Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bcl-2 and Bcl-XL Block Thapsigargin-Induced Nitric Oxide Generation, c-Jun NH2-Terminal Kinase Activity, and Apoptosis

ABSTRACT The proteins Bcl-2 and Bcl-XL prevent apoptosis, but their mechanism of action is unclear. We examined the role of Bcl-2 and Bcl-XL in the regulation of cytosolic Ca2+, nitric oxide production (NO), c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK) activation, and apoptosis in Jurkat T cells. Thapsigargin (TG), an inhibitor of the endoplasmic reticulum-associated Ca2+ATPase, was used to disrupt Ca2+ homeostasis. TG acutely elevated intracellular free Ca2+ and mitochondrial Ca2+ levels and induced NO production and apoptosis in Jurkat cells transfected with vector (JT/Neo). Buffering of this Ca2+ response with 1,2-bis(o-aminophenoxy)ethane-N,N,N′,N′-tetraacetic acid tetra(acetoxymethyl) ester (BAPTA-AM) or inhibiting NO synthase activity with N G-nitro-l-arginine methyl ester hydrochloride (l-NAME) blocked TG-induced NO production and apoptosis in JT/Neo cells. By contrast, while TG produced comparable early changes in the Ca2+ level (i.e., within 3 h) in Jurkat cells overexpressing Bcl-2 and Bcl-XL (JT/Bcl-2 or JT/Bcl-XL), NO production, late (36-h) Ca2+ accumulation, and apoptosis were dramatically reduced compared to those in JT/Neo cells. Exposure of JT/Bcl-2 and JT/Bcl-XL cells to the NO donor,S-nitroso-N-acetylpenacillamine (SNAP) resulted in apoptosis comparable to that seen in JT/Neo cells. TG also activated the JNK pathway, which was blocked by l-NAME. Transient expression of a dominant negative mutant SEK1 (Lys→Arg), an upstream kinase of JNK, prevented both TG-induced JNK activation and apoptosis. A dominant negative c-Jun mutant also reduced TG-induced apoptosis. Overexpression of Bcl-2 or Bcl-XL inhibited TG-induced loss in mitochondrial membrane potential, release of cytochromec, and activation of caspase-3 and JNK. Inhibition of caspase-3 activation blocked TG-induced JNK activation, suggesting that JNK activation occurred downstream of caspase-3. Thus, TG-induced Ca2+ release leads to NO generation followed by mitochondrial changes including cytochrome c release and caspase-3 activation. Caspase-3 activation leads to activation of the JNK pathway and apoptosis. In summary, Ca2+-dependent activation of NO production mediates apoptosis after TG exposure in JT/Neo cells. JT/Bcl-2 and JT/Bcl-XL cells are susceptible to NO-mediated apoptosis, but Bcl-2 and Bcl-XL protect the cells against TG-induced apoptosis by negatively regulating Ca2+-sensitive NO synthase activity or expression.
Clinical Data Mining: Problems, Pitfalls and Solutions

The wide spread of electronic data collection in medical environments leads to an exponential growth of clinical data extracted from heterogeneous patient samples. Collecting, managing, integrating and analyzing these data are essential activities in order to shed light on diseases and on related therapies. The major issues in clinical data analysis are the incompleteness (missing values), the different adopted measure scales, the integration of the disparate collection procedures. Therefore, the main challenges are in managing clinical data, in discovering patients interactions, and in integrating the different data sources. The final goal is to extract relevant information from huge amounts of clinical data. Therefore, the analysis of clinical data requires new effective and efficient methods to extract compact and relevant information: the interdisciplinary field of data mining, which guides the automated knowledge discovery process, is a natural way to approach the complex task of clinical data analysis. Data mining deals with structured and unstructured data, that are, respectively, data for which we can give a model or not. For example, in clinical contexts it is important to highlight those trials (variables) that are frequent in a particular disease diagnosis. The objective of this work is to study and apply methods to manage and retrieve relevant information in clinical data sets. A practical analysis from real patient data collected from several dementia clinical departments in Italy is reported as example of clinical data mining. The particular field of logic classification, where a data model is computed in form of propositional logic formulas, is investigated for clinical data mining and compared to other techniques, showing that it is a successful approach to compute a compact data model for clinical knowledge discovery.
Unsupervised Vanishing Point Detection and Camera Calibration from a Single Manhattan Image with Radial Distortion

The article concerns the automatic calibration of a camera with radial distortion from a single image. It is known that, under the mild assumption of square pixels and zero skew, lines in the scene project into circles in the image, and three lines suffice to calibrate the camera up to an ambiguity between focal length and radial distortion. The calibration results highly depend on accurate circle estimation, which is hard to accomplish because lines tend to project into short circular arcs. To overcome this problem, we show that, given a short circular arc edge, it is possible to robustly determine a line that goes through the center of the corresponding circle. These lines, henceforth called Lines of Circle Centres (LCCs), are used in a new method that detects sets of parallel lines and estimates the calibration parameters, including the center and amount of distortion, focal length, and camera orientation with respect to the Manhattan frame. Extensive experiments in both semi-synthetic and real images show that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised calibration from a single image, while providing more information.
Research on an Effective Mechanism of Task-scheduling in Grid Environment

This paper gives a definition of the communication overhead among nodes in task scheduling and resource management in grid environment, presents rules of building QoS routing tree based on the QoS routing algorithm, proposes grid heap-sort algorithm and QoS routing algorithm, and designs a scheme of grid task scheduling with the help of them. The results of its correlative experiment indicate that this design can guarantee quality of service in grid better
Stateless Mapping and Multiplexing of IPv4 Addresses in Migration to IPv6 Internet

IPv4 addresses will be soon exhausted while more and more users are pouring into the Internet. It is commonly understood that IPv6 is definitely necessary for connecting new users, but lack of resources in current IPv6 world discourages providers from developing their IPv6 market. Address and packet translations are considered necessary for Internet content resources migrating from IPv4 world to IPv6, but up to now there is no one translation approach scalable enough. We understand the scalability is essentially restricted by the states in routing and those in translation, and accordingly we propose a novel architecture, called IVI, where IPv6 subscriber addresses are mapped from IPv4 with a certain rule that keeps IPv6 routing table well aggregated and makes translation stateless at all. Moreover, we introduce multiplex into the mapping to accommodate the trend of IPv4 addresses being more and more precious. Analysis based on real traffic data proves that the proposed approach is feasible to be deployed by an ISP for its customer networks and the potential degradation in end-to-end performance is acceptable.
Generation of synthetic surface electromyography signals under fatigue conditions for varying force inputs using feedback control algorithm

Surface electromyography is a non-invasive technique used for recording the electrical activity of neuromuscular systems. These signals are random, complex and multi-component. There are several techniques to extract information about the force exerted by muscles during any activity. This work attempts to generate surface electromyography signals for various magnitudes of force under isometric non-fatigue and fatigue conditions using a feedback model. The model is based on existing current distribution, volume conductor relations, the feedback control algorithm for rate coding and generation of firing pattern. The result shows that synthetic surface electromyography signals are highly complex in both non-fatigue and fatigue conditions. Furthermore, surface electromyography signals have higher amplitude and lower frequency under fatigue condition. This model can be used to study the influence of various signal parameters under fatigue and non-fatigue conditions.
A Single-Chip CMOS Bluetooth v2.1 Radio SoC

A single-chip Bluetooth v2.1-compliant CMOS radio SoC that supports Enhanced Data Rates is implemented in standard 0.13 mum CMOS technology. All functions of a Bluetooth radio are integrated in the SoC, including RF, analog and digital parts. The RF transceiver features a polar transmitter, a two-point modulated fractional-N synthesizer, a 500 kHz IF receiver with first order low-pass analog filtering, and a DeltaSigma ADC with 74 dB dynamic range. The total SoC die area is 9.2 mm2 with only 3.0 mm2 for analog and RF circuits. The basic-rate radio power consumption is below 30 mA for both receive and transmit.
Toxicity of chlorhexidine on odontoblast-like cells

Chlorhexidine gluconate (CHX) is recommended for a number of clinical procedures and it has been pointed out as a potential cavity cleanser to be applied before adhesive restoration of dental cavities. Objective: As CHX may diffuse through the dentinal tubules to reach a monolayer of odontoblasts that underlies the dentin substrate, this study evaluated the cytotoxic effects of different concentrations of CHX on cultured odontoblast-like cells (MDPC23). Material and Methods: Cells were cultured and exposed to CHX solutions at concentrations of 0.06%, 0.12%, 0.2%, 1% and 2%. Pure culture medium (α-MEM) and 3% hydrogen peroxide were used as negative and positive control, respectively. After exposing the cultured cells to the controls and CHX solutions for 60 s, 2 h or 60 s with a 24h recovery period, cell metabolism (MTT assay) and total protein concentration were evaluated. Cell morphology was assessed under scanning electron microscopy. CHX had a dose-dependent toxic effect on the MDPC-23 cells. Results: Statistically significant difference was observed when the cells were exposed to CHX in all periods (p<0.05). Significant difference was also determined for all CHX concentrations (p<0.05). The 60-s exposure time was the least cytotoxic (p<0.05), while exposure to CHX for 60 s with a 24-h recovery period was the most toxic to the cells (p<0.05). Conclusion: Regardless of the exposure time, all CHX concentrations had a high direct cytotoxic effect to cultured MDPC-23 cells.
Practical automatic loop specialization

Program specialization optimizes a program with respect to program invariants, including known, fixed inputs. These invariants can be used to enable optimizations that are otherwise unsound. In many applications, a program input induces predictable patterns of values across loop iterations, yet existing specializers cannot fully capitalize on this opportunity. To address this limitation, we present Invariant-induced Pattern based Loop Specialization (IPLS), the first fully-automatic specialization technique designed for everyday use on real applications. Using dynamic information-flow tracking, IPLS profiles the values of instructions that depend solely on invariants and recognizes repeating patterns across multiple iterations of hot loops. IPLS then specializes these loops, using those patterns to predict values across a large window of loop iterations. This enables aggressive optimization of the loop; conceptually, this optimization reconstructs recurring patterns induced by the input as concrete loops in the specialized binary. IPLS specializes real-world programs that prior techniques fail to specialize without requiring hints from the user. Experiments demonstrate a geomean speedup of 14.1% with a maximum speedup of 138% over the original codes when evaluated on three script interpreters and eleven scripts each.
Positional behavior of Pan troglodytes in the Mahale Mountains and Gombe Stream National Parks, Tanzania.

The positional behavior of habituated adult chimpanzees and baboons was observed for 784 hr in a year-long study. Comparisons between species were made to establish the distinctiveness of chimpanzee positional behavior and habitat use. Brachiation (sensu stricto, i.e., hand-over-hand suspensory locomotion) was observed in low frequencies among chimpanzees, and its significance for chimpanzee anatomy is judged slight. Although no significant differences were found between sympatric baboons and chimpanzees in the proportion of time spent in the terminal branches, or in the mean diameter of weight-bearing strata, chimpanzees exhibited evidence of a terminal branch adaptation in that they, unlike baboons, used postures among smaller supporting strata different from those used among larger supports. Among chimpanzees, unimanual arm-hanging was most common among the smallest strata and was associated with smaller mean and median support diameter than other postures. Unimanual arm-hanging was the only common behavior among chimpanzees that usually involved complete abduction of the humerus. A number of behaviors often subsumed under the label "quadrumanous climbing" were distinguished in this study. Compared to baboons and other cercopithecoids, chimpanzees did not show increased frequencies of large-stratum vertical climbing, and their vertical climbing did not involve significant humeral abduction. Arm-hanging (i.e., unimanual suspension) and vertical climbing distinguish chimpanzee positional behavior from that of monkeys.
ISOLATION OF A PROTEIN SUBUNIT FROM MICROTUBULES

Sea-urchin sperm tails (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus) were obtained by amputation in synthetic sea water and were purified by differential centrifugation. Most of the arms of the outer nine doublets and soluble matrix proteins were removed by this treatment. The central pairs of microtubules were dissolved by dialysis against EDTA at pH 7.5. The extract contained essentially a single component, with a sedimentation constant of 6S, in amounts sufficient to account for the protein content of the central pairs. Incubation of the extract with colchicine-3H gave binding levels approaching 0.5–1.0 mole of colchicine per 105 g protein. Sucrose-gradient analysis showed that the bound-radioactivity profile coincided with the optical-density profile of the 6S protein. It is concluded that the 6S colchicine-binding protein is a subunit of microtubules.
Survey of Adaptive Novel Class Detection and Classification of Feature-Evolving Data Streams

: In the data mining communities, Data stream classification causes number of difficulties. There are four major difficulties present. Those are: 1. Infinite Length 2. Concept-Drift. 3. Concept-Evolution. 4. Feature-Evolution. Since a data stream has hypothetically infinite length, it is unreasonable to store and utilize all the past data for training. Concept-drift is a regular incident in data streams, which takes place as a consequence of modification in the core concepts. Concept-evolution takes place as a consequence of new classes developing in the stream. Feature-evolution is an often happening process in number of streams, for example, text streams, in which new features that is words or expressions, show up as the stream advances. Most of present data stream classification methods tackle merely the initial two difficulties, and disregard the last two. To tackle concept-drift and concept-evolution, an ensemble classification technique can be implemented, in which every classifier is equipped by a novel class detector. A feature set homogenization method can be implemented for tackling feature-evolution. Also the novel class identification module can be improved by making it more versatile to the advancing stream, and empowering it to detect number of novel class at once.
The association of microalbuminuria and duration of mechanical ventilation in critically ill trauma patients.

BACKGROUND Microalbuminuria, which predicts organ failure, probably predicts the necessity of mechanical ventilation as well as its duration. The primary goal of this study was to determine the incidence and presence of a relationship between microalbuminuria and duration of mechanical ventilation in trauma intensive care unit (ICU) patients. METHODS Sixty admitted critically ill trauma patients were categorized by duration of mechanical ventilation to group A (< or =7 days) or group B (>7 days) in this prospective observational study. We measured serial spot urine micro-albumin-creatinine ratios (ACR) on admission to the ICU (ACR-1), at 24, 72, and 120 hours after admission, and on the days of beginning and discontinuation of mechanical ventilation (ACR-2 and ACR-3, respectively). RESULTS Seventy percent of the patients had microalbuminuria and 63.3% had an ACR > or =100 mg g-1 at admission. ACR-1 [mean (SE)] in patient groups A and B was 30 (6) and 63 (16) mg g(-1) (p=0.0002); ACR-2 was 40 (4) and 52 (8) (p=0.007); and ACR-3 was 30 (11) and 44 (11), respectively (p=0.023). For all patients, mean (SE) ACR-2 fell from 37 (4) to 34 (8) mg g(-1) on the day of discontinuation of mechanical ventilation (p<0.01). CONCLUSION The ACR can be used in estimating the risk of prolonged mechanical ventilation, even on the first day of admission of critically ill trauma patients.
Diagnosing Incompatibilities in Web Service Interactions for Automatic Generation of Adapters

Interactions between two applications encapsulated into Web services consist in series of message exchanges that must conform to service interfaces. The study reported in this text aims at dealing with the issues that arise when interactions between two services (a client and a provider) fail because their interfaces are incompatible. This may happen because the provider has evolved and its interface has been modified. It may also happen because the client decided to change for another provider which addresses the same needs but offers a different interface. The contribution of the proposed approach is twofold. First, given two services, all incompatibilities that may exist between their interfaces are automatically detected and classified into patterns. Second, according to the patterns that have been recognized, an adapter is then automatically generated. This latter is intended to act as an intermediate between the client and the provider, therefore seamlessly reconciling interactions between them.
I-vector estimation using informative priors for adaptation of deep neural networks

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ISCA via http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/interspeech_2015/i15_2872. html Supporting data for this paper is available at the http://www.repository. cam.ac. uk/handle/1810/248387 data repository.
On the Robustness of Fingerprint Liveness Detection Algorithms against New Materials used for Spoofing

Fingerprint biometric systems may be deceived by attacks at sensor level that use fake fingers. A secure fingerprint scanner is required to possess the ability to determine if the image comes from a living individual or not. Recently, several liveness detection approaches have been proposed to address this problem. At present performances of the existing software-based solutions have been assessed with different sensors and using small data sets. Moreover, it is assumed that fake fingerprints are produced by adopting the same materials used for training the system. This paper looks at the cases where the test spoof finger is made by employing a material new for the fingerprint sensor. We propose an experimental comparison among the current fingerprint liveness detection approaches accomplished by adopting materials for training different than those used for testing. Experiments have been performed by using standard databases taken from the LivDet09 Competition.
A Planning and Control Framework for Humanoid Systems: Robust, Optimal, and Real-time Performance

Humanoid robots are increasingly demanded to operate in interactive and human-surrounded environments while achieving sophisticated locomotion and manipulation tasks. To accomplish these tasks, roboticists unremittingly seek for advanced methods that generate whole-body coordination behaviors and meanwhile fulfill various planning and control objectives. Undoubtedly, these goals pose fundamental challenges to the robotics and control community. To take an incremental step towards reducing the performance gap between theoretical foundations and real implementations, we present a planning and control framework for the humanoid, especially legged robots, for achieving high performance and generating agile motions. A particular concentration is on the robust, optimal and real-time performance. This framework constitutes three hierarchical layers: First, we present a robust optimal phase-space planning framework for dynamic legged locomotion over rough terrain. This framework is a hybrid motion planner incorporating a series of pivotal components. Second, we take a step toward formally synthesizing high-level reactive planners for whole-body locomotion in constrained environments. We formulate a two-player temporal logic game between the contact planner and its possibly-adversarial environment. Third, we propose a distributed control architecture for the latency-prone humanoid robotic systems. A central experimental phenomenon is observed that the stability of high impedance distributed controllers is highly sensitive to damping feedback delay but much less to stiffness feedback delay. We pursue a detailed analysis of the distributed controllers where damping feedback effort is executed in proximity to the control plant, and stiffness feedback effort is implemented in a latency-prone centralized control process.
Effect of caffeine on peripheral chemoreceptor activity in premature neonates: interaction with sleep stages.

Caffeine is widely used for the treatment of apnea in premature neonates. However, the localization of caffeine's target site (central nervous system and/or peripheral chemoreceptors) is not well defined, especially for sleeping neonates whose sleep stages interact with respiratory control. The aim of this study was to assess the activity of the peripheral chemoreceptors in relation to sleep stages in premature neonates treated (or not) with caffeine for idiopathic apnea. Peripheral chemoreceptor activity was assessed in 22 neonates (postconceptional age of 36 +/- 1 wk with birth weights ranging from 790 to 1,910 g) by performing a 30-s hyperoxic test during active and quiet sleep. Eleven neonates received caffeine treatment (4.0 +/- 0.5 mg.kg(-1). day(-1)) and 11 served as controls. For all neonates, the decrease in minute ventilation observed during hyperoxia was greater during active than during quiet sleep. Neonates receiving caffeine showed a significantly greater decrease in ventilation during hyperoxia in both sleep stages, compared with controls (caffeine; -29.7 +/- 12.8% vs. control; -22.0 +/- 7.4%; F(1,15) = 4.6, P = 0.04). We conclude that caffeine administration increases the effectiveness of chemoreceptor activity. Because sleep stage durations were not affected by the treatment, it is likely that the decrease in apneic episodes typically observed with caffeine therapy is only related to respiratory processes and is independent of the sleep stage organization.