Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparative evaluation of efficacy of conventional and passive ultrasonic irrigation with sodium hypochlorite against three endodontic pathogens: An in vitro study

Introduction: The main goal of endodontic therapy is the complete removal of the pulpal tissues and bacteria within the pulp space to provide an adequate space for three dimensional root canal filling, resulting in a positive environment for the regeneration of periapical tissues. Infections of endodontic origin are treated mainly by means of mechanical procedures aided by chemical substances, of which sodium hypochlorite (NaOCl) is the most commonly used. Different irrigation regimens have been proposed to enhance the effectiveness of NaOCl in disinfecting the root canal system, the use of ultrasonics being one among them. Based on these premises, the purpose of the study is to compare the efficacy of two different irrigation methods in reducing the bacterial count within the root canal. Objective of the Study: The aim of this study is to compare the efficacy of syringe-needle irrigation to passive ultrasonic agitation in reducing the bacterial count of three endodontic pathogens within the root canal. Methodology: The study was conducted on 50 extracted human teeth. Teeth were decoronated and the apices were sealed with autopolymerizing resin. The teeth were then inoculated and incubated with a suspension comprising equal amount of three endodontic pathogens: Streptococcus mutans, Candida albicans, and Enterococcus faecalis (E. faecalis). The canal preparations were done using crown down technique and samples were divided into two groups based on irrigation technique: Group 1; Syringe-needle irrigation and Group 2; Additional ultrasonic agitation of irrigant (2.5% NaOCl). The root canals were sampled after the procedure and the samples were inoculated on the respective selective growth media and the colony-forming units (CFUs) were calculated. The statistical analysis used was Student's unpaired t-test for intergroup comparison and one-way ANOVA and Tukey's post hoc test for intragroup comparison. Results: The Group 2 (ultrasonic agitation) showed highly statistically significant lower CFUs when compared to Group 1 (syringe-needle irrigation). E. faecalis proved to be the most resistant microorganisms of the three used in the study. Conclusion: Within the limits of the study, ultrasonic agitation of an irrigant proves to be a promising option to achieve significant bacterial reduction and thus achieves reliable and predictable endodontic success.
Simian Immunodeficiency Virus and Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Matrix Proteins Specify Different Capabilities To Modulate B Cell Growth

ABSTRACT Exogenous HIV-1 matrix protein p17 (p17) deregulates the function of different cells after its N-terminal loop (AT20) binding to the chemokine receptors CXCR1 and CXCR2. One site within AT20 has been recently found to be the major determinant of viral fitness following transmission of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) to the human host. Therefore, we sought to determine whether SIV matrix protein (MA) was already capable of interacting with CXCR1 and CXCR2 and mimic p17 biological activities rather than this being a newly acquired function during host adaptation. We show here that SIV MA binds with the same affinity of p17 to CXCR1 and CXCR2 and displays both p17 proangiogenic on human primary endothelial cells and chemotactic activity on human primary monocytes and B cells. However, SIV MA exhibited a higher degree of plasticity than p17 in the C terminus, a region known to play a role in modulating B cell growth. Indeed, in contrast to p17, SIV MA was found to activate the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase/Akt signaling pathway and strongly promote B cell proliferation and clonogenic activity. Interestingly, we have recently highlighted the existence of a Ugandan HIV-1 strain-derived p17 variant (S75X) with the same B cell growth-promoting activity of SIV MA. Computational modeling allowed us to hypothesize an altered C terminus/core region interaction behind SIV MA and S75X activity. Our findings suggest the appearance of a structural constraint in the p17 C terminus that controls B cell growth, which may help to elucidate the evolutionary trajectory of HIV-1. IMPORTANCE The HIV-1 matrix protein p17 (p17) deregulates the biological activities of different cells after binding to the chemokine receptors CXCR1 and CXCR2. The p17 functional domain responsible for receptors interaction includes an amino acid which is considered the major determinant of SIV replication in humans. Therefore, we sought to determine whether SIV matrix protein (SIV MA) already had the ability to bind to both chemokine receptors rather than being a function newly acquired during host adaptation. We show here that SIV MA binds to CXCR1 and CXCR2 and fully mimics the p17 proangiogenic and chemokine activity. However, it differs from p17 in its ability to signal into B cells and promote B cell growth and clonogenicity. Computational analysis suggests that the accumulation of mutations in the C-terminal region may have led to a further SIV MA adaptation to the human host. This finding in turn sheds light on the evolutionary trajectory of HIV-1.
Smooth wavelet frames with application to denoising

This paper considers the design and application of wavelet tight frames based on iterated oversampled filter banks. The greater design freedom available makes possible the construction of wavelets with a high degree of smoothness, in comparison with orthonormal wavelet bases. Grobner bases are used to obtain the solutions to the nonlinear design equations. Following the dual-tree DWT of Kingsbury (see Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE DSP Workshop, Utah, 1998, and Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust., Speech, Signal Processing (ICASSP), Phoenix, 1999), one goal is to keep the redundancy-factor bounded by 2, instead of allowing it to grow as it does for the undecimated DWT (which is exactly shift-invariant). For the tight frame presented here, optimal-tree based denoising algorithms can be directly applied.
Surface roughness effect on thermohydrodynamic analysis of journal bearings lubricated with couple stress fluids

Abstract The paper presents, surface roughness effect for thermo-hydrodynamic analysis of journal bearings extended to couple stress lubricants with high polymer additives. A modified energy equation is simultaneously solved with heat transfer equation as well as modified Reynolds equation by using Multigrid method. The effects of couple stress and surface roughness on the performances of a finite journal bearing are presented in detail. Further, it is shown that lubricants with couple stress and surface roughness, not only increases the load capacity and decreases the friction coefficient, but also generates a lower bearing temperature field. Thus, the lubricant with couple stress improves the performance of journal bearings. The characteristics of bearing are compared with numerical results.
Unusual Case of Double Primary Orbital Tumour *

(1) Multiple primary malignant tumours are themselves rare in children. (2) Two primary tumours of different pathological nature occurring in the same orbit at different times are very rare. (3) New primary tumours occurring in areas treated by radiotherapy for a different type of tumour are rare. The case concerns a schoolgirl who died at the age of 10 years from a meningioma arising in the roof of the orbit 6 years after surgical removal of a tumour of the optic nerve, gliomatous (astrocytoma) in nature. The orbit was treated with deep x-ray therapy after removal of the first tumour.
The Spread of Ras Activity Triggered by Activation of a Single Dendritic Spine

In neurons, individual dendritic spines isolate N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor–mediated calcium ion (Ca2+) accumulations from the dendrite and other spines. However, the extent to which spines compartmentalize signaling events downstream of Ca2+ influx is not known. We combined two-photon fluorescence lifetime imaging with two-photon glutamate uncaging to image the activity of the small guanosine triphosphatase Ras after NMDA receptor activation at individual spines. Induction of long-term potentiation (LTP) triggered robust Ca2+-dependent Ras activation in single spines that decayed in ∼5 minutes. Ras activity spread over ∼10 micrometers of dendrite and invaded neighboring spines by diffusion. The spread of Ras-dependent signaling was necessary for the local regulation of the threshold for LTP induction. Thus, Ca2+-dependent synaptic signals can spread to couple multiple synapses on short stretches of dendrite.
Developmental mechanisms that regulate retinal ganglion cell dendritic morphology

One of the fundamental features of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) is that dendrites of individual RGCs are confined to one or a few narrow strata within the inner plexiform layer (IPL), and each RGC synapses only with a small group of presynaptic bipolar and amacrine cells with axons/dendrites ramified in the same strata to process distinct visual features. The underlying mechanisms which control the development of this laminar‐restricted distribution pattern of RGC dendrites have been extensively studied, and it is still an open question whether the dendritic pattern of RGCs is determined by molecular cues or by activity‐dependent refinement. Accumulating evidence suggests that both molecular cues and activity‐dependent refinement might regulate RGC dendrites in a cell subtype‐specific manner. However, identification of morphological subtypes of RGCs before they have achieved their mature dendritic pattern is a major challenge in the study of RGC dendritic development. This problem is now being circumvented through the use of molecular markers in genetically engineered mouse lines to identify RGC subsets early during development. Another unanswered fundamental question in the study of activity‐dependent refinement of RGC dendrites is how changes in synaptic activity lead to the changes in dendritic morphology. Recent studies have started to shed light on the molecular basis of activity‐dependent dendritic refinement of RGCs by showing that some molecular cascades control the cytoskeleton reorganization of RGCs. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Develop Neurobiol 71: 1297‐1309, 2011
Expression and Characterization of DrrA and DrrB Proteins of Streptomyces peucetius in Escherichia coli : DrrA Is an ATP Binding Protein

Streptomyces peucetius, a microorganism that produces the anticancer drugs doxorubicin and daunorubicin, is itself resistant to the action of these drugs. The genes conferring resistance to doxorubicin and daunorubicin in S. peucetius have been sequenced (P. G. Guilfoile and R. Hutchinson, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 88:8553– 8557, 1991). Two open reading frames, drrA and drrB, were proposed to encode for an ABC (ATP-binding cassette) type of permease that carries out export of the antibiotics in an ATP-dependent manner. This article reports subcloning of the drrA and drrB genes into Escherichia coli expression vectors and characterization of their gene products. Upon induction from the lac promoter, a 36-kDa DrrA protein could be identified on Coomassie blue-stained gels. The DrrB protein was identified by use of a polyclonal antiserum generated against a synthetic peptide corresponding to a portion of the DrrB protein. Together, the DrrA and DrrB proteins conferred resistance to doxorubicin in E. coli. The DrrB protein was localized to the cell membrane. The DrrA protein bound ATP or GTP in a Mg-dependent fashion. ATP binding was enhanced on addition of doxorubicin or daunorubicin.
Semantic genetic programming

Semantic genetic programming is a recent, rapidly growing trend in Genetic Programming (GP) that aims at opening the 'black box' of the evaluation function and make explicit use of more information on program behavior in the search. In the most common scenario of evaluating a GP program on a set of input-output examples (fitness cases), the semantic approach characterizes program with a vector of outputs rather than a single scalar value (fitness). The past research on semantic GP has demonstrated that the additional information obtained in this way facilitates designing more effective search operators. In particular, exploiting the geometric properties of the resulting semantic space leads to search operators with attractive properties, which have provably better theoretical characteristics than conventional GP operators. This in turn leads to dramatic improvements in experimental comparisons. The aim of the tutorial is to give a comprehensive overview of semantic methods in genetic programming, illustrate in an accessible way a formal geometric framework for program semantics to design provably good mutation and crossover operators for traditional GP problem domains, and to analyze rigorously their performance (runtime analysis). A number of real-world applications of this framework will be also presented. Other promising emerging approaches to semantics in GP will be reviewed. In particular, the recent developments in the behavioral programming, which aims at characterizing the entire program behavior (and not only program outputs) will be covered as well. Current challenges and future trends in semantic GP will be identified and discussed. Selected methods and concepts will be accompanied with live software demonstrations. Also, efficient implementation of semantic search operators may be challenging. We will illustrate very efficient, concise and elegant implementations of these operators, which are available for download from the web.
OCULAR SYMPATHETIC PALSY IN PERIODIC MIGRAINOUS NEURALGIA

Harris (1921, 1926) described the main features of periodic migrainous neuralgia, and the subject has been well reviewed recently by Symonds (1956), by Bickerstaff (1959), and by Friedman, Carton, and Horanio (1960). We have examined the clinical features of 50 patients seen at the National Hospital in the past 10 years, of whom 24 were referred in the past 18 months. The observations in this series fully confirm the description of previous authors of the natural history of the pain, its prognosis, and the response to treatment with ergotamine tartrate. The occurrence of ocular sympathetic paralysis in migrainous neuralgia has been mentioned by several authors (Harris, 1926; Horton, Maclean, and Craig, 1939; Horton, 1956; Bickerstaff, 1959) but neither its frequency nor its significance has been emphasized. We have been impressed by the number of patients in this series who have shown evidence of an ocular sympathetic palsy, and we believe that the association provides additional evidence of the vascular aetiology of the condition.
High-Frequency Financial Econometrics

This book is fundamentally about the estimation of risk. At an intuitive level, risk is easy to understand: given an asset with a current price of say $100, what is the likelihood that at some future time—the risk horizon—its price will be less than $90? Or more than $120? And how does the probability of observing a price below $90 change as a function of the risk horizon? Such heuristic notions can be formalized in several different ways. Suppose that the (log) price of the asset follows Xt “ X0 ` σWt where Wt is a standard Brownian motion and σ ą 0 is a parameter quantifying the risk of X, which needs to be estimated. Suppose also that the price is observed at a sequence of fixed points in time, say at the end of each trading day. Then a simple measure of risk is the squared change in the observed price from one day to the next, possibly averaged over several adjacent intervals to obtain a smoothed estimate—this is, of course, the (daily) variance. As the number of intervals increases, and assuming the statistical properties of the underlying price process remain unchanged, this estimator eventually yields the true value of σ (or in fact its square). But asymptotic results can be considered in another sense: suppose that the total length of the observation interval is fixed (say one day) but the distance between observations within the interval becomes increasingly small—that is, one is in the realm of high-frequency data. Then another way to estimate risk on the interval is to sum the squared incremental price changes. This estimator is called the realized volatility, and it is this estimator, along with its variants and applications, that form the main focus of the book. Formally, if the observation interval has length T and the distance between observations is ∆ then the realized volatility is:
Annotated RDF

Real-world use of RDF requires the ability to transparently represent and explain metadata associated with RDF triples. For example, when RDF triples are extracted automatically by information extraction programs, there is a need to represent where the triples came from, what their temporal validity is, and how certain we are that the triple is correct. Today, there is no theoretically clean and practically scalable mechanism that spans these different needs - reification is the only solution propose to date, and its implementations have been ugly. In this paper, we present Annotated RDF (or aRDF for short) in which RDF triples are annotated by members of a partially ordered set (with bottom element) that can be selected in any way desired by the user. We present a formal declarative semantics (model theory) for annotated RDF and develop algorithms to check consistency of aRDF theories and to answer queries to aRDF theories. We show that annotated RDF supports users who need to think about the uncertainty, temporal aspects, and provenance of the RDF triples in an RDF database. We develop a prototype aRDF implementation and show that our algorithms work efficiently even on real world data sets containing over 10 million triples.
Attention Problems and Parent-Rated Behavior and Stress in Young Children at Risk for Developmental Delay

The aim of this article is to characterize the neurobehavior of young children at risk for developmental delay and attention problems. Two hundred and eighty-one children, ages 18 to 70 months, were evaluated. All parents/guardians completed the Child Development Inventory, Child Behavior Checklist for Ages 1½ to 5, Inventory for Client and Agency Planning, and Parenting Stress Index—Short Form. All children had significant delays (developmental ratios <.70). A Mann-Whitney U test compared those with and without attention problems (T score >70). A 2-tailed P value of <. 05 indicated statistical significance. Children with attention problems were more likely to have withdrawn behavior, sleep problems, and aggressive behavior. All had severe problem behaviors, and their families experienced significant stress. Attention problems and other serious problem behaviors occur frequently in young children at risk for developmental delay. Parental stress warrants prompt intervention for their children and positive supports for them.
Clonal diversity, clonal persistence and rapid taxon replacement in natural populations of species and hybrids of the Daphnia longispina complex

Hybridization is common among cyclical parthenogens, especially in zooplankton species assemblages of the genus Daphnia. To explore hybridization dynamics and the extent of clonal diversity in the Daphnia longispina complex, we analysed population structure in eight permanent lakes. Based on 15 microsatellite loci, three major taxonomic units emerged: two species, D. galeata and D. longispina and their F1 hybrids, supported by factorial correspondence analysis and two Bayesian methods. At the same time, the detection of backcross classes differed between methods. Mean clonal diversity was lowest in the F1 hybrids, as expected from the high rate of asexual reproduction. Within taxa, replicated genotypes were of clonal origin, but clonal lineages persisted in subsequent years in only one of three resampled lakes. In another lake, the taxon composition changed from being dominated by hybrids to complete dominance by one parental taxon. Such a year‐to‐year taxon replacement has not been reported for the D. longispina complex before. Our data on this hybrid complex illustrate that high‐resolution genotyping is essential for the understanding of ecological and evolutionary outcomes of hybridization in partially clonal taxa.
The Competition Complexity of Auctions: A Bulow-Klemperer Result for Multi-Dimensional Bidders

A seminal result of Bulow and Klemperer [1989] demonstrates the power of competition for extracting revenue: when selling a single item to n bidders whose values are drawn i.i. d. from a regular distribution, the simple welfare-maximizing VCG mechanism (in this case, a second price-auction) with one additional bidder extracts at least as much revenue in expectation as the optimal mechanism. The beauty of this theorem stems from the fact that VCG is a prior-independent mechanism, where the seller possesses no information about the distribution, and yet, by recruiting one additional bidder it performs better than any prior-dependent mechanism tailored exactly to the distribution at hand (without the additional bidder). In this work, we establish the first full Bulow-Klemperer results in multi-dimensional environments, proving that by recruiting additional bidders, the revenue of the VCG mechanism surpasses that of the optimal (possibly randomized, Bayesian incentive compatible) mechanism. For a given environment with i.i. d. bidders, we term the number of additional bidders needed to achieve this guarantee the environment's competition complexity. Using the recent duality-based framework of Cai et al. [2016] for reasoning about optimal revenue, we show that the competition complexity of n bidders with additive valuations over m independent, regular items is at most n+2m-2 and at least log(m). We extend our results to bidders with additive valuations subject to downward-closed constraints, showing that these significantly more general valuations increase the competition complexity by at most an additive m-1 factor. We further improve this bound for the special case of matroid constraints, and provide additional extensions as well.
Complexity Change in Cardiovascular Disease

With the fast development of wearable medical device in recent years, it becomes critical to conduct research on continuously measured physiological signals. Entropy is a key metric for quantifying the irregularity and/or complexity contained in human physiological signals. In this review, we focus on exploring how entropy changes in various physiological signals in cardiovascular diseases. Our review concludes that the direction of entropy change relies on the physiological signals under investigation. For heart rate variability and pulse index, the entropy of a healthy person is higher than that of a patient with cardiovascular diseases. For diastolic period variability and diastolic heart sound, the direction of entropy change is reversed. Our conclusion should not only give valuable guidance for further research on the application of entropy in cardiovascular diseases but also provide a foundation for using entropy to analyze the irregularity and/or complexity of physiological signals measured by wearable medical device.