Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dual Signaling of the Fas Receptor: Initiation of Both Apoptotic and Necrotic Cell Death Pathways

Murine L929 fibrosarcoma cells were transfected with the human Fas (APO-1/CD95) receptor, and the role of various caspases in Fas-mediated cell death was assessed. Proteolytic activation of procaspase-3 and -7 was shown by Western analysis. Acetyl-Tyr-Val-Ala-Asp-chloromethylketone and benzyloxycarbonyl-Asp(OMe)-Glu(OMe)-Val-Asp(OMe)-fluoromethylketone, tetrapeptide inhibitors of caspase-1– and caspase-3–like proteases, respectively, failed to block Fas-induced apoptosis. Unexpectedly, the broad-spectrum caspase inhibitors benzyloxycarbonyl-Val-Ala-Asp(OMe)-fluoromethylketone and benzyloxycarbonyl-Asp(OMe)-fluoromethylketone rendered the cells even more sensitive to Fas-mediated cell death, as measured after 18 h incubation. However, when the process was followed microscopically, it became clear that anti-Fas–induced apoptosis of Fas-transfected L929 cells was blocked during the first 3 h, and subsequently the cells died by necrosis. As in tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-induced necrosis, Fas treatment led to accumulation of reactive oxygen radicals, and Fas-mediated necrosis was inhibited by the oxygen radical scavenger butylated hydroxyanisole. However, in contrast to TNF, anti-Fas did not activate the nuclear factor κB under these necrotic conditions. These results demonstrate the existence of two different pathways originating from the Fas receptor, one rapidly leading to apoptosis, and, if this apoptotic pathway is blocked by caspase inhibitors, a second directing the cells to necrosis and involving oxygen radical production.
Establishment of an X-ray Irradiation-Induced Glossitis Model in Rats: Biphasic Elevation of Proinflammatory Cytokines and Chemokines

Oral mucositis is a frequent and serious side effect in patients who receive radiotherapy for head and neck cancer. The purpose of this study was to develop a noninvasive and quantitative model of oral mucositis in rats, investigate the pathophysiology, and evaluate the efficacy of pharmacological interventions. Rats received a single dose of 15 Gy of X-rays to the snout after shielding of the remainder of the rat body with lead plates to protect the body from irradiation (day 0). After irradiation, the macroscopic area of tongue injury gradually increased. The total area of injury and the ulcer-like area reached a maximum on day 7 and then gradually decreased until disappearance on day 28. Expression of proinflammatory cytokines and chemokines occurred transiently within 1–4 hours after irradiation and returned to a normal level at 24 hours. This expression was again observed from days 3 to 5 and increased significantly on day 7, which approximately coincided with the histologic severity of tissue damage. Subcutaneous administration of palifermin at 3 mg/kg per day for 3 consecutive days before irradiation completely prevented ulcer formation in this model. In conclusion, we established a novel model of glossitis in rats, induced by X-ray irradiation, in which biphasic elevations of expression of proinflammatory cytokines and chemokines could be monitored. This model is considered useful to investigate the pathophysiology of oral mucositis and evaluate the preventive effect of pharmacological interventions on oral mucositis induced by X-ray irradiation.
CDMA Downlink Transmission with Transmit Antenna Arrays and Power Control in Multipath Fading Channels

Wireless code-division multiple-access (CDMA) cellular downlink communications with transmit antenna arrays in multipath fading channels is studied. Various array signal processing techniques at the transmit end are investigated and compared under various settings, in conjunction with power control. No instant downlink channel information is assumed; however, the obtained results are also compared with results assuming ideal feedback. The study is carried out for both circuit-switched and packet-switched systems, where different goals are pursued and different conclusions are drawn. In particular, it is found that the traffic type impacts the algorithm choice in downlink transmission, and that there is no need to seek optimum power control/allocation schemes, which are either too complex or infeasible in practice. Another interesting conclusion is that, even though feedback does not help much for packet-switched systems, it does help for circuit-switched systems, the gain of which increases with the number of antennas.
Device collaboration in ad-hoc MIMO networks

In this paper we consider methods for determining device coalitions for collaborative signal transmission, where different devices act as relay nodes to peers. The problem is to determine for R total number of users and R transmission slots the subsets of at most two devices that are allowed to transmit simultaneously. The subset selection problem is shown to be equivalent to an assignment problem. We consider both optimal assignment and greedy assignment and demonstrate the performance benefit due to device cooperation with simulations in a network model that models path loss between devices.
Modelling Developable Ribbons Using Ruling Bending Coordinates

This paper presents a new method for modelling the dynamic behaviour of developable ribbons, two dimensional strips with much smaller width than length. Instead of approximating such surface with a general triangle mesh, we characterize it by a set of creases and bending angles across them. This representation allows the developability to be satisfied everywhere while still leaves enough degree of freedom to represent salient global deformation. We show how the potential and kinetic energies can be properly discretized in this configuration space and time integrated in a fully implicit manner. The result is a dynamic simulator with several desirable features: We can model non-trivial deformation using much fewer elements than conventional FEM method. It is stable under extreme deformation, external force or large timestep size. And we can readily handle various user constraints in Euclidean space.
Detection of Gene Expression in an Individual Cell Type within a Cell Mixture Using Microarray Analysis

Background A central issue in the design of microarray-based analysis of global gene expression is the choice between using cells of single type and a mixture of cells. This study quantified the proportion of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) induced differentially expressed monocyte genes that could be measured in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC), and determined the extent to which gene expression in the non-monocyte cell fraction diluted or obscured fold changes that could be detected in the cell mixture. Methodology/Principal Findings Human PBMC were stimulated with LPS, and monocytes were then isolated by positive (Mono+) or negative (Mono−) selection. The non-monocyte cell fraction (MonoD) remaining after positive selection of monocytes was used to determine the effect of non-monocyte cells on overall expression. RNA from LPS-stimulated PBMC, Mono+, Mono− and MonoD samples was co-hybridised with unstimulated RNA for each cell type on oligonucleotide microarrays. There was a positive correlation in gene expression between PBMC and both Mono+ (0.77) and Mono− (0.61–0.67) samples. Analysis of individual genes that were differentially expressed in Mono+ and Mono− samples showed that the ability to detect expression of some genes was similar when analysing PBMC, but for others, differential expression was either not detected or changed in the opposite direction. As a result of the dilutional or obscuring effect of gene expression in non-monocyte cells, overall about half of the statistically significant LPS-induced changes in gene expression in monocytes were not detected in PBMC. However, 97% of genes with a four fold or greater change in expression in monocytes after LPS stimulation, and almost all (96–100%) of the top 100 most differentially expressed monocyte genes were detected in PBMC. Conclusions/Significance The effect of non-responding cells in a mixture dilutes or obscures the detection of subtle changes in gene expression in an individual cell type. However, for studies in which only the most highly differentially expressed genes are of interest, separating and analysing individual cell types may be unnecessary.
EFFECT OF RECOMBINANT BOVINE SOMATOTROPIN TREATMENT ON HEMATOLOGICAL AND SERUM BIOCHEMICAL VARIABLES OF YOUNG KAMORI GOAT

The present study was carried out on sixteen young goats of Kamori breed having age 9-10 weeks and weighing 14-15 kg body weight (BW). After an adaptation period of two weeks, goats were housed in the outerdoor pens (4 animals/pen) under ambient temperature and lighting. The animals were randomly divided into two groups, C and rbST. The animals in rbST group received intramuscular injection of rbST fortnightly, at the dose rate of 1 mg/kg. BW and those in C were kept as control. The experiment lasted for a period of 22 weeks. Animals were fed adlibitum the total mixed ration as a basal diet composed of roughages and concentrates (60:40), twice a day at 08:00 am and 05:00 pm and water was provided ad libitum. The hematological analysis of blood sampled on week 10 of experiment showed an increase (P < 0.05) in red blood cells (RBC) count and hemoglobin concentration in rbST treated goats than that of untreated goats, however, no significant effect (P< 0.05) of rbST was observed on hematological parameters in the blood of goats sampled on week 22 of the experiment. The serum total protein and glucose concentrations increased (P< 0.05) and the total lipid concentration decreased in goats of rbST group than that of control, however, no significant change (P< 0.05) was found in these variables on week 22 of the experiment. The serum IGF-I concentrations increased in the blood of rbST treated on week 10 and 22 of the experiment. The serum T3 concentration increased (P< 0.05) in rbST group than that of control on week 10 of trial but did not differ (P< 0.05) between the groups on week 22 of the trial. While the serum T4 concentration was not different (P< 0.05) between the group, on week 10 and 22 of the experiment. In conclusion, the present study reveals that rbST treatment stimulated eryhthropoises and increased serum concentrations of IGF-I and T3 in the blood of goats sampled on week 10.
Redox properties of CeO2 at low temperature: the direct synthesis of imines from alcohol and amine.

We disclosed the redox properties of CeO2 in organic reactions at low temperature of 303 K. CeO2 works as the most effective heterogeneous catalyst for imine formation from benzyl alcohol and aniline at 303 K among various metal oxides and showed more than 38-fold higher activity than other simple metal oxides. CeO2 is applicable to the reaction of various alcohols and amines and gives high yields (80-98%) and high selectivities (89->99%). Kinetic measurements, MS, and FTIR analyses demonstrated that the high activity of CeO2 is a result of reactive oxygen species at the redox sites on CeO2. This discovery can help to create a new field in metal oxide catalysis.
Optimistic parallelism requires abstractions

Irregular applications, which manipulate large, pointer-based data structures like graphs, are difficult to parallelize manually. Automatic tools and techniques such as restructuring compilers and run-time speculative execution have failed to uncover much parallelism in these applications, in spite of a lot of effort by the research community. These difficulties have even led some researchers to wonder if there is any coarse-grain parallelism worth exploiting in irregular applications. In this paper, we describe two real-world irregular applications: a Delaunay mesh refinement application and a graphics application thatperforms agglomerative clustering. By studying the algorithms and data structures used in theseapplications, we show that there is substantial coarse-grain, data parallelism in these applications, but that this parallelism is very dependent on the input data and therefore cannot be uncoveredby compiler analysis. In principle, optimistic techniques such asthread-level speculation can be used to uncover this parallelism, but we argue that current implementations cannot accomplish thisbecause they do not use the proper abstractions for the data structuresin these programs. These insights have informed our design of the Galois system, an object-based optimistic parallelization system for irregular applications. There are three main aspects to Galois: (1) a small number of syntactic constructs for packaging optimistic parallelism as iteration over ordered and unordered sets, (2)assertions about methods in class libraries, and (3) a runtime scheme for detecting and recovering from potentially unsafe accesses to shared memory made by an optimistic computation. We show that Delaunay mesh generation and agglomerative clustering can be parallelized in a straight-forward way using the Galois approach, and we present experimental measurements to show that this approach is practical. These results suggest that Galois is a practical approach to exploiting data parallelismin irregular programs.
Effects of treatment in women with gestational diabetes mellitus: systematic review and meta-analysis

Objective To summarise the benefits and harms of treatments for women with gestational diabetes mellitus. Design Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. Data sources Embase, Medline, AMED, BIOSIS, CCMed, CDMS, CDSR, CENTRAL, CINAHL, DARE, HTA, NHS EED, Heclinet, SciSearch, several publishers’ databases, and reference lists of relevant secondary literature up to October 2009. Review methods Included studies were randomised controlled trials of specific treatment for gestational diabetes compared with usual care or “intensified” compared with “less intensified” specific treatment. Results Five randomised controlled trials matched the inclusion criteria for specific versus usual treatment. All studies used a two step approach with a 50 g glucose challenge test or screening for risk factors, or both, and a subsequent 75 g or 100 g oral glucose tolerance test. Meta-analyses did not show significant differences for most single end points judged to be of direct clinical importance. In women specifically treated for gestational diabetes, shoulder dystocia was significantly less common (odds ratio 0.40, 95% confidence interval 0.21 to 0.75), and one randomised controlled trial reported a significant reduction of pre-eclampsia (2.5 v 5.5%, P=0.02). For the surrogate end point of large for gestational age infants, the odds ratio was 0.48 (0.38 to 0.62). In the 13 randomised controlled trials of different intensities of specific treatments, meta-analysis showed a significant reduction of shoulder dystocia in women with more intensive treatment (0.31, 0.14 to 0.70). Conclusions Treatment for gestational diabetes, consisting of treatment to lower blood glucose concentration alone or with special obstetric care, seems to lower the risk for some perinatal complications. Decisions regarding treatment should take into account that the evidence of benefit is derived from trials for which women were selected with a two step strategy (glucose challenge test/screening for risk factors and oral glucose tolerance test).
The Development and Validation of the Rational and Intuitive Decision Styles Scale

ABSTRACT Decision styles reflect the typical manner by which individuals make decisions. The purpose of this research was to develop and validate a decision style scale that addresses conceptual and psychometric problems with current measures. The resulting 10-item scale captures a broad range of the rational and intuitive styles construct domain. Results from 5 independent samples provide initial support for the dimensionality and reliability of the new scale, as demonstrated by a clear factor structure and high internal consistency. In addition, our results show evidence of convergent and discriminant validity through expected patterns of correlations across decision-making individual differences and the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) Big Five traits. Research domains that would benefit from incorporating the concept of decision styles are discussed.
Precision laser processing of optical microstructures with slab waveguide CO2 lasers

High precision laser direct writing of two types of micro- optical structure is demonstrated using a workstation built around a commercial CO2 slab waveguide laser. Drift and fluctuations in beam pointing, beam shape and pulse energy are quantified, providing an understanding of the precision capabilities. Quartz glass ablation by waveguide laser pulses of width in the 20 to 60 microsecond range has been characterized and a refractive microlens machined, involving material removal to a depth of 70 micrometer. Surface structures in aluminum with 143 micrometer lattice spacing have been produced to act as two dimensional photonic bandgap devices, modifying the transmission properties of hollow planar waveguides in the mid-infrared.
Nanoclusters: Building blocks for future nanoelectronic devices?

Ligand stabilized metal nanoclusters in the size range of 1-2 nanometers exhibit well pronounced quantum size behaviour, even at room temperature. This is due to the development of discrete energy levels in those metal particles which are reduced in size to quasi zero-dimensionality. Quantum mechanically they can be considered as big atoms. Studies of the current-voltage (I-U) characteristics identified these clusters as single electron transistors and herewith as highly promising candidates as building blocks in future nanoelectronics. As a condition, the clusters - here it is especially Au 55 (PPh 3 ) 12 Cl 6 - have to be organized in two and one dimensions. Procedures have been developed to generate well ordered cluster monolayers by self assembling. Quasi one-dimensional cluster wires became available by degradation of monolayers by means of modified Langmuir-Blodgett techniques. Very first electrical investigations of short cluster wires indicate them as quantum mechanically determined units.
Continuous pseudo-inverse image reconstruction in spiral magnetic resonance imaging

A minimum-norm least-squares image-reconstruction method for the reconstruction of magnetic resonance images from non-Cartesian sampled data is proposed. The method is based on a general formalism for continuous-to-discrete mapping and pseudo-inverse calculation. It does not involve any regridding or interpolation of the data and therefore the methodology differs fundamentally from existing regridding-based methods. Moreover, the method uses a continuous representation of objects in the image domain instead of a discretized representation. Simulations and experiments show the possibilities of the method in spiral imaging. Simulations revealed that minimum-norm least-squares image reconstruction can result in a decrease of artifacts compared with regridding-based reconstruction. Besides, both in vivo and phantom experiments showed that minimum-norm least-squares image reconstruction leads to contrast improvement and increased signal-to-noise ratio compared with image reconstruction based on regridding. At the end of this paper, some possible applications of our reconstruction technique are proposed.
Using Complexity Thinking in Southern Africa Fostering Complexity Thinking in Action Research for Change in Social – Ecological Systems

Complexity thinking is increasingly being embraced by a wide range of academics and professionals as imperative for dealing with today’s pressing social–ecological challenges. In this context, action researchers partner directly with stakeholders (communities, governance institutions, and work resource managers, etc.) to embed a complexity frame of reference for decision making. In doing so, both researchers and stakeholders must strive to internalize not only “intellectual complexity” (knowing) but also “lived complexity” (being and practicing). Four common conceptualizations of learning (explicit/tacit knowledge framework; unlearning selective exposure; conscious/competence learning matrix; and model of learning loops) are integrated to provide a new framework that describes how learning takes place in complex systems. Deep reflection leading to transformational learning is required to foster the changes in mindset and behaviors needed to adopt a complexity frame of reference. We then present three broad frames of mind (openness, situational awareness, and a healthy respect for the restraint/ action paradox), which each encompass a set of habits of mind, to create a useful framework that allows one to unlearn reductionist habits while adopting and embedding those more conducive to working in complex systems. Habits of mind provide useful heuristic tools to guide researchers and stakeholders through processes of participative planning and adaptive decision making in complex social–ecological systems.
A dynamic topological sort algorithm for directed acyclic graphs

We consider the problem of maintaining the topological order of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) in the presence of edge insertions and deletions. We present a new algorithm and, although this has inferior time complexity compared with the best previously known result, we find that its simplicity leads to better performance in practice. In addition, we provide an empirical comparison against the three main alternatives over a large number of random DAGs. The results show our algorithm is the best for sparse digraphs and only a constant factor slower than the best on dense digraphs.
From Deterministic ODEs to Dynamic Structural Causal Models

Structural Causal Models are widely used in causal modelling, but how they relate to other modelling tools is poorly understood. In this paper we provide a novel perspective on the relationship between Ordinary Differential Equations and Structural Causal Models. We show how, under certain conditions, the asymptotic behaviour of an Ordinary Differential Equation under non-constant interventions can be modelled using Dynamic Structural Causal Models. In contrast to earlier work, we study not only the effect of interventions on equilibrium states; rather, we model asymptotic behaviour that is dynamic under interventions that vary in time, and include as a special case the study of static equilibria.
On The Communication Complexity of High-Dimensional Permutations

We study the multiparty communication complexity of high dimensional permutations, in the Number On the Forehead (NOF) model. This model is due to Chandra, Furst and Lipton (CFL) who also gave a nontrivial protocol for the Exactly-n problem where three players receive integer inputs and need to decide if their inputs sum to a given integer $n$. There is a considerable body of literature dealing with the same problem, where $(\mathbb{N},+)$ is replaced by some other abelian group. Our work can be viewed as a far-reaching extension of this line of work. We show that the known lower bounds for that group-theoretic problem apply to all high dimensional permutations. We introduce new proof techniques that appeal to recent advances in Additive Combinatorics and Ramsey theory. We reveal new and unexpected connections between the NOF communication complexity of high dimensional permutations and a variety of well known and thoroughly studied problems in combinatorics. Previous protocols for Exactly-n all rely on the construction of large sets of integers without a 3-term arithmetic progression. No direct algorithmic protocol was previously known for the problem, and we provide the first such algorithm. This suggests new ways to significantly improve the CFL protocol. Many new open questions are presented throughout.