Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SARS Coronavirus Papain-Like Protease Inhibits the TLR7 Signaling Pathway through Removing Lys63-Linked Polyubiquitination of TRAF3 and TRAF6

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) papain-like protease (PLPro) reportedly inhibits the production of type I interferons (IFNs) and pro-inflammatory cytokines in Toll-like receptor 3 (TLR3) and retinoic acid-inducible gene 1 (RIG-I) pathways. The study investigated the inhibitory effect and its antagonistic mechanism of SARS-CoV PLPro on TLR7-mediated cytokine production. TLR7 agonist (imiquimod (IMQ)) concentration-dependently induced activation of ISRE-, NF-κB- and AP-1-luciferase reporters, as well as the production of IFN-α, IFN-β, TNF-α, IL-6 and IL-8 in human promonocyte cells. However, SARS-CoV PLPro significantly inhibited IMQ-induced cytokine production through suppressing the activation of transcription factors IRF-3, NF-κB and AP-1. Western blot analysis with anti-Lys48 and anti-Lys63 ubiquitin antibodies indicated the SARS-CoV PLPro removed Lys63-linked ubiquitin chains of TRAF3 and TRAF6, but not Lys48-linked ubiquitin chains in un-treated and treated cells. The decrease in the activated state of TRAF3 and TRAF6 correlated with the inactivation of TBK1 in response to IMQ by PLPro. The results revealed that the antagonism of SARS-CoV PLPro on TLR7-mediated innate immunity was associated with the negative regulation of TRAF3/6-TBK1-IRF3/NF-κB/AP1 signals.
The association between vitamin D and COPD risk, severity, and exacerbation: an updated systematic review and meta-analysis

Background In recent years, the pleiotropic roles of vitamin D have been highlighted in various diseases. However, the association between serum vitamin D and COPD is not well studied. This updated systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to assess the relationship between vitamin D and the risk, severity, and exacerbation of COPD. Methods A systematic literature search was conducted in PubMed, Medline, EMBASE, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang, and Weipu databases. The pooled risk estimates were standardized mean difference (SMD) with 95% confidence interval (CI) for vitamin D levels and odds ratio (OR) with 95% CI for vitamin D deficiency. Meta-regression and subgroup analyses were performed on latitude, body mass index, and assay method. Results A total of 21 studies, including 4,818 COPD patients and 7,175 controls, were included. Meta-analysis showed that lower serum vitamin D levels were found in COPD patients than in controls (SMD: −0.69, 95% CI: −1.00, −0.38, P<0.001), especially in severe COPD (SMD: −0.87, 95% CI: −1.51, −0.22, P=0.001) and COPD exacerbation (SMD: −0.43, 95% CI: −0.70, −0.15, P=0.002). Vitamin D deficiency was associated with increased risk of COPD (OR: 1.77, 95% CI: 1.18, 2.64, P=0.006) and with COPD severity (OR: 2.83, 95% CI: 2.00, 4.00, P<0.001) but not with COPD exacerbation (OR: 1.17, 95% CI: 0.86, 1.59, P=0.326). Assay methods had significant influence on the heterogeneity of vitamin D deficiency and COPD risk. Conclusion Serum vitamin D levels were inversely associated with COPD risk, severity, and exacerbation. Vitamin D deficiency is associated with increased risk of COPD and severe COPD but not with COPD exacerbation. It is worth considering assay methods in the heterogeneity sources analysis of association between vitamin D deficiency and COPD.
Breast Cancer Subtype as a Predictor of Lymph Node Metastasis according to the SEER Registry

Purpose Breast cancer subtype correlates with response to systemic therapy and overall survival (OS), but its impact on lymphatic spread is incompletely understood. In this study, we used the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results registry to assess whether the subtype can predict the presence of nodal metastasis or advanced nodal stage in breast cancer. Methods A total of 7,274 eligible patients diagnosed with T1-3 infiltrating ductal carcinoma with known estrogen or progesterone hormone receptor (HR) and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) status, who underwent surgical excision of the primary tumor and pathologic lymph node evaluation, were included in this analysis. Patients were categorized into four breast cancer subtypes: HR+/HER2-; HR+/HER2+; HR-/HER2+; and HR-/HER2-. Binary logistic regression analysis was used to determine whether breast cancer subtype, tumor size, tumor grade, patient race, and patient age at diagnosis are independently predictive of lymph node positivity or advanced nodal stage. The Pearson chi-square test was used to determine whether progesterone receptor (PR) status had an impact on the incidence of lymph node positivity in estrogen receptor (ER) positive patients. Results Independent predictors of nodal positivity included breast cancer subtype (p=0.040), tumor size (p<0.001), tumor grade (p<0.001), and patient age (p<0.001), whereas only tumor size (p<0.001), grade (p=0.001), and patient age (p=0.005) predicted advanced nodal stage. Triple-negative cancers had a significantly lower risk of nodal positivity than the HR+/HER2- subtype (odds ratio, 0.686; p=0.004), but no other significant differences between subtypes were observed. There was also no difference in lymph node positivity between PR+ and PR- tumors amongst ER+/HER2- (p=0.228) or ER+/HER2+ tumors (p=0.713). Conclusion The HR+/HER2-breast cancer subtype has a higher rate of lymph node involvement at diagnosis than the triple-negative subtype. These findings may play a role in guiding regional management considerations if confirmed in further studies.
SOME INDEX FORMULAE ON THE MODULI SPACE OF STABLE PARABOLIC VECTOR BUNDLES

Abstract We study natural families of $\bar {\partial } $-operators on the moduli space of stable parabolic vector bundles. Applying a families index theorem for hyperbolic cusp operators from our previous work, we find formulae for the Chern characters of the associated index bundles. The contributions from the cusps are explicitly expressed in terms of the Chern characters of natural vector bundles related to the parabolic structure. We show that our result implies formulae for the Chern classes of the associated determinant bundles consistent with a result of Takhtajan and Zograf.
A novel heterogeneous FPGA architecture based on memristor-transistor hybrid approach

Heterogeneous Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are now considered a practical alternative to Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) thanks to their generalized reconfigurable nature and fast time to market. However, the area, performance gap between FPGAs and ASICs is still quite huge. In this work, we propose a novel memristor-transistor hybrid heterogeneous FPGA architecture that gives better area results as compared to conventional transistor-only heterogeneous FPGA. Memristor-transistor based hybrid building blocks of heterogeneous FPGA are designed and simulated in this work. Results show that hybrid blocks are 25%-60% smaller compared to transistor-only blocks. Furthermore, a generalized exploration flow is also proposed where open source and indigenously developed tools give end-to-end exploration experience. Ten heterogeneous benchmarks are placed and routed on proposed and conventional heterogeneous FPGAs using the exploration flow. Results show that proposed hybrid architecture, on average, consumes 56% less logic area, 60% less routing area; thus leading to 59% total area gain compared to conventional architecture.
Sub-band-power-based efficient Brain Computer Interface for wheelchair control

An efficient Brain Computer Interface (BCI) is designed and implemented to allow disabled people to control the motion of wheelchairs. It uses a compact portable EEG sensor to capture 14 brain signals and wirelessly feed them to the PC. Four classes of motions are used: Forward, Backward, Left, and Right. The signals are obtained in a free-style manner without compelling users to perform pre-defined mental operations. This led to variations in the results that shed some light on the cognitive aspect of the problem. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Sub-Band Powers obtained from the Wavelet Transform are used to reduce the signal dimensionality from nearly 14000 to only 3. A Feed-Forward Neural Network with Back Propagation is used as a classifier. The average classification rate is 91 % on the overall and as high as 97.5 % for some users. The effect of mother wavelet type and user dependence are also investigated.
Modelling a Java Ring based implementation of an N-Count payment system

N-Count is a system for offline value transfer. A prototype of an N-Count payment system has been designed, and it has been implemented in Java. We have used the Java Ring with the Java Card API as a secure device. The system has also been modelled using the Spin model checker. The combined prototyping and model checking has made it possible to investigate safety properties of the prototype, both formally and intuitively. Because of this model building activity, problems have been identified and solved before an actual system has been built.
$W$-Band Dual-Polarization Phased-Array Transceiver Front-End in SiGe BiCMOS

This paper discusses the design and implementation of a 94-GHz phased-array transceiver front-end in SiGe BiCMOS that is capable of receiving concurrently in both vertical (V) and horizontal (H) polarizations and time-duplexed transmission in either polarization. The compact front-end is implemented in 1.3 mm× 1.45 mm of silicon area to ensure compatibility with a scalable phased-array tile approach with λ/2 ( ~ 1.6 mm) spacing between elements. Each transceiver front-end includes variable transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) gain and 360° variable phase shift in TX and RX. Co-integration of the transmit-receive (T/R) switch with the power amplifier (PA) and low-noise amplifier (LNA) matching network minimizes switch impact on RX noise figure (NF). A varactor-based passive reflection-type phase shifter (RTPS) is shared between the TX and RX to reduce area. Analysis of loss mechanisms in on-chip RTPS leads to a novel RTPS load that minimizes RTPS loss while ensuring that the amplitude variation across phase shift is . In RX mode, the front-end achieves 30-dB RX gain, bandwidth of 15 GHz (84-99 GHz) with 10-dB NF in the high-gain mode. In TX mode, the front-end achieves >2-dBm saturated output power and >0-dBm output-referred 1-dB compression point (OP1dB) in V and H polarizations (time-duplexed), 30-dB gain, and 8-GHz bandwidth (89-97 GHz). The 94-GHz phase shifters achieve full 360° variable phase shift with 5-bit phase resolution (11.25° resolution) and error and 1-dB rms gain error at 94 GHz. The front-end consumes 160 mW in RX mode for dual-polarization concurrent reception/phase-shifting and 116 mW in TX mode for time-duplexed V and H output in the W-band.
Health News # 514-Chemicals Linked to Declining Male Reproductive Health October 02 , 1996

A lengthy new report from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences [NIEHS], a federal agency, describes serious deterioration of the male reproductive system in many regions of the world and suggests it may be caused by environmental chemicals that interfere with hormones. [1] The report begins by describing negative trends in men's reproductive health, then describes similar findings among wildlife, and finally reviews evidence that certain chemicals could cause the observed problems. The report ends by describing a research agenda that would help scientists understand these problems better and would provide additional support for public health officials taking action to protect future generations. Here is part of the summary provided by the authors of the new study:
Science and Morality

Tom Magnell has highlighted for us our expansive, weighty responsibility to foster the advancement of the sciences. The hope being that we will be able to drastically (and perhaps perpetually) increase human intelligence to the extent that we will hit an ogee point “where value is realized at an increasing rate beyond anything we set store in today. ” In this paper, I stress that the advancement of morality must play an important, if not a critically important, role in the advancement of science and the hope for Magnell’s ogee point. I make three points: (1) that there seems to be a symbiotic relationship between the advancement of science and the advancement of morality; (2) that morality can guard against hitting a local maximum value; and (3) that morality can help guide the advancements in science. JEL Code: Z19
Improving performance of PNN using clustered ICs for gender classification

The research presented in this paper proposes a novel gender classification approach using face image. The approach extracts features from grayscale face images through Infomax ICA and subsequently selects features using k-means clustering and classifies the clustered features employing PNN. All the experimental evaluations are done on cropped face images from FERET database using 280 faces for training and 120 different faces for testing. The approach, when features are not clustered gives maximum accuracy of 93.33%. However the proposed approach yields 95% accuracy through employing clustering on features, which is significant for gender classification using low resolution (118 × 97) face images.
Nanomaterials - Acetylcholinesterase Enzyme Matrices for Organophosphorus Pesticides Electrochemical Sensors: A Review

Acetylcholinesterase (AChE) is an important cholinesterase enzyme present in the synaptic clefts of living organisms. It maintains the levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine by catalyzing the hydrolysis reaction of acetylcholine to thiocholine. This catalytic activity of AChE is drastically inhibited by trace amounts of organophosphorus (OP) pesticides present in the environment. As a result, effective monitoring of OP pesticides in the environment is very desirable and has been done successfully in recent years with the use of nanomaterial-based AChE sensors. In such sensors, the enzyme AChE has been immobilized onto nanomaterials like multiwalled carbon nanotubes, gold nanoparticles, zirconia nanoparticles, cadmium sulphide nano particles or quantum dots. These nanomaterial matrices promote significant enhancements of OP pesticide determinations, with the thiocholine oxidation occurring at much lower oxidation potentials. Moreover, nanomaterial-based AChE sensors with rapid response, increased operational and long storage stability are extremely well suited for OP pesticide determination over a wide concentration range. In this review, the unique advantages of using nanomaterials as AChE immobilization matrices are discussed. Further, detection limits, sensitivities and correlation coefficients obtained using various electroanalytical techniques have also been compared with chromatographic techniques.
A robot for transnasal surgery featuring needle-sized tentacle-like arms

This paper discusses a new class of robots known as concentric tube robots and their application to transnasal skull base surgery. The endonasal approach has clear benefits for patients, but the surgery presents challenges that strongly motivate the use of robotic tools. In this paper, the concentric tube robot concept is described, and preliminary experimental results for transnasal skull base surgery are reviewed. Just as the da Vinci robot has revolutionized many laparoscopic surgeries, we expect concentric tube robots will enable the advancement of skull base surgery and the development of other minimally invasive procedures that require access through constrained paths.
Classification of iPSC colony images using hierarchical strategies with support vector machines

In this preliminary research we examine the suitability of hierarchical strategies of multi-class support vector machines for classification of induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) colony images. The iPSC technology gives incredible possibilities for safe and patient specific drug therapy without any ethical problems. However, growing of iPSCs is a sensitive process and abnormalities may occur during the growing process. These abnormalities need to be recognized and the problem returns to image classification. We have a collection of 80 iPSC colony images where each one of the images is prelabeled by an expert to class bad, good or semigood. We use intensity histograms as features for classification and we evaluate histograms from the whole image and the colony area only having two datasets. We perform two feature reduction procedures for both datasets. In classification we examine how different hierarchical constructions effect the classification. We perform thorough evaluation and the best accuracy was around 54% obtained with the linear kernel function. Between different hierarchical structures, in many cases there are no significant changes in results. As a result, intensity histograms are a good baseline for the classification of iPSC colony images but more sophisticated feature extraction and reduction methods together with other classification methods need to be researched in future.
Quantified Constraints Under Perturbation

Quantified constraints (i.e. first-order formulae over the real numbers) are often exposed to perturbations: usually constants that come from measurements are only known up to certain precision, and numerical methods only compute with approximations of real numbers. In this paper we study the behavior of quantified constraints under perturbation by showing that one can formulate the problem of solving quantified constraints as a nested parametric optimization problem followed by one sign computation. Using the fact that minima and maxima are stable under perturbation, but the sign of a real number is stable only for non-zero inputs, we derive practically useful conditions for the stability of quantified constraints under perturbation.
Melatonin, mitochondria, and cellular bioenergetics

Aerobic cells use oxygen for the production of 90–95% of the total amount of ATP that they use. This amounts to about 40 kg ATP/day in an adult human. The synthesis of ATP via the mitochondrial respiratory chain is the result of electron transport across the electron transport chain coupled to oxidative phosphorylation. Although ideally all the oxygen should be reduced to water by a four‐electron reduction reaction driven by the cytochrome oxidase, under normal conditions a small percentage of oxygen may be reduced by one, two, or three electrons only, yielding superoxide anion, hydrogen peroxide, and the hydroxyl radical, respectively. The main radical produced by mitochondria is superoxide anion and the intramitochondrial antioxidant systems should scavenge this radical to avoid oxidative damage, which leads to impaired ATP production. During aging and some neurodegenerative diseases, oxidatively damaged mitochondria are unable to maintain the energy demands of the cell leading to an increased production of free radicals. Both processes, i.e., defective ATP production and increased oxygen radicals, may induce mitochondrial‐dependent apoptotic cell death. Melatonin has been reported to exert neuroprotective effects in several experimental and clinical situations involving neurotoxicity and/or excitotoxicity. Additionally, in a series of pathologies in which high production of free radicals is the primary cause of the disease, melatonin is also protective. A common feature in these diseases is the existence of mitochondrial damage due to oxidative stress. The discoveries of new actions of melatonin in mitochondria support a novel mechanism, which explains some of the protective effects of the indoleamine on cell survival.
Natural Interaction White Paper

But what about the second one, calm technology? It is about interaction design, poetry, perception, quality, and it is almost completely unrealized. It is about much more subtle properties than quantities, miniaturization and wireless networking. Google returns less than 50 thousands results on the subject. The world forgot the most precious heritage of Weiser. This text is about calm technology [0] in the public space.
Using session types as an effect system

Side effects are a core part of practical programming. However, they are often hard to reason about, particularly in a concurrent setting. We propose a foundation for reasoning about concurrent side effects using sessions. Primarily, we show that session types are expressive enough to encode an effect system for stateful processes. This is formalised via an effect-preserving encoding of a simple imperative language with an effect system into the pi-calculus with session primitives and session types (into which we encode effect specifications). This result goes towards showing a connection between the expressivity of session types and effect systems. We briefly discuss how the encoding could be extended and applied to reason about and control concurrent side effects.
Ways of Listening and Modes of Being: Electroacoustic Auditory Display

Auditory display is concerned with the use of non-speech sound to communicate information. If the term seems at first oxymoronic, then consider auditory display as an activity of perceptualization, that is, the process of making perceptible to humans aspects or features of a given data set or system. Most commonly this is done using visual representations (which process we call visualization) but it is not limited to the visual channel and recent years have witnessed the increased use of auditory representations in the production of tools for exploring data. By way of semiotics and an aesthetic perspective shift this article posits that auditory display may be considered a form of organized sound and explores the listening experience in this context.
As dimensões da escala servqual na qualidade percebida por clientes de postos de combustível: um estudo em Teresina-PI

O estudo objetivou analisar a qualidade percebida pelos clientes de um posto de combustivel na cidade de Teresina/PI, por meio da mensuracao da qualidade dos servicos oferecidos. Para tanto, realizou-se um survey com 121 clientes do posto “no momento do encontro do servico”, utilizando intrumento de coleta de dados construido a partir das cinco dimensoes da escala Service Quality Gap Analysis ( Servqual ). Para analisar os resultados utilizou-se da estatistica descritiva e analise fatorial confirmatoria. Os resultados expressaram os fatores determinantes da qualidade percebida na visao dos clientes, evidenciando a participacao dos colaboradores em todos os fatores extraidos na analise, enfatizando relevância do fator humano no contexto de analise.
Thresholds in Random Graphs and ksat

In their seminal work [6],[7], Erdos and Renyi invented the notion of random graphs and made the fundamental observation that when the parameter controlling the edge probability varies, the random system undergoes a dramatic and swift qualitative change. “Much like water that freezes abruptly as its temperature drops below zero the structure of the random graph quickly changes from a primordial soup of small tree-like connected components to a graph in which the giant component, one of linear size, captures a constant proportion of the vertices. ” — Friedgut [10]. In this report we wish to present several results dealing with the existence and sharpness of thresholds in random graphs, having in mind the purpose of understanding the sharp threshold of random k-sat. As mentioned is [15], two main categories of questions can be addressed. One type is algorithmic (e.g., finding an algorithm that decides whether an instance is SAT or UNSAT, or that tries to minimize the number of violated constraints). Another one is more theoretical and deals with random instances for which one wants to predict the typical behavior (e.g., phase transitions and structure of the solution space). Beside being fascinating in its own right, the randomized version of the satisfiability problem, contributes to the evaluation of the average case complexity of this problem, and helps understanding the behavior and performance of algorithms. A random k-CNF (conjunctive normal form) formula with parameter M , is a boolean formula having the following structure: