells, similar to yeast, providing a powerful genetic system. As a result, easy and efficient transformation systems have been developed for Chlamydomonas, targeting both the chloroplast and nuclear genomes. Since microalgae comprise a rich repertoire of species that offer variable advantages for biotech and biomed industries, gene transfer technologies were further developed for many microalgae to allow for the expression of foreign proteins of interest. Expressing foreign genes in the chloroplast enables the targeting of foreign DNA to specific sites by homologous recombination. Chloroplast transformation also allows for the introduction of genes encoding several enzymes from a complex pathway, possibly as an operon. Expressing foreign proteins in the chloroplast can also be achieved by introducing the target gene into the nuclear genome, with the protein product bearing a targeting signal that directs import of the transgene-product into the chloroplast, like other endogenous chloroplast proteins. Integration of foreign genes into the nuclear genome is mostly random, resulting in large variability between different clones, such that extensive screening is required. The use of different selection modalities is also described, with special emphasis on the use of herbicides and metabolic markers which are considered to be friendly to the environment, as compared to drug-resistance genes that are commonly used. Finally, despite the development of a wide range of transformation tools and approaches, expression of foreign genes in microalgae suffers from low efficiency. Thus, novel tools have appeared in recent years to deal with this problem. Finally, while C. reinhardtii was traditionally used as a model organism for the development of transformation systems and their subsequent improvement, similar technologies can be adapted for other microalgae that may have higher biotechnological value.
Cooperation and human cognition: the Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis

Nicholas Humphrey's social intelligence hypothesis proposed that the major engine of primate cognitive evolution was social competition. Lev Vygotsky also emphasized the social dimension of intelligence, but he focused on human primates and cultural things such as collaboration, communication and teaching. A reasonable proposal is that primate cognition in general was driven mainly by social competition, but beyond that the unique aspects of human cognition were driven by, or even constituted by, social cooperation. In the present paper, we provide evidence for this Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis by comparing the social-cognitive skills of great apes with those of young human children in several domains of activity involving cooperation and communication with others. We argue, finally, that regular participation in cooperative, cultural interactions during ontogeny leads children to construct uniquely powerful forms of perspectival cognitive representation.