Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Faecal microbiota composition in vegetarians: comparison with omnivores in a cohort of young women in southern India.

The effect of vegetarian diets on faecal microbiota has been explored largely through culture-based techniques. The present study compared the faecal microbiota of vegetarian and omnivorous young women in southern India. Faecal samples were obtained from thirty-two lacto-vegetarian and twenty-four omnivorous young adult women from a similar social and economic background. Macronutrient intake and anthropometric data were collected. Faecal microbiota of interest was quantified by real-time PCR with SYBR Green using primers targeting 16S rRNA genes of groups, including: Clostridium coccoides group (Clostridium cluster XIVa), Roseburia spp. -Eubacterium rectale, Bacteroides--Prevotella group, Bifidobacterium genus, Lactobacillus group, Clostridium leptum group (Clostridium cluster IV), Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, Ruminococcus productus--C. coccoides, Butyrivibrio, Enterococcus species and Enterobacteriaceae. The groups were matched for age, socio-economic score and anthropometric indices. Intake of energy, complex carbohydrates and Ca were significantly higher in the omnivorous group. The faecal microbiota of the omnivorous group was enriched with Clostridium cluster XIVa bacteria, specifically Roseburia-E. rectale. The relative proportions of other microbial communities were similar in both groups. The butyryl-CoA CoA-transferase gene, associated with microbial butyrate production, was present in greater amounts in the faeces of omnivores, and the levels were highly correlated with Clostridium cluster XIVa and Roseburia-E. rectale abundance and to a lesser extent with Clostridium leptum and F. prausnitzii abundance and with crude fibre intake. Omnivores had an increased relative abundance of Clostridium cluster XIVa bacteria and butyryl-CoA CoA-transferase gene compared with vegetarians, but we were unable to identify the components of the diet responsible for this difference.
Spatio-temporal Dynamics of Protein Kinase B/Akt Signaling Revealed by a Genetically Encoded Fluorescent Reporter*♦

The serine/threonine kinase protein kinase B (PKB)/Akt is a critical regulator of insulin signaling, cell survival, and oncogenesis. The activation mechanisms of this key kinase are well characterized. In contrast, inactivation of PKB signaling by phosphatases is less well understood. To study the dynamics of PKB signaling in live cells, we generated a genetically encoded fluorescent reporter for PKB activity that reversibly responds to stimuli activating phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase. Specifically, phosphorylation of the reporter expressed in mammalian cells causes changes in fluorescence resonance energy transfer, allowing real-time imaging of phosphorylation catalyzed by PKB. Because of its reversibility, the reporter also allows termination of PKB signaling by phosphatases to be monitored. We found that PKB signaling in the cytosol was more rapid and more transient compared with that in the nucleus, suggesting the presence of differentially regulated phosphatase activity in these two compartments. Furthermore, targeting of the reporter to the plasma membrane, where PKB is activated, resulted in accelerated and prolonged response compared with the response in the cytosol, suggesting that release of PKB or its substrates from the membrane is required for desensitization of PKB signaling. These data reveal spatio-temporal gradients of both signal propagation and signal termination in PKB signaling.
Introduction to Minitrack: Mixed, Augmented and Virtual Reality: Co-designed Services and Applications

Virtual reality (VR) refers to computer technologies that use software to generate the realistic images, sounds and other sensations that represent an immersive environment and simulate a user’s physical presence in this environment [10]. Mixed reality (MR) refers to combining real and virtual contents with the aid of digital devices [3]. Mixed reality is seen to consist of both augmented reality (i.e., virtual 3D objects in immersive reality), and augmented virtuality (i.e., captured features of reality in immersive virtual 3D environments) [7]. All these technologies have recently peaked in terms of media attention as they are expected to disturb existing markets like PCs and smartphones did when they were introduced to the markets. The first wave of VR came already in 1990’s when a number of industries were inspired by games [1, 11, 6]. However, the user experience was still unpleasant and the hype soon passed. After 2005, a second wave of VR emerged and was more successfully employed in different fields such as engineering, medicine, mental health, design, architecture and construction, education and training, arts, entertainment, business, communication, marketing, military and travel [9, 13, 6]. Now, device, component, software and user-interface development is globally moving fast forward and many world-leading players in manufacturing and ecommerce, for example, are adopting these technologies. Current academic research in the MR sector has concentrated on technology and user-interface research but there is a research gap in studying user experiences and decision-making, technology advancement and application development side-byside in order to understand their value-in-use. The user-value drivers are numerous and should drive application development. So far, the key value drivers have been identified to be cost-saving through out-of-home and out-of-office access, total control and high level of personalization, going beyond reality, personal efficacy experiences, feeling of safety, privacy and confidentiality and immersive experiences [1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 12]. A co-created envisioning of an immersive experience also elevates institutions of agreement, commonly coined as a feeling of win-win. From this point of view, the major challenge for both VR and AR technologies is to convince users that the added value is high enough to compete with the current systems and offerings in desktops, notebooks, tablets, smartphones and related video and game-like applications. The minitrack encouraged submissions from both cutting edge technology and practical applications. The minitrack showcases research on: · Realistic virtual humans in immersive environments · AR applications for personal health decisionmaking · Enabling sociability in around VR experiences · Critical reflection on VR learning · Decision making about enterprise architecture using AR
ChairBot Café: Personality-Based Expressive Motion

This paper presents an inexpensive robot chair and a data-driven methodology for designing and scoping its future behaviors in naturalistic settings. The main study will collect data about robot personality in a public café. Common robot platforms are often non-anthropomorphic, and human-in-the-loop behavioral design can help scope and design new robot applications for rapid deployment in human environments. Key contributions of the study presented are expected to be: (1) a dataset that can be used to seed future robot personality designs, and (2) behavioral data that helps us analyze the connection between personality and social influence
Plasma HDL levels highly correlate with cognitive function in exceptional longevity.

BACKGROUND Families of centenarians have high levels of plasma high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, which may have neurological as well as cardiovascular protective effects during aging. Because plasma HDL level declines progressively with aging, we examined whether centenarians with higher plasma HDL levels have better cognitive function. METHODS Total plasma cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, HDL, triglycerides, and apolipoprotein levels were measured in a group of centenarians (N = 139; older than 95 years) and were correlated with their cognitive function (measured by Mini-Mental State Examination [MMSE]). RESULTS Plasma HDL levels correlated significantly with MMSE (r =.32; p <.0001). Each decrease in plasma HDL tertile (74.9 +/- 2.1, 50.6 +/- 0.5, and 36.8 +/- 1.0 mg/dl) was associated with a significant decrease in MMSE (23.4 +/- 1.5, 17.7 +/- 1.8, and 12.4 +/- 1.8; p <.04 for each plasma HDL tertile). As expected, increased plasma apolipoprotein A-I and decreased plasma triglyceride levels were also correlated with a significantly superior cognitive function. Biological markers of hydration and nutritional status did not differ between the groups with the higher or lower plasma HDL or MMSE. CONCLUSIONS These data demonstrate that cognitive dysfunction in centenarians is associated with a progressive decline in plasma HDL concentrations. This underscores the protective effects of increased plasma HDL and its role in maintaining superior cognition in longevity.
Probiotics, antibiotics and the immune responses to vaccines

Orally delivered vaccines have been shown to perform poorly in developing countries. There are marked differences in the structure and the luminal environment of the gut in developing countries resulting in changes in immune and barrier function. Recent studies using newly developed technology and analytic methods have made it increasingly clear that the intestinal microbiota activate a multitude of pathways that control innate and adaptive immunity in the gut. Several hypotheses have been proposed for the underperformance of oral vaccines in developing countries, and modulation of the intestinal microbiota is now being tested in human clinical trials. Supplementation with specific strains of probiotics has been shown to have modulatory effects on intestinal and systemic immune responses in animal models and forms the basis for human studies with vaccines. However, most studies published so far that have evaluated the immune response to vaccines in children and adults have been small and results have varied by age, antigen, type of antibody response and probiotic strain. Use of anthelminthic drugs in children has been shown to possibly increase immunogenicity following oral cholera vaccination, lending further support to the rationale for modulation of the immune response to oral vaccination through the intestinal microbiome.
Sobolev GAN

We propose a new Integral Probability Metric (IPM) between distributions: the Sobolev IPM. The Sobolev IPM compares the mean discrepancy of two distributions for functions (critic) restricted to a Sobolev ball defined with respect to a dominant measure mu. We show that the Sobolev IPM compares two distributions in high dimensions based on weighted conditional Cumulative Distribution Functions (CDF) of each coordinate on a leave one out basis. The Dominant measure mu plays a crucial role as it defines the support on which conditional CDFs are compared. Sobolev IPM can be seen as an extension of the one dimensional Von-Mises Cramer statistics to high dimensional distributions. We show how Sobolev IPM can be used to train Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We then exploit the intrinsic conditioning implied by Sobolev IPM in text generation. Finally we show that a variant of Sobolev GAN achieves competitive results in semi-supervised learning on CIFAR-10, thanks to the smoothness enforced on the critic by Sobolev GAN which relates to Laplacian regularization.
Factor Analysis of the Level of Expressed Emotion Scale, A Questionnaire Intended to Measure ‘Perceived Expressed Emotion’

When the factor structure and psychometric qualities of the Level of Expressed Emotion scale, an instrument intended to assess patient's perceptions of expressed emotion, were evaluated, three moderately intercorrelated factors emerged, with good internal consistency; these were lack of emotional support, intrusiveness/control, and irritability. This did not quite correspond to the a priori scales described in the original version. As in the original LEE, the three factors add to a total score intended to measure ‘perceived expressed emotion’.
On the impact of sampling on traffic monitoring and analysis

Due to significant advances in transmission technology and to the corresponding increase of link rates, traffic sampling is becoming a normal way of operation in traffic monitoring. Given this trend, in this paper we aim to assess the impact of the sampling on a wide range of tasks which are typical of an operational network. We follow an experimental approach, exploiting passive analysis of network traffic flows, taking into account different sampling policies (e.g., systematic, uniform and stratified) and different sampling rates. To quantify the amount of degradation and bias that sampling introduces with respect to the unsampled traffic we use well-known statistical measures (i.e., Hellinger Distance, Fleiss Chi-Square). Unlike previous work, we consider a very large set of “features” (i.e., any kind of properties characterizing traffic flows, from packet size and inter-arrival time, to Round Trip Time, TCP congestion window size, number of out-of-order packets, etc.) which are typically exploited by a rather wide class of applications, such as traffic monitoring, analysis, accounting, and classification. Using three real traffic traces, representative of different operational networks, we find that (i) a significant degradation affects a wide number of features; (ii) the set of features less degraded is consistent across the three datasets; (iii) at the same time, some artifacts may arise, resulting in lower distortion scores at higher sampling rates, which are tied to both the specific metric, as well as the way in which the feature is computed (e.g., binning); (iv) no significant reduction of the estimation bias can be obtained by merely tweaking the sampling policy - which partly contrasts earlier observations concerning the better quality achievable with stratified sampling.
Bayesian Framework for image segmentation based on Nonparametric Clustering with Spatial Neighborhood Information

In this paper, we present a Bayesian framework for image segmentation based upon spatial nonparametric clustering. To estimate the density function on a nonparametric form, the proposed model exploits local Gaussian kernels. In addition, we have incorporated the spatial information to the clustering process by adding a spatial function for weighting the posterior probabilities.The main advantages of this model are two. First due to the non parametric structure, it does not require the image regions to have a particular type of density distribution. Second, adding spatial information yields more homogenous and smoothed regions.The experimental results based on real images demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method and indicate clearly its robustness to noise. General Terms Image segmentation, image processing,pattern Recognitioncomputer vision.
Differential Scanning Calorimetric (DSC) Study of New and Sterilized Nickel-Titanium Rotary Endodontic Instruments

DIFFERENTIAL SCANNING CALORIMETRIC (DSC) STUDY OF NEW AND STERILIZED NICKEL-TITANIUM ROTARY ENDODONTIC INSTRUMENTS Michael Dyriw, D.D.S. Marquette University, 2015 Introduction: Nickel-Titanium (NiTi) files have become popular in endodontic procedures compared to traditional stainless steel hand files owing to their increased flexibility which is especially advantageous in curved canals. Due to the associated costs, endodontic instruments are frequently re-used, which requires sterilization between uses. With the application of temperature NiTi has the ability to undergo phase transformations, altering the properties of the instruments. The purpose of this study was to investigate phase transformations of four brands of NiTi rotary endodontic instruments in the as-received condition and after multiple sterilization cycles under steam sterilization, using differential scanning calorimetry. Materials and Methods: Four brands of nickel-titanium endodontic rotary files size 35, . 04 taper were evaluated in this study: ProFile (Dentsply Tulsa Dental Specialties, Tulsa, OK), ProFile Vortex (Dentsply), Vortex Blue (Dentsply), and HyFlex CM (Coltène/Whaledent, Cuyahoga Falls, OH). The transformation temperatures and phase transformations of these files were determined in the as-received condition and after 1, 3, and 5 cycles of steam sterilization by differential scanning calorimetry. Measurements were analyzed using a two-way ANOVA. Results: There were significant differences between file brands in austenite finish temperature (p < 0.05) but the only statistical significant differences in thermal properties when comparing files before and after 1, 3, and 5 cycles of steam sterilization were found with onset heating (p < 0.05). Conclusion: Repeated cycles of steam sterilization do not appear to influence the phase transformations of NiTi endodontic instruments.
Enhanced reconstruction of compressive sensing MRI via cross-domain stochastically fully-connected random field model

Introduction: Acquisition time is an important concern for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Reducing imaging time directly reduces patient discomfort and it reduces artifacts due to patient motion thus improving overall image quality. Recent developments in compressed sensing MRI show that different forms of MRI are inherently sparse in certain domains [1], which requires a high quality reconstruction of MR images acquired at sub-Nyquist sampling ratios [2]. Given measurement sparsity in compressive sensing MRI, advanced reconstruction algorithms such as the ones proposed in [1, 2, 3, 4] are required to reconstruct high quality MR images. Existing reconstruction methods for compressive sensing MRI are limited in taking full advantage of information across the entire MR imaging data to improve the preservation of fine tissue details and contrast in the reconstructed MR images. In this study, we propose a Cross-Domain Stochastic Fully-Connected Conditional Random Field (CD-SFCRF)-based reconstruction method for compressive sensing MRI. This cross-domain method will utilize both spatialand frequency-domain information within a SFCRF framework to improve the quality of reconstructed images via preserving fine tissue details and contrast.
A first principles study of substitutional copper in aluminium

This study aims to gain insight into the early stages of precipitation hardening by determining the energetics of atom replacement by first principles computations. Density functional theory calculations using the ABINIT code were performed to determine cohesive energies and the equilibrium lattice constants of aluminium and copper for the conventional face centred cubic structure of 4 atoms. These were extended to periodic super cells of different cubic geometries and with primitive cell size of up to 32 atoms with replacement of a single aluminium atom by copper.
Recommendations for volume augmentation and rejuvenation of the face and hands with the new generation polycaprolactone-based collagen stimulator (Ellansé®)

Background The range of fillers currently available for soft-tissue augmentation is constantly expanding. The latest advances in filler technology include collagen biostimulators that exert their esthetic effect by promoting neocollagenesis. One such product is the next-generation collagen biostimulator (Ellansé®) that demonstrates properties as yet unseen in soft-tissue fillers. It is composed of polycaprolactone (PCL) microspheres in an aqueous carboxymethylcellulose gel carrier. Given its specific characteristics and the number of areas that can be treated with this innovative product, experts’ recommendations were deemed necessary and are therefore presented in this paper with a specific focus on the indications, treatment areas and procedures as well as injection techniques. Methods A multinational, multidisciplinary group of plastic surgeons and dermatologists convened to develop recommendations with a worldwide perspective. This publication provides information on the specific characteristics of the product and focuses on the recommendations on the injection techniques. Results Recommendations on injection techniques are provided for the upper face, mid-face and lower face and zone by zone for each of these areas, as well as hands. Based on the particular anatomy of each area, the focus is on the techniques and devices of injection and the volume and depth of injection. The information is tabulated, and photos are presented for illustration. Conclusion These recommendations provide a guideline for physicians who wish to perform safe and efficacious treatment with the PCL collagen stimulator for face and rejuvenation with volume augmentation.
A Geiger mode APD fabricated in standard 65nm CMOS technology

We present the first avalanche photodiode (APD) successfully fabricated in standard 65nm CMOS technology. The APD operates both in proportional and Geiger mode at -60C to +60C temperature range. The device comprises an octagonal n+p-well junction surrounded by an n-tub guard-ring; its photon detection probability peaks at 450nm with 200mV excess bias and it is above 1% between 350 and 750nm. The dark count rate is 1.5kHz/μm2 at 200mV excess bias, while afterpulsing is less than 1% for a dead time longer than 5μs and timing jitter is better than 235ps. Applications include low-power, ultra-high-speed quantum number generators, time-of-flight 3D image sensors, LIDAR detectors, and time-resolved spectroscopy.
Insulin exits skeletal muscle capillaries by fluid-phase transport

Before insulin can stimulate myocytes to take up glucose, it must first move from the circulation to the interstitial space. The continuous endothelium of skeletal muscle (SkM) capillaries restricts insulin’s access to myocytes. The mechanism by which insulin crosses this continuous endothelium is critical to understand insulin action and insulin resistance; however, methodological obstacles have limited understanding of endothelial insulin transport in vivo. Here, we present an intravital microscopy technique to measure the rate of insulin efflux across the endothelium of SkM capillaries. This method involves development of a fully bioactive, fluorescent insulin probe, a gastrocnemius preparation for intravital microscopy, an automated vascular segmentation algorithm, and the use of mathematical models to estimate endothelial transport parameters. We combined direct visualization of insulin efflux from SkM capillaries with modeling of insulin efflux kinetics to identify fluid-phase transport as the major mode of transendothelial insulin efflux in mice. Model-independent experiments demonstrating that insulin movement is neither saturable nor affected by insulin receptor antagonism supported this result. Our finding that insulin enters the SkM interstitium by fluid-phase transport may have implications in the pathophysiology of SkM insulin resistance as well as in the treatment of diabetes with various insulin analogs.
The Role of NLRP3 Inflammasome in Cardiovascular Diseases

The inflammasome is a cytosolic protein complex involved in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis. The NLRP3 inflammasome can be activated by a wide range of stimuli, including intracellular cholesterol crystals The NLRP3 inflammasome is up-regulated within the myocardium after myocardial infarction (MI), primarily in noncardiomyocytes (i.e. fibroblasts). Its deficiency markedly improves myocardial function and reduces infarct size after ex vivo myocardial ischaemia-reperfusion injury I/R. NLRP3 inflammasome is up-regulated in myocardial fibroblasts after MI, potentially contributing to infarct size after myocardial I/R. NLRP3 inhibitors and mechanism of action, Glyburide, Apigenin, Parthenolide, Cysteinyl leukotriene receptor antagonist, Inhibitors of P2X7, Scropolioside B, Cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) inhibitors, Intravenous immunoglobulin, Resveratrol, C3a Pt and inhibitors of C3a receptor, Atorvastatin, Zinc, Umbelliferone (UMB), omega-3 fatty acids, Ethanol. Modulation of the inflammasome may represent a unique therapeutic strategy to limit cell death and prevent heart failure after AMI. Inflammasome inhibitors may improve current treatment approach.