Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reprogramming of T Cells to Natural Killer–Like Cells upon Bcl11b Deletion

One Two T T cells develop in the thymus, where they proceed through several developmental stages, losing alternative lineage potential as they progress. The molecular regulation of this developmental process, however, is not fully understood (see the Perspective by Di Santo). P. Li et al. (p. 85, published online 10 June), L. Li et al. (p. 89), and Ikawa et al. (p. 93) now identify expression of the zinc finger transcription factor Bcl11b as the earliest checkpoint in T cell development in mice. Genetic deletion of Bcl11b in developing T cells inhibited commitment to the T cell lineage. Under conditions that should have stimulated T lineage differentiation, Bcl11b-deficient T cell progenitors failed to up-regulate genes associated with lineage-committed T cells and maintained stem cell– and progenitor cell–associated gene expression. In both developing and committed T cells, loss of Bcl11b resulted in the generation of cells that resembled natural killer (NK) cells in both phenotype and function. These NK-like cells could be expanded easily in vitro and possessed antitumor cytotoxicity, but they did not exhibit cytotoxicity against normal cells and were not tumorigenic. Because T cells are much easier to obtain from human patients than NK cells, deletion of Bcl11b in T cells may thus provide a source of easy-to-grow NK cells for cell-based antitumor therapies. A transcription factor is essential for maintenance of T cell identity. T cells develop in the thymus and are critical for adaptive immunity. Natural killer (NK) lymphocytes constitute an essential component of the innate immune system in tumor surveillance, reproduction, and defense against microbes and viruses. Here, we show that the transcription factor Bcl11b was expressed in all T cell compartments and was indispensable for T lineage development. When Bcl11b was deleted, T cells from all developmental stages acquired NK cell properties and concomitantly lost or decreased T cell–associated gene expression. These induced T-to–natural killer (ITNK) cells, which were morphologically and genetically similar to conventional NK cells, killed tumor cells in vitro, and effectively prevented tumor metastasis in vivo. Therefore, ITNKs may represent a new cell source for cell-based therapies.
Minimum sensor duty cycle with guaranteed estimator performance

In this paper, we consider Kalman filtering over a network and construct the optimal sensor data scheduling schemes which minimize the sensor duty cycle and guarantee a bounded error or a bounded average error at the remote estimator. Depending on the computation capability of the sensor, we can either give a closed-form expression of the minimum sensor duty cycle or provide tight lower and upper bounds of it. Examples are provided throughout the paper to demonstrate the results.
A Gate Delay Model Focusing on Current Fluctuation over Wide-Range of Process and Environmental Variability

This paper proposes a gate delay model that is suitable for timing analysis considering wide-range process and environmental variability. The proposed model focuses on current variation and its impact on delay is considered by replacing output load. The proposed model is applicable for large variability with current model constructed by DC analysis whose cost is small. The proposed model can also be used both in statistical static timing analysis and in conventional corner-based static timing analysis. Experimental results in a 90nm technology show that the gate delays of inverter, NAND and NOR are accurately estimated under gate length, threshold voltage, supply voltage and temperature fluctuation. We also verify that the proposed model can cope with slow input transition and RC output load. We demonstrate applicability to multiple-stage path delay and flip-flop delay, and show an application of sensitivity calculation for statistical timing analysis
A high-fat diet impairs cardiac high-energy phosphate metabolism and cognitive function in healthy human subjects.

BACKGROUND High-fat, low-carbohydrate diets are widely used for weight reduction, but they may also have detrimental effects via increased circulating free fatty acid concentrations. OBJECTIVE We tested whether raising plasma free fatty acids by using a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet results in alterations in heart and brain in healthy subjects. DESIGN Men (n = 16) aged 22 ± 1 y (mean ± SE) were randomly assigned to 5 d of a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet containing 75 ± 1% of calorie intake through fat consumption or to an isocaloric standard diet providing 23 ± 1% of calorie intake as fat. In a crossover design, subjects undertook the alternate diet after a 2-wk washout period, with results compared after the diet periods. Cardiac (31)P magnetic resonance (MR) spectroscopy and MR imaging, echocardiography, and computerized cognitive tests were used to assess cardiac phosphocreatine (PCr)/ATP, cardiac function, and cognitive function, respectively. RESULTS Compared with the standard diet, subjects who consumed the high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet had 44% higher plasma free fatty acids (P < 0.05), 9% lower cardiac PCr/ATP (P < 0.01), and no change in cardiac function. Cognitive tests showed impaired attention (P < 0.01), speed (P < 0.001), and mood (P < 0.01) after the high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet. CONCLUSION Raising plasma free fatty acids decreased myocardial PCr/ATP and reduced cognition, which suggests that a high-fat diet is detrimental to heart and brain in healthy subjects.
A new IPTV channel zapping scheme for EPON

This paper proposes a new IPTV channel zapping scheme in EPON, and defines two user's operation behavior for channel zapping. Based on such user's operation behavior, this paper defines two channel zapping types that are intra- and inter-stream channel zapping. In addition, we propose two analysis models to evaluate channel zapping time for both channel zapping types, respectively. According to simulation results, our proposed scheme can reduce channel zapping time and satisfy quality criteria (500ms). In addition, some further works are described in this work.
Performance efficiency of context-flow system-on-chip platform

Recent efforts in adapting computer networks into system-on-chip (SOC), or network-on-chip, present a setback to the traditional computer systems for the lack of effective programming model, while not taking full advantage of the almost unlimited on-chip bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a new programming model, called context-flow, that is simple, safe, highly parallelizable yet transparent to the underlying architectural details. An SOC platform architecture is then designed to support this programming model, while fully exploiting the physical proximity between the processing elements. We demonstrate the performance efficiency of this architecture over bus based and packet-switch based networks by two case studies using a multi-processor architecture simulator.
Identification of the Ca2+ Blocking Site of Acid-sensing Ion Channel (ASIC) 1

Acid-sensing ion channels ASIC1a and ASIC1b are ligand-gated ion channels that are activated by H+ in the physiological range of pH. The apparent affinity for H+ of ASIC1a and 1b is modulated by extracellular Ca2+ through a competition between Ca2+ and H+. Here we show that, in addition to modulating the apparent H+ affinity, Ca2+ blocks ASIC1a in the open state (IC50 ∼ 3.9 mM at pH 5.5), whereas ASIC1b is blocked with reduced affinity (IC50 > 10 mM at pH 4.7). Moreover, we report the identification of the site that mediates this open channel block by Ca2+. ASICs have two transmembrane domains. The second transmembrane domain M2 has been shown to form the ion pore of the related epithelial Na+ channel. Conserved topology and high homology in M2 suggests that M2 forms the ion pore also of ASICs. Combined substitution of an aspartate and a glutamate residue at the beginning of M2 completely abolished block by Ca2+ of ASIC1a, showing that these two amino acids (E425 and D432) are crucial for Ca2+ block. It has previously been suggested that relief of Ca2+ block opens ASIC3 channels. However, substitutions of E425 or D432 individually or in combination did not open channels constitutively and did not abolish gating by H+ and modulation of H+ affinity by Ca2+. These results show that channel block by Ca2+ and H+ gating are not intrinsically linked.
Homicide and Associated Steroid Acute Psychosis: A Case Report

We report the case of an old man treated with methylprednisolone for chronic lymphoid leukemia. After two months of treatment, he declared an acute steroid psychosis and beat his wife to death. Steroids were stopped and the psychotic symptoms subsided, but his condition declined very quickly. The clinical course was complicated by a major depressive disorder with suicidal ideas, due to the steroid stoppage, the leukemia progressed, and by a sudden onset of a fatal pulmonary embolism. This clinical case highlights the importance of early detection of steroid psychosis and proposes, should treatment not be stopped, a strategy of dose reduction combined with a mood stabilizer or antipsychotic treatment. In addition have been revised the risks of the adverse psychiatric effects of steroids.
Ibn Sina Steps Out: Exploring Arabic Attitudes Toward Humanoid Robots

As humanoid robot technology makes its way into the global economy, it is important for robot designers to try to under- stand the variety of cultural attitudes that exist throughout the world. However, to our knowledge, no one has yet surveyed Middle Eastern attitudes on this topic. We aim to try to bridge this gap. In particular, we wanted to understand how Arabic people might view having hu- manoid robots in their daily lives, and developed a questionnaire to understand these views. We also built an end-to-end Arabic conver- sational system on our humanoid robot Ibn Sina, and brought the robot to a mall in the United Arab Emirates. At the mall we en- couraged people to interact with the robot as well as complete our questionnaire. With 131 respondents from 21 countries, our find- ings show significant regional differences in overall attitudes (people from the Gulf viewed humanoid robots more favorably than people from Africa), as well as an effect from college education (people with college degrees viewed humanoid robots less favorably than people without college degrees). Category: Exploratory studies (*E*)
A Fraud Detection Model Based on Feature Selection and Undersampling Applied to Web Payment Systems

The volume of electronic transactions has raised a lot in last years, mainly due to the popularization of e-commerce. Since this popularization, we have observed a significant increase in the number of fraud cases, resulting in billions of dollars losses each year worldwide. Therefore, it is important and necessary to develop and apply techniques that can assist in fraud detection in Web transactions. Due to the large amount of data generated in electronic transactions, to find the best set of features is an essential task to identify frauds. Fraud detection is a specific application of anomaly detection, characterized by a large imbalance between the classes (e.g., fraud or non fraud), which can be a detrimental factor for feature selection techniques. In this work we evaluate the behavior and impact of feature selection techniques to detect fraud in a Web Transaction scenario, applying feature selection techniques and performing undersampling in this step. To measure the effectiveness of the feature selection approach we use some state-of-the-art classification techniques to identify frauds, using real data from one of the largest electronic payment system in Latin America. Thus, the fraud detection models comprises a feature selection and classification techniques. To evaluate our results we use metrics of F-Measure and Economic Efficiency. Our results show that the imbalance between the classes reduces the effectiveness of feature selection and the undersampling strategy applied in this task improves the final results. We achieve a very good performance in fraud detection using the proposed methodology, reducing the number of features and presenting financial gains of up to 61% compared to the actual scenario of the company.
Performance improvement of microbial fuel cell (MFC) using suitable electrode and Bioengineered organisms: A review

ABSTRACT There is an urgent need to find an environment friendly and sustainable technology for alternative energy due to rapid depletion of fossil fuel and industrialization. Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs) have operational and functional advantages over the current technologies for energy generation from organic matter as it directly converts electricity from substrate at ambient temperature. However, MFCs are still unsuitable for high energy demands due to practical limitations. The overall performance of an MFC depends on microorganism, appropriate electrode materials, suitable MFC designs, and optimizing process parameters which would accelerate commercialization of this technology in near future. In this review, we put forth the recent developments on microorganism and electrode material that are critical for the generation of bioelectricity generation. This would give a comprehensive insight into the characteristics, options, modifications, and evaluations of these parameters and their effects on process development of MFCs.
Lexical Comparison Between Wikipedia and Twitter Corpora by Using Word Embeddings

Compared with carefully edited prose, the language of social media is informal in the extreme. The application of NLP techniques in this context may require a better understanding of word usage within social media. In this paper, we compute a word embedding for a corpus of tweets, comparing it to a word embedding for Wikipedia. After learning a transformation of one vector space to the other, and adjusting similarity values according to term frequency, we identify words whose usage differs greatly between the two corpora. For any given word, the set of words closest to it in a particular embedding provides a characterization for that word’s usage within the corresponding corpora.
Appropriating the Brand: Union Organizing in Front-line Service Work

Much has been written about the structural shift towards service work and the management of front‐ line service workers (Frenkel et al 1999, Taylor et al 2002, Batt 2000 amongst many others). There is also extensive academic analysis relating to the efforts made by unions to re‐establish their influence in the contemporary labour market (see, amongst many others, the edited collections by Gall 2003 and Gall 2006 for extensive discussion). With some notable exceptions however (Heery 1993, Eaton 1996, Bain and Taylor 2002), relatively little academic work examines the intersection of these two bodies of literature; and even less focuses on the micro‐politics of union organising efforts amongst front‐line service workers. This presents a preliminary effort to address this gap. Developing writings from the US over a decade ago (Eaton 1996, Hurd 1993, Cobble 1996), this paper draws on evidence from case studies of successful union organising campaigns amongst front line service workers to examine the complex processes involved in developing collective workplace trade unionism. The particular challenge for both workers and unions in this context is to develop and establish collective interests and solidarities, without compromising the customer service role which is often extremely important to these workers.
Fitness costs may explain the post-colonisation erosion of phenotypic plasticity

SUMMARY Many organisms can adjust their phenotypes to match local environmental conditions via shifts in developmental trajectories, rather than relying on changes in gene frequencies wrought by natural selection. Adaptive developmental plasticity confers obvious benefits in terms of rapid response and higher mean fitness, so why is it not more common? Plausibly, adaptive plasticity also confers a cost; reshaping the phenotype takes time and energy, so that canalised control of trait values enhances fitness if the optimal phenotype remains the same from one generation to the next. Although this idea is central to interpreting the fitness consequences of adaptive plasticity, empirical data on costs of plasticity are scarce. In Australian tiger snakes, larger relative head size enhances maximal ingestible prey size on islands containing large prey. The trait arises via adaptive plasticity in snake populations on newly colonised islands but becomes genetically canalised on islands where snakes have been present for much longer periods. We experimentally manipulated relative head size in captive neonatal snakes to quantify the costs of adaptive plasticity. Although small-headed snakes were able to increase their head sizes when offered large prey, the delay in doing so, and their inability to consume large prey at the outset, significantly reduced their growth rates relative to conspecifics with larger heads at the beginning of the experiment. This study describes a proximate cause to the post-colonisation erosion of developmental plasticity recorded in tiger snake populations.
Constraints on the Abundance of Highly Ionized Protocluster Regions from the Absence of Large Voids in the Lyα Forest

Energetic feedback processes during the formation of galaxy clusters may have heated and ionized the majority of the intergalactic gas in protocluster regions. When such a highly ionized superbubble falls along the sight line to a background quasar, it would be seen as a large void with little or no absorption in the Lyα forest. We examine the spectra of 137 quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to search for such voids and find no clear evidence of their existence. The size distribution of voids in the range 5 Å ≲ Δλ ≲ 70 Å (corresponding to physical sizes of 3 h-1 ≲ L ≲ 35 h-1 comoving Mpc) is consistent with the standard model for the Lyα forest without additional ionized bubbles. We adapt a physical model for H II bubble growth during cosmological reionization to describe the expected size distribution of ionized superbubbles at z ~ 3. This model incorporates the conjoining of bubbles around individual neighboring galaxies. Using the nondetection of voids, we find that models in which the volume filling factor of ionized bubbles exceeds ~20% at z ~ 3 can be ruled out, primarily because they overproduce the number of large (40-50 Å) voids. We conclude that any preheating mechanism that explains galaxy cluster observations must avoid heating the low-density gas in the protocluster regions, either by operating relatively recently (z ≲ 3) or by increasing entropy primarily in high-density regions.
Efficient code generation for horizontal architectures: Compiler techniques and architectural support

A horizontal architecture consists of a number of resources that can operate in parallel, each of which is controlled by a field in the wide instruction word. Such architectures offer the potential for high performance scientific computing at a modest cost. If this potential performance is to be realized, the multiple resources of a horizontal processor must be scheduled effectively. The scheduling task for conventional horizontal processors is quite complex and the construction of highly optimizing compilers for them is a difficult and expensive project. The polycyclic architecture is a horizontal architecture with architectural support for the scheduling task. The complexity of scheduling conventional horizontal processors and the ease of scheduling polycyclic processors is demonstrated by means of an example.
A hybrid system for fraud detection in mobile communications

During the course of the European project \Advanced Security for Personal Communication Technologies" (ASPeCT), we have developed some rule-based and neural network architectures as a number of di erent fraud detection tools for GSM networks. We have now integrated these di erent techniques into a hybrid detection tool. We optimized the performance of the hybrid system in terms of the number of subscribers raising alarms. More precisely, we optimized performance curves showing the trade-o between the percentage of correctly identi ed fraudsters versus the percentage of new subscribers raising alarms. We report here on a common suite of experiments we performed on these di erent sys-
High-performance TCAM-based IP lookup engines

IP lookup is a key packet processing task in IP routers. To achieve high performance, it has been proposed to use TCAMs to implement IP-lookup accelerators. In this paper, in addition to the state-of-art MSMB-LPT scheme for TCAM-based IP lookup, M-MSMB-LPT and MSMB-LPT-I schemes are proposed and studied. Using realistic Internet packet traces, it is shown that MSMB-LPT, M-MSMB-LPT and MSMB-LPT-I schemes with different parameters constitute a solution space for constructing a wide-range of high-performance TCAM-based IP lookup engines. Under cost, performance and scalability constraints best IP lookup engine can be selected from this solution space.
Properties of Three Shadows on a Plane

We describe the geometrical properties of solid's shadows projected onto a flat plane by point-light sources. Even though the shape and position of each element are arbitrary and unknown, we indicate that there exists a certain constraint between three shadows on the plane; i.e., three cross points determined by pairs of tangential lines must sit on a straight line. This property is considered to be a derivation of epipolar geometry. However, the situation we treat is a special one in which an explicit feature can emerge. We also show the geometrical meaning of this property by invoking other properties.
The Control of Locomotor Frequency by Excitation and Inhibition

Every type of neural rhythm has its own operational range of frequency. Neuronal mechanisms underlying rhythms at different frequencies, however, are poorly understood. We use a simple aquatic vertebrate, the two-day-old Xenopus tadpole, to investigate how the brainstem and spinal circuits generate swimming rhythms of different speeds. We first determined that the basic motor output pattern was not altered with varying swimming frequencies. The firing reliability of different types of rhythmic neuron involved in swimming was then analyzed. The results showed that there was a drop in the firing reliability in some inhibitory interneurons when fictive swimming slowed. We have recently established that premotor excitatory interneurons [descending interneurons (dINs)] are critical in rhythmically driving activity in the swimming circuit. Voltage-clamp recordings from dINs showed higher frequency swimming correlated with stronger background excitation and phasic inhibition, but did not correlate with phasic excitation. Two parallel mechanisms have been proposed for tadpole swimming maintenance: postinhibition rebound firing and NMDAR-dependent pacemaker firing in dINs. Rebound tests in dINs in this study showed that greater background depolarization and phasic inhibition led to faster rebound firing. Higher depolarization was previously shown to accelerate dIN pacemaker firing in the presence of NMDA. Here we show that enhancing dIN background excitation during swimming speeds up fictive swimming frequency while weakening phasic inhibition without changing background excitation slows down swimming rhythms. We conclude that both strong background excitation and phasic inhibition can promote faster tadpole swimming.