Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Conservative Sex and the Benefits of Transformation in Streptococcus pneumoniae

Natural transformation has significant effects on bacterial genome evolution, but the evolutionary factors maintaining this mode of bacterial sex remain uncertain. Transformation is hypothesized to have both positive and negative evolutionary effects on bacteria. It can facilitate adaptation by combining beneficial mutations into a single individual, or reduce the mutational load by exposing deleterious alleles to natural selection. Alternatively, it may expose transformed cells to damaged or otherwise mutated environmental DNA and is energetically expensive. Here, we examine the long-term effects of transformation in the naturally competent species Streptococcus pneumoniae by evolving populations of wild-type and competence-deficient strains in chemostats for 1000 generations. Half of these populations were exposed to periodic mild stress to examine context-dependent benefits of transformation. We find that competence reduces fitness gain under benign conditions; however, these costs are reduced in the presence of periodic stress. Using whole genome re-sequencing, we show that competent populations fix fewer new mutations and that competence prevents the emergence of mutators. Our results show that during evolution in benign conditions competence helps maintain genome stability but is evolutionary costly; however, during periods of stress this same conservativism enables cells to retain fitness in the face of new mutations, showing for the first time that the benefits of transformation are context dependent.
The effectiveness of various iron-supplementation regimens in improving the Fe status of anaemic rats

Less frequent iron supplementation may be equally as beneficial to Fe-deficient subjects as routine daily supplementation because of the short-term suppressive effect of oral dosing with large amounts of Fe on subsequent Fe absorption. In the present study, the possibility that the administration of an Fe supplement every 2nd or 3rd day may be as effective in improving Fe status as a daily supplement was investigated in anaemic rats. Anaemic rats were given a 4 mg Fe supplement every day, on alternate days or every 3rd day, as a single dose with a midday meal or as a multiple dose with a morning, midday and evening meal. A low-Fe diet (13 mg/kg) was given at all other times. After 7 d, erythrocyte count, packed cell volume, mean cell volume, haemoglobin concentration and total liver Fe were measured and compared with those of meal-fed rats which had not been given any supplemental Fe. Rats which received a supplement every 3rd day, a total supplement of 12 mg, had a similar Fe status to those receiving a daily supplement, a total supplement of 28 mg. Administration of the supplement as a multiple, rather than as a single dose did not improve recovery from the Fe deficiency. It is suggested that less frequent supplementation with a smaller total amount of Fe, should be considered in human subjects. Such a regimen would minimize unpleasant side-effects of oral Fe therapy, decrease the risk of adverse effects of Fe on the absorption of other essential minerals and substantially cut the cost of supplementation programmes.
Synthesising intonational varieties of Swedish

Within the research project SIMULEKT (Simulating Intonational Varieties of Swedish), our recent work includes two approaches to simulating intonation in regional varieties of Swedish. The first involves a method for modeling intonation using the SWING (SWedish INtonation Generator) tool, where annotated speech samples are resynthesised with rule-based intonation and audio-visually analysed with regards to the major intonational varieties of Swedish. The second approach concerns a method for simulating dialects with HMM synthesis, where speech is generated from emphasis-tagged text. We consider both approaches important in our aim to test and further develop the Swedish prosody model, as well as to convincingly simulate Swedish regional varieties using speech synthesis.
Properties of the Ehrlich ascites tumor cell as determined by electron microscopy, ultracentrifugation, and hydrostatic pressure.

Ehrlich ascites tumor cells were ultracentrifuged in a gum arabic solution, or as stacks of cells in 0.9% sodium chloride solution for periods ranging from 20 to 30 min. Those suspended in gum arabic become greatly stretched and are sometimes pulled into two parts. The nuclei are displaced centrifugally and the relatively dense nucleolus (sometimes there are more than one) is forced against the nuclear envelope and adjacent plasma membrane causing them to become greatly stretched. Sometimes the nucleolus is thrown through both the nuclear envelope and plasma membrane becoming free of the cell. The interphase chromosomes are more dense than the nucleoplasm, and they are displaced centrifugally. However, when this occurs, it is revealed that the chromosomes adhere to the nuclear envelope. The forces holding them to the inner membrane of the nuclear envelope are relatively strong, thus causing the displaced chromosomes to become greatly stretched, or even broken, before they are detached. When subjected to a comparable centrifugal force, the stratification in the ascites cells is not so complete as has been reported for certain nonmalignant somatic cells.
A Study of Psoriasis Histopathological Analysis of Lesional and Perilesional Skin Biopsy

Psoriasis is defined as a common, genetically determined, inflammatory and proliferative disease of skin, the most characteristic lesions consisting of chronic, sharply demarcated, dull-red, scaly plaques, particularly on the extensor prominences and in the scalp. The prevalence of Psoriasis in Western Europe and Scandinavia is between about 1.5 and 3%. The low prevalence of Psoriasis in oriental people is now well-recognized. It is commoner in Indians than in Chinese or Malays. Female tend to develop Psoriasis earlier than males. This study ware undertaken to characterize histopathological features of the lesional and perilesional skin in the psoriatic skin biopsy and to evaluate the epidermal and dermal changes in psoriasis this is a prospective analytical study at Osmania General Hospital, Hyderabad for a period of 24months and total 100 cases formed the study group. Punch / Incisional biopsies were obtained from lesional and perilesional skin, routine processing done and H & E stain is used for staining. Itching and scaly, erythomatous plaque is most common clinical presentation. Age incidence – 8-70yrs and M: F ratio was 1.6: 1. Chronic plaque psoriasis is the most common variant. Lesional epidermal changes were acanthosis with parakeratosis with regular elongations and thickening in lower portion of rete ridges. Micromunro abscess in 39% and Kogoj abscess in 23% of cases. Perilesionally epidermal changes – mild acanthosis, parakeratosis, dilated dermal capillaries, mild dermal edema, and perivascular mononuclear infiltration was noticed most of the cases.
Advances in Brief Aberrant Methylation of the Estrogen Receptor and E-Cadherin 5 * CpG Islands Increases with Malignant Progression in Human Breast Cancer 1

Loss of expression for both theestrogen receptora and E-cadherin genes has been linked to disease progression in human ductal breast carcinomas and has been associated with aberrant 5 * CpG island methylation. To assess when, during malignant progression, such methylation begins and whether such methylation increases with advancing disease, we have surveyed 111 ductal carcinomas of the breast for aberrant methylation of the estrogen receptor-a and E-cadherin 5* CpG islands. Hypermethylation of either CpG island was evident prior to invasion in;30% of ductal carcinoma in situ lesions and increased significantly to nearly 60% in metastatic lesions. Coincident methylation of both CpG islands also increased significantly from ;20% in ductal carcinoma in situ to nearly 50% in metastatic lesions. Furthermore, in all cases, the pattern of methylation displayed substantial heterogeneity, reflecting the well-established, heterogeneous loss of expression for these genes in ductal carcinomas of the breast.
Blogger-centric contextual advertising

This paper addresses the concept of Blogger-Centric Contextual Advertising, which refers to the assignment of personal ads to any blog page, chosen in according to bloggers' interests. As blogs become a platform for expressing personal opinions, they naturally contain various kinds of statements, including facts, comments and statements about personal interests, of both a positive and negative nature. To extend the concept behind the Long Tail theory in contextual advertising, we argue that web bloggers, as the constant visitors of their own blog sites, could be potential consumers who will respond to ads on their own blogs. Hence, in this paper, we propose using text mining techniques to discover bloggers' immediate personal interests in order to improve online contextual advertising. The proposed BCCA (Blogger-Centric Contextual Advertising) framework aims to combine contextual advertising matching with text mining in order to select ads that are related to personal interests as revealed in a blog and rank them according to their relevance. We validate our approach experimentally using a set of data that includes both real ads and actual blog pages. The results indicate that our proposed method could effectively identify those ads that are positively-correlated with a blogger's personal interests.
0 Cooperative Global Localization in Multi-robot System

With the development of robotic technology, the application areas of robots have been greatly widened. The robots may serve as assistants (Elena et al., 2004), rescuers (Robert & Arvin, 2003) and explorers (Schenker et al., 2003). In many cases a multi-robot system has to be used, since many tasks cannot be completed with a single robot and multi-robot system can finish the tasks much more efficiently. As in a single robot system, knowing their relative positions and their global positions in the environment are the preconditions for performing tasks and coordination. Since a robot can determine the location of another robot relative to its own when they see each other, both robots can refine their internal beliefs based on the other robot’s estimate. In this way cooperative localization of multiple robots can greatly improve the localization precision and efficiency (Fox et al., 2000; Trawny et al., 2009). An area that has received some attentions in the single-robot case and very little attention in the multi-robot case is active localization (Fox et al., 1998). In active localization, the robot(s) may actively choose actions so as to aid in localization. Active localization has the potential to increase the speed and accuracy of localization further. In this chapter a mechanism of making robots coordinate their action actively during localization is proposed. In order to determine the exploration strategy, the ability to stably track multi-hypotheses of the robot’s own position and his partners’ positions is very important in active localization. However using traditional particle filters for localization tends to produce premature convergence, i.e. the hypothesis represented by particle filters converge to a small area of the state space with high likelihood too quickly. To overcome this problem a new version of particle filters termed co-evolution particle filters (CEPF) is proposed. Another problem of using particle filters in multi-robot localization system is the communication problem. When several robots want to share their estimates they have to transmit a large set of samples from one robot to another, so a great bandwidth is needed. To solve this problem the reduced set density estimator (RSDE) (Girolami & Chao, 2003) is used to estimate the density over robots’ pose, so that only a small sub-set of the original samples should be transmitted between robots, which can reduce the communication data considerably.
Flight muscle myofibrillogenesis in the pupal stage of Drosophila as examined by X-ray microdiffraction and conventional diffraction

In the asynchronous flight muscles of higher insects, the lattice planes of contractile filaments are strictly preserved along the length of each myofibril, making the myofibril a millimetre-long giant single multiprotein crystal. To examine how such highly ordered structures are formed, we recorded X-ray diffraction patterns of the developing flight muscles of Drosophila pupae at various developmental stages. To evaluate the extent of long-range myofilament lattice order, end-on myofibrillar microdiffraction patterns were recorded from isolated quick-frozen dorsal longitudinal flight muscle fibres. In addition, conventional whole-thorax diffraction patterns were recorded from live pupae to assess the extent of development of flight musculature. Weak hexagonal fluctuations of scattering intensity were observed in the end-on patterns as early as approximately 15 h after myoblast fusion, and in the following 30 h, clear hexagonally arranged reflection spots became a common feature. The result suggests that the framework of the giant single-crystal structure is established in an early phase of myofibrillogenesis. Combined with published electron microscopy results, a myofibril in fused asynchronous flight muscle fibres is likely to start as a framework with fixed lattice plane orientations and fixed sarcomere numbers, to which constituent proteins are added afterwards without altering this basic configuration.
Weak Emergence and Complexity

In this paper we consider Mark Bedau’s notion of weak emer- gence (WE) and relate it to various attempts to objectively construe complexity. We argue that the heavy reliance on a specific notion of complexity risks rendering the concept superfluous. Furthermore we discuss what sort of systems might reasonably be understood as exhibiting emergence at all and point out that the macro-level needs to be at least min- imally structured. A worry may thus be formed that macro- level generalisations provide the sort of short-cut that is ex- plicitly excluded from WE thus potentially making the con- cept apply only to chaotic systems of limited interest (in this context).
CD90 is Identified as a Candidate Marker for Cancer Stem Cells in Primary High-Grade Gliomas Using Tissue Microarrays*

Although CD90 has been identified as a marker for various kinds of stem cells including liver cancer stem cells (CSCs) that are responsible for tumorigenesis, the potential role of CD90 as a marker for CSCs in gliomas has not been characterized. To address the issue, we investigated the expression of CD90 in tissue microarrays containing 15 glioblastoma multiformes (GBMs), 19 WHO grade III astrocytomas, 13 WHO grade II astrocytomas, 3 WHO grade I astrocytomas and 8 normal brain tissues. Immunohistochemical analysis showed that CD90 was expressed at a medium to high level in all tested high-grade gliomas (grade III and GBM) whereas it was barely detectable in low-grade gliomas (grade I and grade II) and normal brains. Double immunofluorescence staining for CD90 and CD133 in GBM tissues revealed that CD133+ CSCs are a subpopulation of CD90+ cells in GBMs in vivo. Flow cytometry analysis of the expression of CD90 and CD133 in GBM-derived stem-like neurospheres further confirmed the conclusion in vitro. The expression levels of both CD90 and CD133 were reduced along with the loss of stem cells after differentiation. Furthermore, the limiting dilution assay demonstrated that the sphere formation ability was comparable between the CD90+/CD133+ and the CD90+/CD133− populations of GBM neurospheres, which is much higher than that of the CD90−/CD133− population. We also performed double staining for CD90 and a vascular endothelial cell marker CD31 in tissue microarrays which revealed that the CD90+ cells were clustered around the tumor vasculatures in high-grade glioma tissues. These findings suggest that CD90 is not only a potential prognostic marker for high-grade gliomas but also a marker for CSCs within gliomas, and it resides within endothelial niche and may also play a critical role in the generation of tumor vasculatures via differentiation into endothelial cells.
The wurtzite-zincblende phase transformation in irradiated zinc selenide

Abstract The damage produced in wurtzite platelets of zinc selenide by heavy ion bombardment has been observed by means of transmission electron microscopy. The annealing behaviour of such damage has been noted, and it has been shown that a phase transformation to the zincblende modification occurs under certain conditions. The origin of the partial dislocations responsible for this transformation has been identified and their cooperative motion has been observed.
Control of Secondary Granule Release in Neutrophils by Ral GTPase*

Neutrophil (polymorphonuclear leukocyte; PMN) inflammatory functions, including cell adhesion, diapedesis, and phagocytosis, are dependent on the mobilization and release of various intracellular granules/vesicles. In this study, we found that treating PMN with damnacanthal, a Ras family GTPase inhibitor, resulted in a specific release of secondary granules but not primary or tertiary granules and caused dysregulation of PMN chemotactic transmigration and cell surface protein interactions. Analysis of the activities of Ras members identified Ral GTPase as a key regulator during PMN activation and degranulation. In particular, Ral was active in freshly isolated PMN, whereas chemoattractant stimulation induced a quick deactivation of Ral that correlated with PMN degranulation. Overexpression of a constitutively active Ral (Ral23V) in PMN inhibited chemoattractant-induced secondary granule release. By subcellular fractionation, we found that Ral, which was associated with the plasma membrane under the resting condition, was redistributed to secondary granules after chemoattractant stimulation. Blockage of cell endocytosis appeared to inhibit Ral translocation intracellularly. In conclusion, these results demonstrate that Ral is a critical regulator in PMN that specifically controls secondary granule release during PMN response to chemoattractant stimulation.
A New Key Establishment Protocol and its Application in Pay-TV Systems

A pay-TV consumer uses a decoder to access encrypted digital content. To this end, the decoder contains a chip capable of decrypting the content if provisioned with the appropriate content decryption keys. A key establishment protocol is used to secure the delivery of the content decryption keys to the chip. This paper presents a new protocol and shows how the protocol can be applied in a pay-TV system. Compared to existing protocols, the presented solution reduces the risk that decoders need to be replaced in order to correct a security breach. The new protocol has recently been incorporated in an ETSI standard.
ALPHA/Sim simulation software tutorial

ALPHA/Sim is a general purpose, discrete event simulation tool. ALPHA/Sim allows a user to graphically build a simulation model, enter input data via integrated forms, execute the simulation model, and view the simulation results, within a single graphical environment. We introduce ALPHA/Sim and describe how to use ALPHA/Sim to build, simulate, and analyze a simple queueing type system. In addition, we briefly describe some advanced features and list some sample applications.
Metabolic and endocrine changes induced by chronic heatexposure in broiler chickens: growth performance, body composition and energy retention

Abstract The present study was performed in order to investigate the effect of chronic heat exposure (32",constant) on growth, body composition and energy retention of broiler chickens in relation to age. At 2and 4 weeks of age, fifty-four male Shaver broiler chickens were allocated to three treatments accordingto the following design: 22", ad lib. feeding (22AL); 32", ad lib. feeding (32AL); and 22", pair-feeding with the 32" group (22PF). Ambient temperature was kept constant at either 22 or 32" for 2 weeks. Heatexposure decreased feed intake by 14% YO between 2 and 4 weeks and by 24% YO between 4 and 6 weeks of age. Even with the same feed intake, chicks gained less weight at 32" than at 22", 55% less in young chickens and 22% less in older ones. Hot environmental conditions thus resulted in decreased feed efficiency; the feed:gain ratio was 2·85 at 32" compared with 2·06 at 22" in 22AL birds for the period4—6 weeks. Body composition appeared significantly affected by high ambient temperature. Feathering was reduced at 32" in absolute weight but not as a proportion of body weight. Heat-exposed birds showed a decrease in body protein content, protein gain and protein retention. Group 32AL birds were fatter than the pair-fed (22PF) or ad fib. -fed (22AL) groups at 22". The percentage of energy retained as fat was 79 in heat-exposed chickens compared with 64 in the control groups. The energy retained as protein:energy retained as fat for groups maintained at 22" (0·56) was twice that forthose maintained at 32" (0·28). These modifications should be investigated further in relation to metabolic and endocrinological changes.
Microstructural and Mechanical Characterization of Aluminum Matrix Composites Produced by Laser Powder Bed Fusion  

Laser powder bed fusion is one of the most widely used additive manufacturing process owing to its ability to produce functional near net shape metal components. This paper focuses on the microstructural and mechanical characterization of four aluminum matrix composites produced by laser powder bed fusion using AlSi10Mg as matrix with four different ceramic particles. On the basis of the building parameters, composites present specific microstructural features able to influence the strengthening mechanisms and, consequently, their mechanical and thermal properties. It is demonstrated that, in order to obtain dense materials, in composite processing, it is indispensable to use energy densities which are higher than that of the matrix. This change in process parameters probably implies a different heat profile in the part during the building process, with a consequent increase in cell size and decrease in yield strength of the MMCs with respect to the pure aluminum.
Use of near-infrared spectroscopy as a measure of cerebrovascular health in aging adults

ABSTRACT Neuroimaging techniques assessing oxygenation of cerebral blood (such as near-infrared spectroscopy, NIRS) may reflect general cerebrovascular health, a factor not always considered in studies comparing younger and older adults. We examined whether baseline dorsolateral prefrontal cerebral oxygenation (measured by NIRS) was related to cardiovascular risk factors and cognitive test performance in healthy older adults. We found that cardiovascular risk factors are associated with both baseline dorsolateral prefrontal cortex cerebral oxygenation and memory performance. In addition, cardiovascular health factors were associated with memory performance, and the relationship between cerebral oxygenation and memory performance was explained by these cardiovascular health factors, supporting our contention that NIRS can reflect general cerebrovascular health in older adults. Results suggest that studies examining differences in cortical activation in older and younger adults should consider the potential confound of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular health when interpreting data from imaging methods based on oxygenated cerebral blood flow.
When did Lou Gehrig's personal illness begin?

Henry Louis Gehrig played for the New York Yankees from 1923 to 1939, during which time he became the most famous first baseman in major league history. He is best known for playing 2,130 consecutive games and for the illness that bears his name: «Lou Gehrig's disease» ― amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)