Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Extension of the in vivo half-life of endostatin and its improved anti-tumor activities upon fusion to a humanized antibody against tumor-associated glycoprotein 72 in a mouse model of human colorectal carcinoma

Endostatin is an endogenous angiogenesis inhibitor that exhibits potential anti-tumor efficacy in various preclinical animal models. However, its relatively short in vivo half-life and the long-term, frequent administration of high doses limit its widespread clinical use. In this study, we evaluated whether a fusion protein of murine endostatin (mEndo) to a humanized antibody against tumor-associated glycoprotein 72 (TAG-72), which is highly expressed in several human tumor tissues including colon cancer, can extend the serum half-life and improve the anti-tumor efficacy of endostatin by targeted delivery to the tumor mass. The fusion protein (3E8-mEndo) and mEndo showed improved anti-angiogenic activity in vitro and in vivo, predominantly by interfering with pro-angiogenic signaling triggered by vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). Moreover, in mice treated with 3E8-mEndo, we observed a markedly prolonged serum half-life and significantly inhibited tumor growth. The improved anti-tumor activity of 3E8-mEndo can be partially explained by increased local concentration in the tumor mass due to targeted delivery of 3E8-mEndo to implanted colon tumors. Collectively, our data clearly indicate that tumor-targeting antibody fusions to endostatin are a powerful strategy that improves the poor pharmacokinetic profile and anti-tumor efficacy of endostatin.
Changes in Auditory Evoked Response with Intensity

Introduction THE average auditory evoked cortical potential in young adults is a waveform in which several well-marked components as shown in Fig. i can usually be identified. The Pi, Nr, and P2, components are the most characteristic and the N2, and N3 are less constant. The amplitude of the main response, measured peak-to-peak (from Xi to P2) is related to intensity and decreases progressively as the stimulus is reduced towards the subject's threshold. The waveform of the evoked response is a little different in young children where the later elements are larger than the earlier components and may in fact submerge them completely. A waveform from a child is seen in Fig. 2 showing the usual P,, Nz, and P2 components but with greatly enlarged N2 and N3 peaks. Within broad limits, the latencies of the various major components of the averaged waveform are stable, but some lengthening of the latency has been noted in many normally-hearing subjects as threshold is approached. It was decided to investigate these changes in detail for it was felt that any positive findings could well have some predictive value when utilizing the evoked cortical potential as a practical test of hearing.
Effect of Sustained Inflation Length on Establishing Functional Residual Capacity at Birth in Ventilated Premature Rabbits

The effect of inflation length on lung aeration pattern, tidal volumes, and functional residual capacity (FRC) immediately after birth was investigated. Preterm rabbits (28 d), randomized into four groups, received a 1-, 5-, 10-, or 20-s inflation (SI) followed by ventilation with 5 cm H2O end-expiratory pressure. Gas volumes were measured by plethysmography and uniformity of lung aeration by phase contrast x-ray imaging for 7 min. The first inspiratory volume significantly (p < 0.001) increased with inflation duration from a median (IQR) of 0.2 (0.1–3.1) mL/kg for 1-s inflation to 23.4 (19.3–30.4) mL/kg for 20-s SI. The lung was uniformly aerated, and the FRC and tidal volume fully recruited after 20-s SI. A 10-s SI caused a higher FRC (p < 0.05) at 7 min, and a 20-s SI caused a higher FRC (p < 0.05) at 20 s and 7 min than a 1- or 5-s SI. The mean (SD) time for 90% of the lung to aerate was 14.0 (4.1) s using 35 cm H2O peak inflation pressure. In these rabbits, 10- and 20-s SI increased the inspiratory volume and produced a greater FRC, and a 20-s SI uniformly aerated the lung before ventilation started.
In Vitro Activity of a Novel Diaminopyrimidine Compound, Iclaprim, against Chlamydia trachomatis and C. pneumoniae

ABSTRACT The in vitro activities of iclaprim, a novel dihydrofolate reductase inhibitor, azithromycin, and levofloxacin were tested against 10 strains of Chlamydia trachomatis and 10 isolates of Chlamydia pneumoniae. For C. trachomatis and C. pneumoniae, the iclaprim MIC and minimal bactericidal concentration at which 90% of isolates were inhibited (MIC90 and MBC90) were 0.5 μg/ml, compared to an azithromycin MIC90 and MBC90 of 0.125 μg/ml and levofloxacin MIC90s and MBC90s of 1 μg/ml for C. trachomatis and 0.5 μg/ml for C. pneumoniae.
Women, Sport, and Culture

This is the most comprehensive collection of articles available on women, sport, and culture. The book features 24 selections from various feminist positions that examine the relation between sport and gender.The articles in Women, Sport, and Culture serve as a marker of where feminist sport studies has been as a field and a guidepost for what may be the most promising theoretical directions in the future. Part I introduces and provides an overview of feminist theories that have examined gender, women, and sport. The articles in the section discuss the complexity of the relations among sport, gender, ideology, bodies, and technology.Part II addresses the gendered organizational order of sport and explores the practices through which women in institutionalized sport are managed. The articles in Part III respond to Kenneth Sheard and Eric Dunning’s idea that sport is a "male preserve"—a site for the production and reproduction of gendered power relations. The section explores how certain practices associated with sport actively degrade women and how women have alternately appropriated and opposed what they perceive to be oppressive and unjust practices.Part IV examines the role of the media in circulating and legitimizing dominant meanings of sport, women, gendered bodies, and sexuality. Part V looks at heterosexism and homophobia in sport.
Several Sensor Approaches that Retrofit Large Surfaces for Interactivity

Several different techniques are described for turning a large wall into an interactive surface. These include capacitive sensing of arm and body gesture, scanning laser rangefinders for tracking hands above video walls, passive tracking of knocks on large plates of glass with distributed acoustic pickups, and the detection of touch via frustrated total internal reflection.
TRACKING OF HUMAN WALKING BASED ON HYBRID METHOD USING DYNAMIC MODEL

This paper proposesa new systemfor detecting humanmotion in amonocularvideostream.It is focusedonprecisetracking of articulatedhumanmotion basedon skeletonmodeland joint motiondetection. To realizethis approach,we introduce the hybrid model consisting of optical tracking and dynamic tracking basedon Bayesrule. In this paper , we also introducethesystemdesignintegratedwith theseconceptsandshow someexperimentalresults.
MEMSCALE: in-cluster-memory databases

We have developed a new memory architecture for clusters that allows automatic access from any processor to any memory module in the cluster completely by hardware. Thus, with a single assembly instruction a processor can retrieve (or update) a memory location in a remote node. The efficiency of this new paradigm makes it possible to speed-up the execution of shared-memory applications with very large memory footprints by running them across the entire cluster, thus providing them a true shared-memory environment (contrary to the emulation typically carried out by software-based distributed shared memory). This new memory architecture, referred to as MEMSCALE, opens up a new frontier for memory-hungry applications. In this paper we focus on in-memory databases and show how this target application can be boosted by our memory architecture, which can virtually provide unlimited memory resources to it. In the demo presented in this paper we show the advantages of our architecture by means of a prototype cluster. We configure two cluster sizes, 16 and 32 nodes, to analyze throughput scalability and latency worsening, to extrapolate these metrics to bigger clusters, and to show the benefits of our technology compared to other alternatives like SSD-based databases. Moreover, we also show the easiness of use of our architecture by explaining how we ported MySQL Server to our prototype cluster. Finally, the possibility of executing queries in any processor of the cluster during the live demo will show the audience how our system aggregates the advantages of the scale out and scale up approaches for database server growing.
Changes in Rhinovirus Protein 2C Allow Efficient Replication in Mouse Cells

ABSTRACT Rhinovirus type 16 was found to replicate in mouse L cells that express the viral receptor, human intercellular adhesion molecule 1 (ICAM-1). However, infection of these cells at a low multiplicity of infection leads to no discernible cytopathic effect, and low virus titers are produced. A variant virus, 16/L, was isolated after alternate passage of rhinovirus 16 between HeLa and ICAM-1 L cells. Infection of mouse cells with 16/L leads to higher virus titers, increased production of RNA, and total cytopathic effect. Three amino acid changes were identified in the P2 region of virus 16/L, and the adaptation phenotype mapped to two changes in protein 2C. The characterization of a rhinovirus host range mutant will facilitate the investigation of cellular proteins required for efficient viral growth and the development of a murine model for rhinovirus infection.
Expert Finding for Microblog Misinformation Identification

The growth of social media provides a convenient communication scheme for people, but at the same time it becomes a hotbed of misinformation. The wide spread of misinformation over social media is injurious to public interest. We design a framework, which integrates collective intelligence and machine intelligence, to help identify misinformation. The basic idea is: (1) automatically index the expertise of users according to their microblog contents; and (2) match the experts with given suspected misinformation. By sending the suspected misinformation to appropriate experts, we can collect the assessments of experts to judge the credibility of information, and help refute misinformation. In this paper, we focus on expert finding for misinformation identification. We propose a tag-based method to index the expertise of microblog users with social tags. Experiments on a real world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for expert finding with respect to misinformation identification in microblogs.
A New metabolomics Analysis Technique: steady-State metabolic Network Dynamics Analysis

With the recent advances in experimental technologies, such as gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, the number of metabolites that can be measured in biofluids of individuals has markedly increased. Given a set of such measurements, a very common task encountered by biologists is to identify the metabolic mechanisms that lead to changes in the concentrations of given metabolites and interpret the metabolic consequences of the observed changes in terms of physiological problems, nutritional deficiencies, or diseases. In this paper, we present the steady-state metabolic network dynamics analysis (SMDA) approach in detail, together with its application in a cystic fibrosis study. We also present a computational performance evaluation of the SMDA tool against a mammalian metabolic network database. The query output space of the SMDA tool is exponentially large in the number of reactions of the network. However, (i) larger numbers of observations exponentially reduce the output size, and (ii) exploratory search and browsing of the query output space is provided to allow users to search for what they are looking for.
A Coalition Formation Framework Based on Transitive Dependence

Coalition formation in multi-agent systems (MAS) is becoming increasingly important as it increases the ability of agents to execute tasks and maximize their payoffs. Dependence relations are regarded as the foundation of coalition formation. This paper proposes a novel dependence theory namely transitive dependence theory for dynamic coalition formation in multi-agent systems. Transitive dependence is an extension of direct dependence that supports an agent's reasoning about other social members during coalition formation. Based on the proposed transitive dependence theory, a dynamic coalition formation framework has been worked out which includes information gathering, transitive dependence based reasoning for coalition partners search and coalition resolution. The nested coalitions and how to deal with incomplete knowledge while forming coalitions are also discussed in the paper.
Measurement of N‐acetylaspartylglutamate in the human frontal brain by 1H‐MRS at 7 T

N‐Acetylaspartylglutamate in human brain has been measured with difference editing at 7 T. The CH2 proton resonances (∼2.5 ppm) of the aspartyl groups of N‐acetylaspartylglutamate and N‐acetylaspartate were difference edited (MEGA) using 20‐msec gaussian radiofrequency pulses for selective 180° rotations of the coupling partners at 4.61 and 4.38 ppm, respectively. The echo time of the editing sequence, 108 msec, was obtained in phantom tests. Single‐voxel localized in vivo measurements were conducted in the medial prefrontal and right frontal cortices of five healthy volunteers. The gray and white matter fractions within the voxels were obtained from T1‐weighted image segmentation. Using linear regression of the metabolite concentration vs. fractional white matter contents within the voxels, the N‐acetylaspartylglutamate‐to‐N‐acetylaspartate concentration ratios in gray and white matter were estimated to be 0.13 and 0.28 by difference editing (95% confidence intervals 0.07–0.19 and 0.22–0.34), respectively, assuming identical relaxation effects between the metabolites. Magn Reson Med, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Translocation of Synaptically Connected Interneurons across the Dentate Gyrus of the Early Postnatal Rat Hippocampus

Most neurons in the developing mammalian brain migrate to their final destinations by translocation of the cell nucleus within their leading process and immature bipolar body that is devoid of synaptic connections. Here, we used a combination of immunohistochemistry at light- and electron-microscopic (EM) levels and time-lapse imaging in slice cultures to analyze migration of synaptically interconnected, cholecystokinin-immunopositive [CCK(+)] interneurons in the dentate gyrus in the rat hippocampus during early postnatal ages. We observed dynamic morphogenetic transformation of the CCK(+) interneurons, from a horizontal bipolar shape situated in the molecular layer, through a transitional triangular and then vertical bipolar form that they acquire while traversing the granular layer to finally assume an adult-like pyramidal-shaped morphology on entering the hilus. Immunostaining with anti-glial fibrillary acidic protein and three-dimensional reconstructions from serial EM images indicate that, unlike granule cells, which migrate from the hilus to the granular layer, interneurons traverse this layer in the opposite direction without apparent surface-mediated guidance of the radial glial cells. Importantly, the somas, dendrites, and axons of the CCK(+) transitional forms maintain old and acquire new synaptic contacts while migrating across the dentate plate. The migration of synaptically interconnected neurons that may occur in response to local functional demand represents a novel mode of cell movement and form of neuroplasticity.
Resting Energy Expenditure in Infants with Cystic Fibrosis

SummaryTo evaluate the contribution of energy expenditure to the energy imbalance seen in cystic fibrosis patients, resting energy expenditure was measured using open-circuit indirect calorimetry in eight infants with cystic fibrosis, aged 2–7 months (mean, 4), without overt lung disease and in 10 healthy age-matched controls. In both groups, we found close, significant, linear correlations between resting energy expenditure and body weight and between resting energy expenditure and fat-free mass as measured by anthropometry. Cystic fibrosis patients had a 26% increase in resting energy expenditure per kilogram of fat-free mass as compared with controls and a 32% increase in resting energy expenditure as compared with predicted values for fat-free mass. These data from young infants free of clinical symptoms suggest a constitutional metabolic disorder in cystic fibrosis and support the need for early nutritional therapy in cystic fibrosis patients.
Comparison of Staphylococcus aureus strains for ability to cause infective endocarditis and lethal sepsis in rabbits

Staphylococcus aureus is a major cause of infective endocarditis (IE) and sepsis. Both methicillin-resistant (MRSA) and methicillin-sensitive (MSSA) strains cause these illnesses. Common S. aureus strains include pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) types USA200, 300, and 400 types where we hypothesize that secreted virulence factors contribute to both IE and sepsis. Rabbit cardiac physiology is considered similar to humans, and rabbits exhibit susceptibility to S. aureus superantigens (SAgs) and cytolysins. As such, rabbits are an excellent model for studying IE and sepsis, which over the course of four days develop IE vegetations and/or fatal septicemia. We examined the ability of MRSA and MSSA strains (4 USA200, 2 USA300, 2 USA400, and three additional common strains, FRI1169, Newman, and COL) to cause vegetations and lethal sepsis in rabbits. USA200, TSST-1+ strains that produce only low amounts of α-toxin, exhibited modest LD50 in sepsis (1 × 108 – 5 × 108) colony-forming units (CFUs), and 3/4 caused significant IE. USA200 strain MNPE, which produces high-levels of α-toxin, was both highly lethal (LD50 5 × 106 CFUs) and effective in causing IE. In contrast, USA300 strains were highly effective in causing lethal sepsis (LD50s 1 × 106 and 5 × 107 CFUs) but were minimally capable of causing IE. Strain Newman, which is phylogenetically related to USA300 strains, was not highly lethal (LD50 of 2 × 109 CFUs) and was effective in causing IE. USA400 strains were both highly lethal (LD50s of 1 × 107 and 5 × 107 CFUs) and highly effective causes of IE. The menstrual TSS isolate FRI1169, that is TSST-1+, produces high-levels of α-toxin, but is not USA200, was both highly lethal and effective in causing IE. Additional studies showed that phenol soluble modulins (PSMs) produced by FRI1169 were important for sepsis but did not contribute to IE. Our studies show that these clonal groups of S. aureus differ in abilities to cause IE and lethal sepsis and suggest that secreted virulence factors, including SAgs and cytolysins, account for some of these differences.
Persistence Brokers in a Distributed Object Environment

Managing database resources for distributed, object-oriented applications can be done efficiently through the use of persistence brokers. CORBA enabled, distributed application objects communicate with the persistence brokers to obtain database services. Such an approach insulates application software from the details of the persistence mechanism and reduces requirements for concurrent database licenses. We are using Oracle8 in the control system of the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Object extensions and the eventual inclusion of CORBA services in Oracle8 maps well to our multi-tier, distributed object architecture.
Antimicrobial Resistance of Hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae: Epidemiology, Hypervirulence-Associated Determinants, and Resistance Mechanisms

Klebsiella pneumoniae is one of the most clinically relevant species in immunocompromised individuals responsible for community-acquired and nosocomial infections, including pneumonias, urinary tract infections, bacteremias, and liver abscesses. Since the mid-1980s, hypervirulent K. pneumoniae, generally associated with the hypermucoviscosity phenotype, has emerged as a clinically significant pathogen responsible for serious disseminated infections, such as pyogenic liver abscesses, osteomyelitis, and endophthalmitis, in a generally younger and healthier population. Hypervirulent K. pneumoniae infections were primarily found in East Asia and now are increasingly being reported worldwide. Although most hypervirulent K. pneumoniae isolates are antibiotic-susceptible, some isolates with combined virulence and resistance, such as the carbapenem-resistant hypervirulent K. pneumoniae isolates, are increasingly being detected. The combination of multidrug resistance and enhanced virulence has the potential to cause the next clinical crisis. To better understand the basic biology of hypervirulent K. pneumoniae, this review will provide a summarization and discussion focused on epidemiology, hypervirulence-associated factors, and antibiotic resistance mechanisms of such hypervirulent strains. Epidemiological analysis of recent clinical isolates in China warns the global dissemination of hypervirulent K. pneumoniae strains with extensive antibiotic resistance in the near future. Therefore, an immediate response to recognize the global dissemination of this hypervirulent strain with resistance determinants is an urgent priority.
Micro-Enterprise Development Schemes as Effective Reintegration Assistance Programs for Voluntarily-Repatriated Vietnamese Asylum Seekers

From the creation of the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA) in 1989 through December 1994, about sixty-eight thousand asylum seekers have voluntarily repatriated to Vietnam. In response to this reverse migration, the international community has funded numerous reintegration assistance programs to facilitate the asylum seekers' return. This article examines reintegration assistance programs currently operating in Vietnam and presents an argument that small scale income generation projects constitute the most effective and efficient use of scarce repatriation funding.
A Note on Packing Graphs Without Cycles of Length up to Five

The following statement was conjectured by Faudree, Rousseau, Schelp and Schuster: if a graph $G$ is a non-star graph without cycles of length $m \leq 4$ then $G$ is a subgraph of its complement. So far the best result concerning this conjecture is that every non-star graph $G$ without cycles of length $m \leq 6$ is a subgraph of its complement. In this note we show that $m\leq 6$ can be replaced by $m \leq 5$.
Transient and steady-State Dynamics of Granular shear Flows

The initiation and steady-state dynamics of granular shear flow are investigated experimentally in a Couette geometry with independently moveable outer and inner cylinders. The motion of particles on the top surface is analyzed using fast imaging. During steady state rotation of both cylinders at different rates, a shear band develops close to the inner cylinder for all combinations of speeds of each cylinder we investigated. Experiments on flow initiation were carried out with one of the cylinders fixed. When the inner cylinder is stopped and restarted after a lag time of seconds to minutes in the same direction, a shear band develops immediately. When the inner cylinder is restarted in the opposite direction, shear initially spans the whole material, i.e. particles far from the shear surface are moving significantly more than in steady state.