Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The impact of obesity on the male reproductive axis

Abstract Obesity, defined as a body mass index (BMI) >30 kg/m2, has seen an important increase in prevalence in the last decades, not only in Europe and the United States, but also in developing countries. It is an established risk factor for numerous pathologic conditions like diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular diseases and cancer, but has also been linked to male hypogonadism. Several studies showed a negative impact of excessive BMI on testosterone levels, sexual function and sperm parameters. Possible mechanisms beyond this phenomenon are reduced hypothalamic and pituitary secretory function, excess estrogen production and reduced circulating sex-hormone binding globulin (SHBG). Peptides produced by the adipocyte may also trigger modifications of the reproductive function. Independently of the method used, non-surgical approach or bariatric techniques, weight reduction and a return to a normal BMI have been associated with improvement in the sexual function and levels of sexual hormones in obese males, showing that obesity related hypogonadism is preventable. Sexual and reproductive health might represent additional motivational factors for men in order to maintain a healthy life-style.
The Reliability Issue of Computer-Aided Breast Cancer Diagnosis

This paper introduces a number of reliability criteria for computer-aided diagnostic systems for breast cancer. These criteria are then used to analyze some published neural network systems. It is also shown that the property of monotonicity for the data is rather natural in this medical domain, and it has the potential to significantly improve the reliability of breast cancer diagnosis while maintaining a general representation power. A central part of this paper is devoted to the representation/narrow vicinity hypothesis, upon which existing computer-aided diagnostic methods heavily rely. The paper also develops a framework for determining the validity of this hypothesis. The same framework can be used to construct a diagnostic procedure with improved reliability.
German Noun Plurals: A Challenge to the Dual-Mechanism Model

In this article, the authors test one of the central claims of the Dual-Mechanism Model (Pinker and Prince, 1994), that is, that regular inflection equals default inflection. Based on results from an elicitation task with eight agrammatic Broca's aphasics and a lexical decision task with unimpaired subjects, the authors show that this assumption is not borne out. Their data on German plural inflection rather indicate that regular inflection is not necessarily identical to default inflection. To capture the German data, they have to assume regular but input-restricted inflection besides regular default inflection.
Extracellular ATP activates a cation conductance and a K+ conductance in cultured microglial cells from mouse brain

Microglial cells have important functions during regenerative processes after brain injury. It is well established that they rapidly respond to damage to the brain tissue. Stages of activation are associated with changes of cellular properties such as proliferation rate or expression of surface antigens. Yet, nothing is known about signal substances leading to the rapid changes of membrane properties, which may be required to initiate the transition from one cell stage into another. From our present study, using the patch-clamp technique, we report that cultured microglial cells obtained from mouse or rat brain respond to extracellularly applied ATP with the activation of a cation conductance. Additionally, in the majority of cells an outwardly directed K+ conductance was activated with some delay. Since ADP, AMP, and adenosine (in descending order) were less potent or ineffective in inducing the cation conductance, the involvement of a P2 purinergic receptor is proposed. The receptor activation is accompanied by an increase of cytosolic Ca2+ as determined by a fura-2-based Ca(2+)- imaging system. This ATP receptor could enable microglial cells to respond to transmitter release from nerve endings with ATP as a transmitter or cotransmitter or to the death of cells with resulting leakage of ATP.
Demand Based Routing in Network-on-Chip ( NoC )

In this paper, we present new routing technique called “Demand based routing” for mesh Networkon-Chip(NoC) which improves throughput in terms of tasks. We are proposing this because usually different nodes/tiles on NoC perform different tasks which intern may depend themselves. Various existing routing algorithms for Networkon-Chip(NoC) are improving throughput in terms of packets, global delay and energy consumption etc. In all these algorithms sender node is the initiator of packet transmission. Our proposal of “Demand based routing in NoC” aims to improve throughput in terms of tasks, where packet transmission can be initiated by receiver node along with sender node based on situation. So in this schema receiver can request a packet(which we termed as “demand”) based on situation. This routing technique improves task completion time of a node through demanding the required packet.
The wire is really easy to see (WIRES): sonographic visualization of the guidewire by novices.

OBJECTIVE To determine whether novices can distinguish between properly and improperly placed guidewires in a vascular access model after only minimal training. METHODS This was a prospective study involving trainees with no previous training in sonographic guidewire visualization. A vascular access model was created with guidewires positioned inside or adjacent to simulated veins. Subjects were taught to scan each wire to determine its location. Afterward, participants scanned a test model of five vein-wire pairs and recorded their answers as "inside," "outside," or "unsure. " The test characteristics of sonographic guidewire localization were determined using actual wire location as the criterion standard. RESULTS Forty trainees (21 emergency medicine residents, 19 medical students) participated, and each examined five simulated veins. There were 156 true positives (intravascular wire correctly identified), 38 true negatives (extravascular wire correctly identified), 2 false negatives, 2 false positives, and 2 cases in which the participant marked "not sure," which were reclassified as false negatives. Test characteristics were sensitivity 97.5% (95% CI 93.3-99.2) and specificity 95.0% (95% CI 81.8-99.1). The overall accuracy was 97.0%. CONCLUSIONS Sonographic guidewire visualization, a step recommended for ensuring proper vessel cannulation during central venous access, can be accomplished by novices with a high degree of accuracy.
Incipient sexual isolation in Laupala cerasina: Females discriminate population-level divergence in acoustic characters

Sexual selection by female choice can shape the evolution of male traits within populations, since the most attractive males experience an increase in fitness through elevated mating success. Speciation by sexual selection occurs when evolution in traits and preferences within populations causes differentiation among populations, such that females in alternative populations prefer sexual signals of their own population relative to others. Differentiated traits and preferences thereby play an active role in limiting gene flow between divergent populations. The effectiveness of differentiated preferences in maintaining differentiated male signals against the homogenizing effects of gene flow across populations will be limited by both the degree to which fe- males can discriminate against non-local males, and the breeding values of traits and preferences. Populations of the Hawaiian cricket Laupala cerasina have diverged in pulse rate, a sexually selected male signal, and female acoustic preference for pulse rate. Gene flow between neighboring populations may be reduced if migrants from sexually diverged populations experience re- duced mating success. We show that females discriminate among divergent songs characteristic of neighboring populations, that differences among populations in song and preference breed true in a common environment, and that mean preferences for each population closely match the mean pulse rates. Divergence in preference was observed only between populations that also dif- fered in song. Along with a striking ability to discriminate slight differences in song, correlated evolution of song and preference within populations could be a mechanism that promotes assortative mating among populations, thereby reducing gene flow, and leading to speciation in Laupala (Current Zoology 58 (3): 416−425, 2012).
Failure distance-based simulation of repairable fault-tolerant systems

This paper presents a new importance sampling scheme called failure biasing for the efficient simulation of Markovian models of repairable fault-tolerant systems. The new scheme enriches the failure biasing scheme previously proposed by exploiting the concept of failure distance. This results in a much more efficient simulation with speedups over failure biasing of orders of magnitude in typical cases. The paper also discusses the efficient implementation of the new importance sampling scheme and presents a practical method for the optimization of the biasing parameters.
Depicting qudit quantum mechanics and mutually unbiased qudit theories

We generalize the ZX calculus to quantum systems of dimension higher than two. The resulting calculus is sound and universal for quantum mechanics. We define the notion of a mutually unbiased qudit theory and study two particular instances of these theories in detail: qudit stabilizer quantum mechanics and Spekkens-Schreiber toy theory for dits. The calculus allows us to analyze the structure of qudit stabilizer quantum mechanics and provides a geometrical picture of qudit stabilizer theory using D-toruses, which generalizes the Bloch sphere picture for qubit stabilizer quantum mechanics. We also use our framework to describe generalizations of Spekkens toy theory to higher dimensional systems. This gives a novel proof that qudit stabilizer quantum mechanics and Spekkens-Schreiber toy theory for dits are operationally equivalent in three dimensions. The qudit pictorial calculus is a useful tool to study quantum foundations, understand the relationship between qubit and qudit quantum mechanics, and provide a novel, high level description of quantum information protocols.
Comparative Laboratory Study of 12 Devices for Agriculture Extension Phase 1 Report of Devices for Agriculture Extension : A Comparative Landscape Study

The commoditization of consumer audio-video electronics offers a tantalizingly low-cost channel for disseminating information to under-educated, possibly illiterate, populations such as those living in remote rural areas in developing countries. Examples include devices such as Dictaphones, mid-tier mobile phones, and low-cost video camcorders. Agriculture extension is the focus of this study, but analogous applications are seen for instructional scenarios in hygiene and healthcare, literacy instruction, and microfinance. We surveyed 12 available devices in terms of cost and features, through laboratory analysis that did not involve investigations in the field (an ongoing follow-up study tests 4 devices in low-income farming contexts). Devices were analyzed with respect to their cost, ruggedness, usability, ease of content authoring, and other factors which are critical for large-scale usage. This report overviews the conclusion from the study, preceded by several caveats regarding the use of electronic technologies for agriculture extension. Among the caveats: 1) Agriculture extension is best thought of as a process of deep education, which requires not only the thin dissemination of information and knowledge, but fundamental changes in behavior and habit which are not readily transmitted outside of a strong institutional framework. 2) Technology is an ongoing cost, of which cost of hardware is a relatively small part. Costs of maintenance, repair, upgrade, training, and so forth rapidly add up. 3) Automated processes are not necessarily cheaper or better in international development contexts, as the human touch can provide important elements of trust and hand-holding that technology alone cannot. Also, with low costs of labor, technology is not always cheaper. 4) There is no single " perfect " technology even for the purposes of agriculture extension. Different scenarios call for markedly different features. The study's conclusions include the following: a) With respect to electronic technology use, agriculture extension can be broadly classified into several usage contexts, including one-to-one or small-group instruction, large-group presentations, individual or household self-study situations, peer-to-peer content production, and formal content production. b) Small-group presentations require rugged, portable devices, but demand less in the way of feature richness or ease of use, as the assumption is that an instructor or mentor figure is present. Large-group presentations require high-volume, high-quality audio and/or large-screen video. Self-study situations require what small-group presentations require, but additionally must be very low-cost and have a simple user interface. c) There is a very consistent tradeoff between device cost and features in the obvious way, with higher …
Porcine corneal cell culture models for studying epidemic keratoconjunctivitis

Purpose Epidemic keratoconjunctivitis (EKC) is a severe ocular infection caused by a few types (8, 19a [relabeled as 64 recently], 37, 53, and 54) of human adenoviruses (HAdVs). HAdVs are known for their strong host species specificity that limits studying HAdV virulence and pathophysiology in animal models. Methods A HAdV infection model of primary porcine corneal epithelial cells (PPCE) and primary porcine corneal keratocytes (PPCK) was established and compared to primary human corneal epithelial cells (PHCE) and primary human corneal keratocytes (PHCK). Induction of interleukin-8 (IL-8) messenger RNA (mRNA), HAdV DNA replication, and the release of infectious virus progeny by the EKC-associated type HAdV-D37 and the non-EKC-associated type HAdV-D22 were studied. Results PPCE and PPCK morphology and the expression of α2,3-linked sialic acid, the main receptor of EKC-associated HAdV types, were akin to human corneal cells (PHCE and PHCK). Induction of IL-8 mRNA was observed as early as 8 h after HAdV infection. Induction of IL-8 mRNA by HAdV-D37 infection was significantly higher (p≤0.001) than by HAdV-D22 infection in PPCE, PPCK, PHCE, and PHCK. Detection of HAdV-DNA replication, release of infectious virus progeny, and the development of cytopathic effect indicated that PPCE and PPCK were fully permissive for HAdV-D37 and HAdV-D22 replication as were the human corneal cells (PHCE and PHCK). Infectious virus titers after HAdV-D37 infection (1.0×105 TCID50/ml) were significantly higher (p=0.001) than after HAdV-D22 infection (1.8×104 TCID50/ml) in PPCE, PHCE, and PHCK but not significantly different in PPCK. Conclusions Primary porcine epithelial cells and keratocytes are nonhuman corneal cell culture models fully permissive for HAdV infection. The models hold promise for studying the virulence and pathophysiology of EKC-associated adenovirus types compared to other adenovirus types.
THE DYNAMIC FACTOR IN ENLARGEMENT OF CORONARY ARTERIAL ANASTOMOSES, AND PARADOXICAL CHANGES IN THE SUBENDOCARDIAL PLEXUS

Most investigators are agreed that frequent arterial anastomoses of relatively large size may be demonstrated in the coronary circulation in the presence of obliterative coronary artery disease. Evidence has been presented which shows that the enlarged anastomotic channels found in disease may in fact be derived from pre-existing, pre-capillary communications (Fulton, 1960, 1963a,b). Although there is a considerable body of information concerning the effects of coronary artery ligation on collateral blood flow in the experimental animal (Gregg, 1950) and on the increased incidence of readily injectable intercoronary communication in the presence of coronary occlusion (Zoll, Wessler, and Blumgart, 1951a), knowledge about the exact anastomotic pathways concerned and detail of their structural change is still somewhat sketchy. Enlargement of anastomoses on the surface of the heart has tended to attract greater notice than have changes taking place in the deeper vessels. This is probably attributable to the relative ease with which the superficial vessels may be demonstrated. However, an arterial network in the -inner zone of the left ventricle was described independently in the normal heart by Spalteholz (1907, 1924) and by Gross (1921), and the subendocardial network has been shown to undergo great enlargement and to exert profound influence on the distribution of blood to the heart in coronary artery disease (Fulton, 1956, 1960, 1964b). Apart from the observations made in the present investigation, enlargement of the vessels composing the subendocardial plexus of the left ventricle appears to have received little attention in pathology. It is perhaps for this reason that the apparent paradox of enlargement of these vessels under conditions of severe restriction of total blood flow to the heart has excited so little comment hitherto. The manner in which the subendocardial arterial plexus of the left ventricle enlarges in the presence of coronary artery disease, and some factors that promote anastomotic enlargement at this -site, and elsewhere in the heart, are considered in this communication.
Hubble Space Telescope Proper Motion Confirms the Optical Identification of the Nearby Pulsar PSR 1929+10

We report on the proper-motion measurement of the proposed optical counterpart of the X-ray/radio pulsar PSR 1929+10. Using images obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS; average epoch 2001.73), we computed a yearly displacement of +97 ± 1 mas yr-1 in right ascension and +46 ± 1 mas yr-1 in declination since the epoch (1994.52) of the original HST Faint Object Camera (FOC) detection. Both the magnitude and direction of the optical proper-motion components are found to be fully consistent with the most recent Very Long Baseline Array radio measurements. This result provides an unambiguous confirmation of the pulsar optical identification. In addition, we have used the combined STIS/FOC data sets to derive information on the pulsar spectrum, which seems characterized by a power-law component, apparently unrelated to the X-ray emission.
Efficacy and complications associated with a modified inferior alveolar nerve block technique. A randomized, triple-blind clinical trial

Objectives: To compare the efficacy and complication rates of two different techniques for inferior alveolar nerve blocks (IANB). Study Design: A randomized, triple-blind clinical trial comprising 109 patients who required lower third molar removal was performed. In the control group, all patients received an IANB using the conventional Halsted technique, whereas in the experimental group, a modified technique using a more inferior injection point was performed. Results: A total of 100 patients were randomized. The modified technique group showed a significantly higher onset time in the lower lip and chin area, and was frequently associated to a lingual electric discharge sensation. Three failures were recorded, 2 of them in the experimental group. No relevant local or systemic complications were registered. Conclusions: Both IANB techniques used in this trial are suitable for lower third molar removal. However, performing an inferior alveolar nerve block in a more inferior position (modified technique) extends the onset time, does not seem to reduce the risk of intravascular injections and might increase the risk of lingual nerve injuries. Key words:Dental anesthesia, inferior alveolar nerve block, lidocaine, third molar, intravascular injection.
A Novel Video Object Tracking Approach Based on Kernel Density Estimation and Markov Random Field

In this paper, we propose a novel video object tracking approach based on kernel density estimation and Markov random field (MRF). The interested video objects are first segmented by the user, and a nonparametric model based on kernel density estimation is initialized for each video object and the remaining background, respectively. A temporal saliency map is also initialized for each object to memorize the temporal trajectory. Based on the probabilities evaluated on the non-parametric models, each pixel in the current frame is first classified into the corresponding video object or background using the maximum likelihood criterion. Starting from the initial classification result, a MRF model that combines spatial smoothness and temporal coherency is selectively exploited to generate more reliable video objects. The nonparametric model and the temporal saliency map for each video object are updated and propagated for the future tracking. Experimental results on several MPEG-4 test sequences demonstrate the good segmentation performance of our approach.
Mobile cloud offloading for malware detections with learning

Accurate malware detections on mobile devices such as smartphones require fast processing of a large number of data and thus cloud offloading can be used to improve the security performance of mobile devices with limited resources. The performance of malware detection with cloud offloading depends on the computation speed of the cloud, the population sharing the cloud resources and the bandwidth of the radio access. In the paper, we investigate the offloading rates of smartphones connecting to the same security server in a cloud under dynamic network bandwidths and formulate their interactions as a non-cooperative mobile cloud offloading game. The Nash equilibrium of the mobile cloud offloading game and the existence condition are presented. An offloading algorithm based on Q-learning is proposed for smartphones to determine their offloading rates for malware detection with unknown parameters such as transmission costs. Simulation results show that the proposed offloading strategy can achieve the optimal rate and improve the user's utility under dynamic network bandwidths.
Comparative Genomics Reveals Multiple Genetic Backgrounds of Human Pathogenicity in the Trypanosoma brucei Complex

The Trypanosoma brucei complex contains a number of subspecies with exceptionally variable life histories, including zoonotic subspecies, which are causative agents of human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) in sub-Saharan Africa. Paradoxically, genomic variation between taxa is extremely low. We analyzed the whole-genome sequences of 39 isolates across the T. brucei complex from diverse hosts and regions, identifying 608,501 single nucleotide polymorphisms that represent 2.33% of the nuclear genome. We show that human pathogenicity occurs across a wide range of parasite genotypes, and taxonomic designation does not reflect genetic variation across the group, as previous studies have suggested based on a small number of genes. This genome-wide study allowed the identification of significant host and geographic location associations. Strong purifying selection was detected in genomic regions associated with cytoskeleton structure, and regulatory genes associated with antigenic variation, suggesting conservation of these regions in African trypanosomes. In agreement with expectations drawn from meiotic reciprocal recombination, differences in average linkage disequilibrium between chromosomes in T. brucei correlate positively with chromosome size. In addition to insights into the life history of a diverse group of eukaryotic parasites, the documentation of genomic variation across the T. brucei complex and its association with specific hosts and geographic localities will aid in the development of comprehensive monitoring tools crucial to the proposed elimination of HAT by 2020, and on a shorter term, for monitoring the feared merger between the two human infective parasites, T. brucei rhodesiense and T. b. gambiense, in northern Uganda.