Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The bursa of Fabricius: the evolution of a discovery.

It has been a joy these past 40 yr to have traveled the "Bursal Road"--a road we helped construct and whose route allowed us to make a variety of observations that contributed either to basic science or indirectly or directly to the role of the bursa of Fabricius in the B cell repertoire. The chicken's bursa of Fabricius introduced me to endocrine, heritability, and growth studies, which allowed serendipity to occur and the revelation of the classical and modification of the classical theses of bursal function. The modification of the classical thesis, presence of immunoglobulin in the absence of the bursa, raised questions that directed us to study hypothalamic control of behavior, which was not directly related to bursal function. This forced us to learn various techniques, e.g., autoradiography, cell labeling, and electron microscopy, that made it possible to study long- and short-lived lymphocytes, lymphokines, labeled cells, and the fine structure and function of the bursa of Fabricius, cecal tonsil, Harderian gland, lymph nodes, Meckel's diverticulum, Pineal gland, and spleen. In an attempt to use cyclophosphamide to understand how the spleen acquired the ability to produce antibodies, we revealed a dendritic cell in the bursa, the bursal-secretory dendritic cell (BSDC), and in the spleen, the ellipsoid-associated cell (EAC). The BSDC is a novel cell in the bursal microenvironment and may be involved in an interaction with prebursal or bursal stem cells, leading to the differentiation or selection of the B cell repertoire of the chicken.
A Novel Quantitative 500-MHz Acoustic Microscopy System for Ophthalmologic Tissues

<italic>Objective:</italic> This paper describes development of a novel 500-MHz scanning acoustic microscope (SAM) for assessing the mechanical properties of ocular tissues at fine resolution. The mechanical properties of some ocular tissues, such as lamina cribrosa (LC) in the optic nerve head, are believed to play a pivotal role in eye pathogenesis. <italic>Methods:</italic> A novel etching technology was used to fabricate silicon-based lens for a 500-MHz transducer. The transducer was tested in a custom-designed scanning system on human eyes. Two-dimensional (2-D) maps of bulk modulus (K) and mass density (ρ) were derived using improved versions of current state-of-the-art signal processing approaches. <italic>Results:</italic> The transducer employed a lens radius of 125 μm and had a center frequency of 479 MHz with a –6-dB bandwidth of 264 MHz and a lateral resolution of 4 μm. The LC, Bruch's membrane (BM) at the interface of the retina and choroid, and Bowman's layer (BL) at the interface of the corneal epithelium and stroma, were successfully imaged and resolved. Analysis of the 2-D parameter maps revealed average values of LC, BM, and BL with <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\rm{KLC}} = 2.81 \pm 0.17$</tex-math></inline-formula>; GPa, <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\rm{KBM}} = 2.89 \pm 0.18$</tex-math></inline-formula>; GPa, <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\rm{KBL}} = 2.6 \pm 0.09$ </tex-math></inline-formula>; GPa, ρ <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\rm{LC}} = 0.96 \pm 0.03$ </tex-math></inline-formula> g/cm<sup>3</sup>; ρ <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\rm{BM}} = 0.97 \pm 0.04$</tex-math></inline-formula> g/cm<sup>3</sup>; ρ <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\rm{BL}} = 0.98 \pm 0.04$</tex-math></inline-formula> g/cm<sup>3</sup>. <italic>Significance:</italic> This novel SAM was shown to be capable of measuring mechanical properties of soft biological tissues at microscopic resolution; it is currently the only system that allows simultaneous measurement of K, ρ, and attenuation in large lateral scales (field area >9 mm<sup>2</sup>) and at fine resolutions.
Exercise Training Modes In Rehabilitation Of Patients With Chronic Heart Failure

Abstract Modern cardiac rehabilitation (CR) in chronic heart failure (CHF) is a multidisciplinary process with the patient being the centre of the focus. Various CR models (inpatient, outpatient and home based) have been used the last two decades in the pursuit of higher effectiveness and better results. The aim of this review is to present different exercise training modes applied in rehabilitating patients with CHF and to highlight their clinical value, advantages and disadvantages and practical implication. РЕЗЮМЕ Современная кардиореабилитация при хронической сердечной недостаточности (ХСН) представляет собой мультидисциплинарный процесс, при чем па- циент занимает центральное место. В последние 20 лет применяемые различные кардиореабилита- ционные методы (внутрибольничные, амбулаторные, как и таковы, проведенные в домашних условиях) убедительно показывают высокую эффективность и лучшие результаты. Настоящая работа ставит себе целью пред- ставить различные тренировочные модели, приме- няемые на пациентах с ХСН, как и подчеркнуть их клиническую стоимость, преимущества, недостатки и практические применения.
Calcium homeostasis in the laying hen. 1. Age and dietary calcium effects.

An experiment was carried out to investigate the effects of age of laying hens (young = 22 wk vs old = 120 wk) in maintaining Ca homeostasis during periods of Ca depletion then repletion with Ca. Plasma Ca and P, tibia breaking strength and percentage ash, renal 25-hydroxycholecalciferol-1-hydroxylase (1 alpha-hydroxylase), and parathyroid hormone (PTH)-stimulated adenylate cyclase activities were studied during 28 d of Ca depletion on a . 08% Ca diet (LC) and 28 d of Ca repletion on a 3.75% Ca diet (HC). When laying hens on a HC diet were placed on a LC diet, plasma Ca and P, tibia breaking strength and ash percentage, and renal PTH-dependent adenylate cyclase activity were significantly depressed, but renal 1 alpha-hydroxylase activity was significantly stimulated. These changes were greater in the young hens than in the older hens; therefore an interaction between age and dietary Ca was found. These changes were of a lesser magnitude at 28 d of Ca depletion, probably due to the cessation of egg laying and to the desensitization of hormone-mediated function. 1 alpha-Hydroxylase activity was significantly less during the repletion period. The age effect was most pronounced for 1 alpha-hydroxylase, with the younger birds expressing significantly higher activity and ability to respond to hypocalcemia. There was a significant increase in kidney weights in Ca-deficient groups at 14 and 28 d of Ca depletion. It is concluded that younger hens have greater adaptive responses to Ca restriction than do older hens.
Semi-Adaptive Beamforming for OFDM Based Hybrid Terrestrial-Satellite Mobile System

Adaptive interference mitigation requires significant resources due to recursive processing. Specific to satellite systems, interference mitigation by employing adaptive beamforming at the gateway or at the satellite both have associated problems. While ground based beamforming reduces the satellite payload complexity, it results in added feeder link bandwidth requirements, higher gateway complexity and suffers from feeder link channel degradations. On the other hand, employing adaptive beamforming onboard the satellite gives more flexibility in case of variation in traffic dynamics and also for changing of beam patterns. However, these advantages come at the cost of additional complexity at the satellite. In pursuit of retaining the benefits of onboard beamforming and to reduce the complexity associated with adaptive processing, we here propose a novel semi-adaptive beamformer for a Hybrid Terrestrial-Satellite Mobile System. The proposed algorithm is a dual form of beamforming that enables adaptive and non-adaptive processing to coexist via a robust gradient based switching mechanism. We present a detailed complexity analysis of the proposed algorithm and derive bounds associated with its power requirements. In the scenarios studied, results show that the proposed algorithm consumes up to 98% less filter computing power as compared to full-adaptive case without compromising on system performance.
A Factor Graph Description of Deep Temporal Active Inference

Active inference is a corollary of the Free Energy Principle that prescribes how self-organizing biological agents interact with their environment. The study of active inference processes relies on the definition of a generative probabilistic model and a description of how a free energy functional is minimized by neuronal message passing under that model. This paper presents a tutorial introduction to specifying active inference processes by Forney-style factor graphs (FFG). The FFG framework provides both an insightful representation of the probabilistic model and a biologically plausible inference scheme that, in principle, can be automatically executed in a computer simulation. As an illustrative example, we present an FFG for a deep temporal active inference process. The graph clearly shows how policy selection by expected free energy minimization results from free energy minimization per se, in an appropriate generative policy model.
Effect of dietary sodium chloride, protein, and strain difference upon water consumption and fecal moisture content of broiler breeder males.

Water consumption of birds and moisture content and water-holding capacity of feces were determined for caged immature broiler breeder males of Strains A and B. Both strains were fed a commercial type corn-soy diet containing 16% protein and . 35% sodium chloride. The breeder males of Strain A were also fed different levels of dietary proteins (12, 14, 16, and 18%) for 3 weeks and sodium chloride (0, .17, .35, and .70%) for 3 weeks to evaluate the effect on the criteria listed. A commercial type feeding and water restriction program was used. Strain A males consumed more water and had a significantly greater moisture content and a significantly reduced moisture-holding capacity of feces than did Strain B males when fed the same diet. The dietary levels of salt used had no effect on water consumption (off feed day), fecal moisture, or water holding capacity of the feces in strain A males. Water consumption on feed day significantly increased as dietary salt increased. Although decreasing dietary protein below 16% had no influence on water consumption, it did significantly decrease fecal moisture and increase the water-holding capacity of feces. It was concluded that strain differences in water consumption exist and that the large quantity of water consumed and high fecal moisture content of Strain A males was not related to dietary salt or protein.
Somatic diversification in the absence of antigen-driven responses is the hallmark of the IgM+IgD+CD27+ B cell repertoire in infants

T cell–dependent immune responses develop soon after birth, whereas it takes 2 yr for humans to develop T cell–independent responses. We used this dissociation to analyze the repertoire diversification of IgM+IgD+CD27+ B cells (also known as “IgM memory” B cells), comparing these cells with switched B cells in children <2 yr of age, with the aim of determining whether these two subsets are developmentally related. We show that the repertoire of IgM+IgD+CD27+ B cells in the spleen and blood displays no sign of antigen-driven activation and expansion on H-CDR3 spectratyping, despite the many antigenic challenges provided by childhood vaccinations. This repertoire differed markedly from those of switched B cells and splenic germinal center B cells, even at the early stage of differentiation associated with μ heavy chain expression. These data provide evidence for the developmental diversification of IgM+IgD+CD27+ B cells, at least in very young children, outside of T cell–dependent and –independent immune responses.
Crowdsourcing Relevance Assessments: The Unexpected Benefits of Limiting the Time to Judge

Crowdsourcing has become an alternative approach to collect relevance judgments at scale thanks to the availability of crowdsourcing platforms and quality control techniques that allow to obtain reliable results. Previous work has used crowdsourcing to ask multiple crowd workers to judge the relevance of a document with respect to a query and studied how to best aggregate multiple judgments of the same topic-document pair. This paper addresses an aspect that has been rather overlooked so far: we study how the time available to express a relevance judgment affects its quality. We also discuss the quality loss of making crowdsourced relevance judgments more efficient in terms of time taken to judge the relevance of a document. We use standard test collections to run a battery of experiments on the crowdsourcing platform CrowdFlower, studying how much time crowd workers need to judge the relevance of a document and at what is the effect of reducing the available time to judge on the overall quality of the judgments. Our extensive experiments compare judgments obtained under different types of time constraints with judgments obtained when no time constraints were put on the task. We measure judgment quality by different metrics of agreement with editorial judgments. Experimental results show that it is possible to reduce the cost of crowdsourced evaluation collection creation by reducing the time available to perform the judgments with no loss in quality. Most importantly, we observed that the introduction of limits on the time available to perform the judgments improves the overall judgment quality. Top judgment quality is obtained with 25-30 seconds to judge a topic-document pair.
Effects of testosterone enanthate and resistance training on myocardium in Wistar rats; clinical and anatomical pathology

This study was performed to determine the effects of 8 weeks testosterone enanthate (TE) injection and resistance training (RT) on cardiac muscle in male Wistar rats. A total of 28 male adult Wistar rats were randomly divided into 4 groups; control + placebo, RT + placebo, TE and TE + RT. Testosterone enanthate (20 mg/kg BW, IM) and placebo (olive oil; 0.2 ml, IM) were injected twice a week for 2 months. The RT consisted of climbing (5 reps/3 sets) a ladder carrying a load suspended from the tail. The serum activities of aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alanine aminotransferase (ALT), lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and creatine kinase MB (CK‐MB) and serum level of creatinine, urea and cardiac troponin I (CTnI) were evaluated. After sacrifice, samples from myocardial muscle were collected for histopathology evaluation. The serum concentration of CTnI and CK‐MB activity significantly increased in group RT compared with control (p < .05). In group RT + TE, all biomarkers of muscle damage (CTnI, CK‐MB, AST, LDH) were significantly more than those in control (p < .05). Also, mild myocardial hypertrophy was observed in RT and RT + TE groups. The higher level of all heart damage biomarkers in the RT + TE group rather than control may indicate the synergistic effects of medication and exercise.
High admission prevalence of fluoroquinolone resistance in third-generation cephalosporin-resistant Enterobacteriaceae in German university hospitals

Objectives Fluoroquinolone resistance (FQR) in third-generation cephalosporin-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (3GCRE) presents serious limitations to antibiotic therapy. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the FQR proportion among 3GCRE differs between community-acquired (CA) and hospital-acquired (HA) isolates. Methods In a prospective observational study covering 2014 and 2015, we monitored the occurrence of 3GCRE in adult hospitalized patients in six German university hospitals. 3GCRE clinical isolates were subdivided into CA and HA. Multivariable analysis identified factors associated with in vitro non-susceptibility to ciprofloxacin. Results The dataset included 5721 3GCRE isolates of which 52.9% were HA and 52.7% exhibited FQR. Interestingly, the FQR proportion was higher in CA 3GCRE than in HA 3GCRE (overall, 60.1% versus 46.2%, respectively, P < 0.001). Multivariable analysis adjusting for age confirmed community acquisition as a risk factor for FQR [adjusted rate ratio (aRR) 1.33, 95% CI 1.17-1.53]. Escherichia coli and Klebsiella spp. were associated with a much higher FQR proportion than other Enterobacteriaceae species (aRR 8.14, 95% CI 6.86-9.65 and aRR 7.62 with 95% CI 6.74-8.61, respectively). Conclusions The high FQR proportion observed among CA 3GCRE, particularly in E. coli and Klebsiella spp. , indicates that selection pressure in the outpatient setting needs to be addressed with antibiotic stewardship and other interventions in order to limit further spread of MDR.
Ovulation and longevity in the Japanese quail (Coturnix coturnix japonica) under constant illumination.

Abstract INTRODUCTION IN THE Summer of 1963, the writer, as a participant in an NSF sponsored Summer Institute on Animal Behavior at the Pennsylvania State University, became interested in the Japanese quail (Coturnix coturnix japonica). Through the courtesy of the directors of the NSF Institute, Drs. M. W. Schein and E. B. Hale, a small flock of Coturnix quail was obtained. The observations and measurements described below were made on this population of Coturnix quail over a period of 55 months. MATERIALS AND METHODS All birds in the experimental population came from a single hatch in a commercial incubator of the Poultry Department of the Pennsylvania State University. They were kept for four weeks, from July 17 till August 17, 1963, in the hatchery under conditions of constant illumination and temperature, and food and water ad libitum. These four week old birds, nine females and five males, were taken to the .
The consequences of vaccination with the Johne's disease vaccine, Gudair, on diagnosis of bovine tuberculosis

The single intradermal comparative cervical tuberculin skin-test (SICCT) remains the primary surveillance tool to diagnose bovine tuberculosis (BTB) in the UK. Therefore, understanding the potential confounding influences on this test is important. This study investigated the effects of vaccination against Johne's disease (JD) on the immunodiagnosis of BTB using a Mycobacterium bovis BCG vaccination model as a surrogate of M bovis infection. Calves were vaccinated with either BCG (an attenuated live vaccine) or the JD vaccine, Gudair (a heat-inactivated suspension of Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis), or a combination of both, and SICCT responses were measured approximately six and 12 weeks postvaccination. Animals vaccinated with Gudair only were negative to the SICCT test, thus supporting the specificity of the SICCT test following Gudair vaccination. However, while animals vaccinated with BCG-only demonstrated a bovine tuberculin-biased response as expected, covaccination with Gudair resulted in a bias towards avian tuberculin in the SICCT test. Therefore, our model demonstrates the potential of the Gudair vaccine to reduce the sensitivity of the SICCT. In addition, while we also demonstrate that Gudair vaccination can compromise the specificity of serological tests to detect JD, the specificity of defined M bovis antigens in serological or interferon gamma-based blood assays was not compromised by the vaccine.
Successfully Designing FPGA-Card for Mobile Robot Research

This paper describes a new design of electronic board based on FPGA Cyclone III. The main objective of this idea is towards small size, fast Real Time processing, high integration and analog peripherals that are not disposal in available FPGA development kits. For the optimum performance a Microcontroller 8 Bits Flash CMS was used which is interfaced with FPGA and used as an ADC to make all the data processing on board in Real Time. This card can be used in many applications on the field of mobile robotics like autonomous navigation and intelligent parallel parking. To communicate and supervise all activities of mobile robots, an RF module was installed on the board which serves as a transmitter to a host computer that will receive all information in Real Time. The paper introduces many challenging issues which are being addressed to enhance in laboratories researchers project planning, designing and implementing capabilities. These issues are the FPGA performance, interfacing the microcontroller to the FPGA, implementing the flexible processing algorithms and high speed interconnection between the boards. The developed card was tested via the implementation of real time algorithms, and was validated experimentally on a mobile robot system.
Deep Character-Level Click-Through Rate Prediction for Sponsored Search

Predicting the click-through rate of an advertisement is a critical component of online advertising platforms. In sponsored search, the click-through rate estimates the probability that a displayed advertisement is clicked by a user after she submits a query to the search engine. Commercial search engines typically rely on machine learning models trained with a large number of features to make such predictions. This inevitably requires a lot of engineering efforts to define, compute, and select the appropriate features. In this paper, we propose two novel approaches (one working at character level and the other working at word level) that use deep convolutional neural networks to predict the click-through rate of a query-advertisement pair. Specifically, the proposed architectures only consider the textual content appearing in a query-advertisement pair as input, and produce as output a click-through rate prediction. By comparing the character-level model with the word-level model, we show that language representation can be learnt from scratch at character level when trained on enough data. Through extensive experiments using billions of query-advertisement pairs of a popular commercial search engine, we demonstrate that both approaches significantly outperform a baseline model built on well-selected text features and a state-of-the-art word2vec-based approach. Finally, by combining the predictions of the deep models introduced in this study with the prediction of the model in production of the same commercial search engine, we significantly improve the accuracy and the calibration of the click-through rate prediction of the production system.
MicroRNA dynamics at the onset of primordial germ and somatic cell sex differentiation during mouse embryonic gonad development

In mammals, commitment and specification of germ cell lines involves complex programs that include sex differentiation, control of proliferation, and meiotic initiation. Regulation of these processes is genetically controlled by fine-tuned mechanisms of gene regulation in which microRNAs (miRNAs) are involved. We have characterized, by small-RNA-seq and bioinformatics analyses, the miRNA expression patterns of male and female mouse primordial germ cells (PGCs) and gonadal somatic cells at embryonic stages E11.5, E12.5, and E13.5. Differential expression analyses revealed differences in the regulation of key miRNA clusters such as miR-199-214, miR-182-183-96, and miR-34c-5p, whose targets have defined roles during gonadal sexual determination in both germ and somatic cells. Extensive analyses of miRNA sequences revealed an increase in noncanonical isoforms on PGCs at E12.5 and dramatic changes of 3′ isomiR expression and 3′ nontemplate nucleotide additions in female PGCs at E13.5. Additionally, RT-qPCR analyses of genes encoding proteins involved in miRNA biogenesis and 3′ nucleotide addition uncovered sexually and developmentally specific expression, characterized by the decay of Drosha, Dgcr8, and Xpo5 expression along gonadal development. These results demonstrate that miRNAs, their isomiRs, and miRNA machinery are differentially regulated and participate actively in gonadal sexual differentiation in both PGCs and gonadal somatic cells.