Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Local Reconstruction and Visualization of Point-Based Surfaces Using Subdivision Surfaces

Point-Based Surfaces, i.e. surfaces represented by discrete point sets which are either directly obtained by current 3D acquisition devices or converted from other surface representations, are well designed for multiresolution storage and transmission of complex objects. Unfortunately, visualization of point-based surfaces requires to develop specific rendering techniques (e.g. splatting) since point sets are not well adapted to existing graphics hardware which is optimized for polygonal meshes. In this paper, we propose an efficient reconstruction and visualization technique of point-based surfaces that takes full benefit from the entire optimized pipeline implemented in graphics hardware. The basic idea is to generate a set of independent meshes using a local 2D Delaunay triangulation of the point set. These meshes are then glued together to get a visual continuity by using a subdivision process.
SEX DETERMINATION, SEX RATIOS AND GENETIC CONFLICT

Genetic mechanisms of sex determination are unexpectedly diverse and change rapidly during evolution. We review the role of genetic conflict as the driving force behind this diversity and turnover. Genetic conflict occurs when different components of a genetic system are subject to selection in opposite directions. Conflict may occur between genomes (including paternal-maternal and parentalzygotic conflicts) or within genomes (between cytoplasmic and nuclear genes or sex chromosomes and autosomes). The sex-determining system consists of parental sex-ratio genes, parental-effect sex determiners, and zygotic sex determiners, which are subject to different selection pressures because of differences in their modes of inheritance and expression. Genetic conflict theory is used to explain the evolution of several sex-determining mechanisms, including sex chromosome drive, cytoplasmic sex-ratio distortion, and cytoplasmic male sterility in plants. Although still limited, there is growing evidence that genetic conflict could be important in the evolution of sex-determining mechanisms.
Change in Body Size and Mortality: Results from the Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study

Background The association between change in weight or body mass index, and mortality is widely reported, however, both measures fail to account for fat distribution. Change in waist circumference, a measure of central adiposity, in relation to mortality has not been studied extensively. Methods We investigated the association between mortality and changes in directly measured waist circumference, hips circumference and weight from baseline (1990–1994) to wave 2 (2003–2007) in a prospective cohort study of people aged 40–69 years at baseline. Cox regression, with age as the time metric and follow-up starting at wave 2, adjusted for confounding variables, was used to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for change in body size in relation to mortality from all causes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. Results There were 1465 deaths (109 cancer, 242 cardiovascular disease) identified during an average 7.7 years of follow-up from 21 298 participants. Compared to minimal increase in body size, loss of waist circumference (HR: 1.26; 95% CI: 1.09–1.47), weight (1.80; 1.54–2.11), or hips circumference (1.35; 1.15–1.57) were associated with an increased risk of all-cause mortality, particularly for older adults. Weight loss was associated with cardiovascular disease mortality (2.40; 1.57–3.65) but change in body size was not associated with obesity-related cancer mortality. Conclusion This study confirms the association between weight loss and increased mortality from all-causes for older adults. Based on evidence from observational cohort studies, weight stability may be the recommended option for most adults, especially older adults.
Adaptive Fuzzy Tracking Control of a Class of Stochastic Nonlinear Systems with Unknown Dead-Zone Input

In this paper, a direct adaptive fuzzy tracking control scheme is presented for a class of stochastic uncertain nonlinear systems with unknown dead-zone input. A direct adaptive fuzzy tracking controller is developed by using the backstepping approach. It is proved that the design scheme ensures that all the error variables are bounded in probability while the mean square tracking error becomes semiglobally uniformly ultimately bounded (SGUUB) in an arbitrarily small area around the origin. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the control scheme.
Code Generation for CSM/ECSM Models in COSMA Environment

The COSMA software environment, developed in the Institute of Computer Science, WUT,was designed primarily for model checking of reactive systems specified in terms of ConcurrentState Machines (CSM). However, COSMA supports also Extended CSM (ECSM). The extensions allow for using complex data types and pieces of C/C++ code, attributedto CSM states and/or transitions. Because of these extensions, ECSM models cannot beverified by model checking, but they can be used as an intermediate step in code generation.The underlying CSM represent then the flow of control within cooperating components andthe communication among them while the extensions specify the data structures and thedetails of their processing.The paper discusses the code generation from ECSM diagrams. The approach is illustratedwith an example.
Dissociation of E‐cadherin and β‐catenin in a mouse model of total parenteral nutrition: a mechanism for the loss of epithelial cell proliferation and villus atrophy

Total parenteral nutrition (TPN) leads a loss of epithelial barrier function, decline in epithelial cell (EC) proliferation, and decreased expression of E‐cadherin. As a large portion of intracellular β‐catenin is tightly associated with E‐cadherin, we hypothesized that the loss of E‐cadherin would result in a redistribution of intracellular β‐catenin, and could be a contributing mechanism for this TPN‐associated loss of EC proliferation. An assessment of small bowel epithelium was performed in mice given either enteral nutrition (Control) or intravenous nutrition (TPN). TPN significantly down‐regulated E‐cadherin and β‐catenin expression, and resulted in a loss of a colocalization of these factors. TPN also up‐regulated phosphorylated (p)‐β‐catenin (Ser31/33,Thr41) and down‐regulated (p)‐β‐catenin(Ser552) expression. To further address mechanisms driving this, we observed a significant decrease in the abundance of p‐AKT and p‐GSK3β expression, and an associated decline in tcf‐4 transcription factors (cyclin D1, c‐myc and Axin2), as well as a loss of EC proliferation by 7 days. To address whether the mechanism driving these changes was the absence of nutritional factors, glutamine was added to the TPN solution. This resulted in a partial restoration of β‐catenin expression and EC proliferation, suggesting that an alteration in nutrient delivery may affect many of these changes. Based on these findings, the loss of EC proliferation with TPN may well be due to a loss of total β‐catenin, as well as a concomintant change in the differential expression of β‐catenin phosphorylation sites, and a reduction in β‐catenin mediated tcf‐4 transcription. This potential pathway may well explain many of the findings of mucosal atrophy associated with TPN.
Path loss and multipath effects in a real world indoor localization scenario

This paper presents results of a large real world experimental setup of an indoor localization system. We used a time-of-flight based radio range measurement system to collect a large body of ranging data between a mobile reference system and multiple anchor nodes with a fixed and known position. For our experiment the reference system moved autonomously through an office building while collecting ranging data. We used this data to analyze the impact of environmental parameters on the ranging accuracy. We saw effects which are not predicted by the standard channel models for multiple scenarios and discuss these effects in detail.
Regulatory Element Detection Using a Probabilistic Segmentation Model

The availability of genome-wide mRNA expression data for organisms whose genome is fully sequenced provides a unique data set from which to decipher how transcription is regulated by the upstream control region of a gene. A new algorithm is presented which decomposes DNA sequence into the most probable "dictionary" of motifs or words. Identification of words is based on a probabilistic segmentation model in which the significance of longer words is deduced from the frequency of shorter words of various length. This eliminates the need for a separate set of reference data to define probabilities, and genome-wide applications are therefore possible. For the 6,000 upstream regulatory regions in the yeast genome, the 500 strongest motifs from a dictionary of size 1,200 match at a significance level of 15 standard deviations to a database of cis-regulatory elements. Analysis of sets of genes such as those up-regulated during sporulation reveals many new putative regulatory sites in addition to identifying previously known sites.
High-Throughput RNA Interference Screening

The process of validating an assay for high-throughput screening (HTS) involves identifying sources of variability and developing procedures that minimize the variability at each step in the protocol. The goal is to produce a robust and reproducible assay with good metrics. In all good cell-based assays, this means coefficient of variation (CV) values of less than 10% and a signal window of fivefold or greater. HTS assays are usually evaluated using Z′ factor, which incorporates both standard deviation and signal window. A Z′ factor value of 0.5 or higher is acceptable for HTS. We used a standard HTS validation procedure in developing small interfering RNA (siRNA) screening technology at the HTS center at Southern Research. Initially, our assay performance was similar to published screens, with CV values greater than 10% and Z′ factor values of 0.51 ± 0.16 (average ± standard deviation). After optimizing the siRNA assay, we got CV values averaging 7.2% and a robust Z′ factor value of 0.78 ± 0.06 (average ± standard deviation). We present an overview of the problems encountered in developing this whole-genome siRNA screening program at Southern Research and how equipment optimization led to improved data quality.
Gain Adaptive Real-Time Stereo Streaming

This paper introduces a multi-view stereo matcher that gen- erates depth in real-time from a monocular video stream of a static scene. A key feature of our processing pipeline is that it estimates global camera gain changes in the feature tracking stage and eciently compensates for these in the stereo stage without impacting the real-time performance. This is very important for outdoor applications where the brightness range often far exceeds the dynamic range of the camera. Real-time per- formance is achieved by leveraging the processing power of the graphics processing unit (GPU) in addition to the CPU. We demonstrate the eectiveness of our approach on videos of urban scenes recorded by a vehicle-mounted camera with auto-gain enabled.
A Double Dissociation between Conscious and Non-conscious Priming of Responses and Affect: Evidence for a Contribution of Misattributions to the Priming of Affect

Studies have demonstrated conscious and non-conscious priming of responses and of affect. Concerning response priming, presenting a target-related (congruent) distractor prior to a target typically facilitates target responses. This facilitation – the response-priming effect – is observed in comparison to a less related (incongruent) distractor. An incongruent distractor would interfere with the required response to the target. This response-priming effect is found with both conscious distractors, of which participants are aware, and non-conscious distractors, of which participants are not aware. In partly related research, distractors have also yielded affective priming effects on the evaluations of task-unrelated neutral symbols that followed the target: In comparison to the congruent condition, participants evaluated a neutral symbol presented after an incongruent distractor-target sequence as more negative. This affective priming effect was sometimes ascribed to the participants’ misattributions of distractor-target conflict to the unrelated neutral symbols. Here, we set out to test this possibility. If the misattribution explanation of affective priming holds true, affective priming would be stronger with non-conscious than with conscious distractors: Mostly the non-conscious distractors would mask distractor-target conflict as the true affect-origin and, therefore, invite participants’ misattribution of the primed affect to the neutral symbol in temporal vicinity. In contrast, only with conscious distractors, participants would be aware of distractor-target conflict as the true affect-origin and should, therefore, be better able to attribute their affective responses to the distractor-target relationship itself. In three experiments, we confirmed this prediction of a stronger affective priming effect in non-conscious than conscious distractor conditions, while at the same time showing conscious response-priming effects to even exceed non-conscious response-priming effects. Together, these results amount to a double dissociation between affective priming, being stronger with unconscious distractors, and response priming, being stronger with conscious distractors. This double dissociation supports the misattribution explanation and makes clear that the amount of distractor-elicited response conflict alone does not account for the amount of affective priming. Moreover, the participants’ unawareness of the distractors is critical for the amount of affective priming of neutral symbols in temporal vicinity.
Iranian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences Association of Il-10 Gene Polymorphisms and Human T Lymphotropic Virus Type I-associated Myelopathy/tropical Spastic Paraparesis in North-east of Iran (mashhad)

which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The underlying mechanisms leading to the development of human T-cell lymphotropic virus type I (HTLV-I) associated myelopathy/tropical spastic paraparesis (HAM/TSP) in HTLV-I infected individuals are not fully understood. Host genetic factors appear to be involved as risk factors for developing HAM/TSP. We investigated the possible contribution of interleukin-10 (IL-10) as a risk factor to HAM/TSP by comparing frequencies of promoter region single nucleotide polymorphisms in HTLV-I infected Iranian patients who either remained asymptomatic or developed HAM/TSP and asymptomatic HTLV-I carriers. Healthy, uninfected individuals from the same region served as healthy controls. Significant differences were observed in the distribution of IL-10 promoter alleles and genotypes at position-819 and-592 between HAM/TSP patients and healthy controls (P=0.01), and between HTLV-I carriers and healthy controls (P=0.02). The frequency of the low IL-10 producer haplotype (-1082*A,-819*T,-592*A) was significantly associated with HTLV-I carriage or HAM/TSP compared with healthy controls (P=0.02 and 0.01, respectively). Our results suggest that IL-10-819*T and-592*A alleles are significant risk factors for developing HTLLV-I infection but do not appear to convey additional risk for developing HAM/TSP.
Direct visualization of the human subthalamic nucleus with 3T MR imaging.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Electrical stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) is an accepted treatment for advanced Parkinson disease (PD). Although procedural details are well established, targeting STN remains problematic because of its variable location and relatively small size (20-30 mm(3)). A combination of anatomic imaging with a stereotactic frame, atlas coordinates, and intraoperative neurophysiology is currently considered the most reliable approach for STN targeting. CT imaging is dependent on atlas coordinates, because the STN is not visualized. The STN is also difficult to visualize directly by using MR imaging at 1.5 T. METHODS We performed preoperative stereotactic MR imaging at 3T to visualize the STN in 13 patients undergoing deep-brain stimulation for PD. With the patient positioned within a standard Leksell type G stereotactic frame localizer, rapidly acquired scout images are used to prescribe volumes of contiguous high-resolution T2-weighted fast spin-echo images in the axial, sagittal, and coronal planes through the midbrain and basal ganglia. The STN is identified in all 3 planes by cross-referencing in a 3-plane viewer. These coordinates are used for surgical targeting. RESULTS At 3T, the STN was visualized as a small, hypointense, almond-shaped structure in 3 planes located immediately lateral to the anterior edge of the red nucleus, medial to the internal capsule, about 5 mm inferior, 1-2 mm posterior, and 9-12 mm lateral to the midcommissural point. Intraoperative microelectrode recordings confirmed these coordinates in all cases from the first microelectrode pass, thereby eliminating prolonged intraoperative electrophysiological STN searching and tissue disruption that may occur from multiple passes. CONCLUSION 3T MR imaging appears to be an excellent tool for reliable and accurate direct visualization of the human STN, necessary for precise surgical targeting.
A Study of Sustainable Design Based on Unconscious Behavior

Nowadays, a lot of people engage in unsustainable daily behavior unconsciously, although most of them worry about the state of our natural environment. Designers can find ideas in people’s unconscious saving behavior and wasting behavior, and then realize these ideas into design. Based upon the case studies, the paper gives hints how to realize ideas derived from unconscious behavior into sustainable design.
Granzymes are essential for natural killer cell‐mediated and perf‐facilitated tumor control

Studies with perforin‐deficient mice firmly established perforin as a key element in cytotoxic T cell (CTL) / natural killer (NK) cell‐mediated tumor control but did not reveal the role of granzyme (gzm) A and B. A contribution of gzm in these processes was indicated by earlier in vitro experiments employing purified effector molecules demonstrated that tumor cell apoptosis and death only occurred in the presence of both, perf and gzm. However, recent work using mice deficient in either gzmA, gzmB or both gzm suggested that only perf but neither of the two gzm are criticalfor tumor surveillance by CTL or NK cells. In light of the conflicting results we have re‐investigated this issue by analyzing the potential of mice deficient in one or more component(s) of the exocytosis pathway to control NK‐sensitive syngeneic MHC class I‐defective RMA‐S tumor cells in vivo. Our results show that in contrast to wild‐type mice, mice deficient for both gzm exhibit an uncontroled tumor growth with a time kinetic similar to that of perforin‐deficient mice. Together with the finding that a defect of mice in either gzmA or gzmB alone also leads to an increased susceptibility to tumor growth, at least to a certain extent when compared to wild‐type mice, the data clearly indicate that a concerted action of perforin and the two gzm is mandatory for optimal NK cell‐mediated tumor control in vivo. Most notably, the in vivo potential of the respective NK cell populations was only reflected by their nucleolytic, but not their cytolytic activities in vitro.
Proarrhythmic Defects in Timothy Syndrome Require Calmodulin Kinase II

Background— Timothy syndrome (TS) is a disease of excessive cellular Ca2+ entry and life-threatening arrhythmias caused by a mutation in the primary cardiac L-type Ca2+ channel (CaV1.2). The TS mutation causes loss of normal voltage-dependent inactivation of CaV1.2 current (ICa). During cellular Ca2+ overload, the calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) causes arrhythmias. We hypothesized that CaMKII is a part of the proarrhythmic mechanism in TS. Methods and Results— We developed an adult rat ventricular myocyte model of TS (G406R) by lentivirus-mediated transfer of wild-type and TS CaV1.2. The exogenous CaV1.2 contained a mutation (T1066Y) conferring dihydropyridine resistance, so we could silence endogenous CaV1.2 with nifedipine and maintain peak ICa at control levels in infected cells. TS CaV1.2–infected ventricular myocytes exhibited the signature voltage-dependent inactivation loss under Ca2+ buffering conditions, not permissive for CaMKII activation. In physiological Ca2+ solutions, TS CaV1.2–expressing ventricular myocytes exhibited increased CaMKII activity and a proarrhythmic phenotype that included action potential prolongation, increased ICa facilitation, and afterdepolarizations. Intracellular dialysis of a CaMKII inhibitory peptide, but not a control peptide, reversed increases in ICa facilitation, normalized the action potential, and prevented afterdepolarizations. We developed a revised mathematical model that accounts for CaMKII-dependent and CaMKII-independent effects of the TS mutation. Conclusion— In TS, the loss of voltage-dependent inactivation is an upstream initiating event for arrhythmia phenotypes that are ultimately dependent on CaMKII activation.
Reversibility of the tryptophanase reaction: synthesis of tryptophan from indole, pyruvate, and ammonia.

Degradation of tryptophan to indole, pyruvate, and ammonia by tryptophanase (EC 4.) from Escherichia coli, previously thought to be an irreversible reaction, is readily reversible at high concentrations of pyruvate and ammonia. Tryptophan and certain of its analogues, e.g., 5-hydroxytryptophan, can be synthesized by this reaction from pyruvate, ammonia, and indole or an appropriate derivative at maximum velocities approaching those of the degradative reactions. Concentrations of ammonia required for the synthetic reactions produce specific changes in the spectrum of tryptophanase that differ from those produced by K(+) and indicate that ammonia interacts with bound pyridoxal 5'-phosphate to form an imine. Kinetic results indicate that pyruvate is the second substrate bound, hence indole must be the third. These results favor a modified mechanism for the multitude of tryptophanase-catalyzed reactions in which alpha-aminoacrylate, which functions as a common enzyme-bound intermediate in both synthetic and degradative reactions, is not released into the medium during the latter reactions, but is degraded to pyruvate and ammonia by sequential reversible steps via enzyme-bound intermediates.
Partial cation-order and early-stage, phase separation in phase W, LixCo1−xO: 0.075≤x≤0.24−0.31

We report the characterization using X-ray and neutron powder diffraction, transmission electron microscopy and extended X-ray absorption fine structure of a new, partially ordered rock-salt-like solid solution phase LixCo1−xO: 0.075≤x≤0.24−0.31. The cation stacking sequence along [111] consists of alternating planes of Co and Co/Li. Nano-sized domains of this cation-ordered phase appear alongside disordered regions; domain size increases from 2 to 8 nm with increasing Li content. Compositions of ordered and disordered regions are Li- and Co-rich, respectively, and, therefore, the phase exhibits frozen-in, incipient phase separation. This microstructure could be considered as a precursor to precipitation of fully ordered, rhombohedral LiCoO2.