Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Functional analyses of the NRT2 family of nitrate transporters in Arabidopsis

Nitrogen is an essential macronutrient for plant growth and development. Nitrate is the major form of nitrogen acquired by most crops and also serves as a vital signaling molecule. Nitrate is absorbed from the soil into root cells usually by the low-affinity NRT1 NO3 - transporters and high-affinity NRT2 NO3 - transporters, with NRT2s serving to absorb NO3 - under NO3 –limiting conditions. Seven NRT2 members have been identified in Arabidopsis, and they have been shown to be involved in various biological processes. In this review, we summarize the spatiotemporal expression patterns, localization, and biotic and abiotic responses of these transporters with a focus on recent advances in the current understanding of the functions of the seven AtNRT2 genes. This review offers beneficial insight into the mechanisms by which plants adapt to changing environmental conditions and provides a theoretical basis for crop research in the near future.
Identification versus CBCD: A comparison of different evaluation techniques

Fingerprint techniques have a significant advantage in respect of watermarking: a fingerprint can be extracted in each moment of the lifetime of a multimedia content. This aspect is fundamental to solve the problem of copy detection mainly because many copies can be available in huge amount of data in circulation and because each copy can be attacked in several ways (compression, re-encoding, text-overlay, etc.). In this paper the problem of copy detection is studied and tested from two different point of views: content based and identification approaches. The results show that the proposed system is quite robust to some copy modifications and most of all show that the overall results depend on the evaluation method used for testing.
Lasers in Surgery and Medicine

Background and Objective: Recently, a novel acne treatment based on selective photothermolysis of pilosebaceous units with follicular delivery of inert gold microparticles as an exogenous chromophore and diode laser pulses has been developed. To evaluate the efficacy and safety of a single monotherapy treatment regimen with gold microparticles and diode laser exposure in patients with moderate and moderately severe acne. Further, to evaluate the added benefit of a second treatment regimen combined with pharmaceutical acne treatment in patients with inadequate initial response. Materials and Methods: Patients with moderate and moderately severe facial acne were recruited in this open‐ label, pilot study. A single treatment regimen consisted of three weekly facial treatments with topically applied gold microparticles and diode laser pulses. Outcome measures were the proportion of patients with ≥40% improvement in number of acne lesions (weighted lesion count [WLC]) at 12 weeks (single treatment regimen, primary outcome measure), 24, and 36 weeks from baseline (two treatment regimens), safety, and patient satisfaction. Results: A total of 28 patients were enrolled in the study (18 males, 10 females, 19 patients with moderate acne severity, 9 with moderately severe, mean age: 19.8 years). Twenty‐five patients underwent analysis for outcome measures. After a single monotherapy treatment regimen, 76% patients (19/25) achieved ≥40% reduction in WLC (mean WLC reduction: 63%; SD: 13%). Of the patients undergoing two treatment regimens (n= 9 patients), 56% experienced a reduction in acne lesion burden (WLC) ≥40% at 24 weeks and 89% 36 weeks post‐baseline. Mean pain score was 4.0 (SD: 1.3), and transient erythema and perifollicular edema were commonly noted after treatment. Most patients (81%) were either “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the treatment. Conclusion: Acne therapy based on selective photothermolysis with gold microparticles shows promise and may be used in treatment of moderate to moderately severe acne.
Hysteresis and Economics Taking the economic past into account

The goal of this article is to explore the rationale underlying the application of hysteresis to economic models. In particular, we explain why many aspects of real economic systems are hysteretic. The aim is to be explicit about the difficulties encountered when trying to incorporate hysteretic effects into models that can be validated and then used as possible tools for macroeconomic control. The growing appreciation of the ways that memory effects influence the functioning of economic systems is a significant advance in economic thought and, by removing distortions that result from oversimplifying specifications of input–output relations in economics, has the potential to narrow the gap between economic modeling and economic reality. Although economic systems evolve in time, mainstream economics on the whole is not cognizant of the history dependence of economic processes, even though the relevance of the historical dimension in economics has been emphasized time and again by historians and philosophers, for example, in [1], which is also one of the first works in economics to mention hysteresis explicitly (but without providing a rigorous definition). Merely accepting that economic structures evolve is not sufficient to single out any particular mechanism of history dependence at work. In many cases an economic agent can be 1
The Influence of Pressure Overload Left Ventricular Hypertrophy on Diastolic Properties during Hypoxia in Isovolumically Contracting Rat Hearts

We tested the hypothesis that there is an enhanced susceptibility in hypertrophied cardiac muscle to develop decreased diastolic distensibility of the left ventricle in response to hypoxia. The effects of brief hypoxia (3 minutes) were studied in rats with and without chronic left ventricular pressure overload hypertrophy using an isolated buffer-perfused and isovolumic (balloon-in-left ventricle) heart preparation with excised pericardium and vented right ventricle. We compared hypertrophied hearts from hearts from hypertensive uninephrectomized Wistar- Kyoto rats (n = 12) with normotensive uninephrectomized age-matched controls (n = 13). Coronary flow was held constant and adjusted so that an identical flow per gram left ventricular weight was achieved in both groups. The left ventricular balloon volume was adjusted to produce an initial left ventricular end-diastolic pressure of 10 mm Hg in both groups and was held constant thereafter so that changes in left ventricular end-diastolic pressure during hypoxia represented changes in diastolic chamber distensibility. Under aerobic conditions, left ventricular systolic pressure was 66percent; higher in the hypertrophied hearts than in the controls, but there was no difference in the rate or extent of left ventricular relaxation as estimated by the exponential time constant of pressure decay and the asymptote to which pressure decayed. In response to hypoxia, left ventricular end-diastolic pressure was significantly higher in the hypertrophied hearts than in the controls (37 ± 5 vs. 22 ± 5 mm Hg, P < 0.001). In response to hypoxia, the rate of left ventricular relaxation was depressed to a comparable degree in both groups, but there was a greater upward shift in the asymptote to which pressure decayed in the hypertrophied hearts. Hypoxia-induced coronary vasodilation as assessed by the change in coronary vascular resistance was similar in the hypertrophied and control hearts (2.9 ± 0.5 vs. 2.3 ± 0.9 mm Hg/[(ml/min)/g], NS). The degree of hypoxia-induced anaerobic metabolism as estimated by the coronary arterial-venous lactate concentration difference was also similar in both groups (−0.72 ± 0.23 vs. −0.73 ± 0.16 mM/liter, NS). It is concluded that brief hypoxia results in a greater decrease in diastolic distensibility of the left ventricle in the presence of chronic pressure overload hypertrophy than in its absence.
Characterization of erythropoietin and hepcidin in the regulation of persistent injury-associated anemia

BACKGROUND The cause of persistent injury-associated anemia is multifactorial and includes acute blood loss, an altered erythropoietin (EPO) response, dysregulation of iron homeostasis, and impaired erythropoiesis in the setting of chronic inflammation/stress. Hepcidin plays a key role in iron homeostasis and is regulated by anemia and inflammation. Erythropoietin is a main regulator of erythropoiesis induced by hypoxia. A unique rodent model of combined lung injury (LC)/hemorrhagic shock (HS) (LCHS)/chronic restraint stress (CS) was used to produce persistent injury-associated anemia to further investigate the roles of EPO, hepcidin, iron, ferritin, and the expression of EPO receptors (EPOr). METHODS Male Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly assigned into one of the four groups of rodent models: naive, CS alone, combined LCHS, or LCHS/CS. Plasma was used to evaluate levels of EPO, hepcidin, iron, and ferritin. RNA was isolated from bone marrow and lung tissue to evaluate expression of EPOr. Comparisons between models were performed by t tests followed by one-way analysis of variance. RESULTS After 7 days, only LCHS/CS was associated with persistent anemia despite significant elevation of plasma EPO. Combined LCHS and LCHS/CS led to a persistent decrease in EPOr expression in bone marrow on Day 7. The LCHS/CS significantly decreased plasma hepcidin levels by 75% on Day 1 and 84% on Day 7 compared to LCHS alone. Hepcidin plasma levels are inversely proportional to EPO plasma levels (Pearson R = −0.362, p < 0.05). CONCLUSION Tissue injury, hemorrhagic shock, and stress stimulate and maintain high levels of plasma EPO while hepcidin levels are decreased. In addition, bone marrow EPOr and plasma iron availability are significantly reduced following LCHS/CS. The combined deficit of reduced iron availability and reduced bone marrow EPOr expression may play a key role in the ineffective EPO response associated with persistent injury-associated anemia.
Effective and Efficient Indexing for Large Video Databases

Content based multimedia retrieval is an important topic in database sys- tems. An emerging and challenging topic in this area is the content based search in video data. A video clip can be considered as a sequence of images or frames. Since this representation is too complex to facilitate efficient video retrieval, a video clip is often summarized by a more concise feature representation. In this paper, we trans- form a video clip into a set of probabilistic feature vectors (pfvs). In our case, a pfv corresponds to a Gaussian in the feature space of frames. We demonstrate that this representation is well suited for accurate video retrieval. The use of pfvs allows us to calculate confidence values for frames or sets of frames for being contained within a given video in the database. These confidence values can be employed to specify two types of queries. The first type of query retrieves the videos stored in the database which contain a given set of frames with a probability that is larger than a given thresh- old value. Furthermore, we introduce a probabilistic ranking query retrieving the k database videos which contain the given query set with the highest probabilities. To efficiently process these queries, we introduce query algorithms on set-valued objects. Our solution is based on the Gauss-tree, an index structure for efficiently managing Gaussians in arbitrary vector spaces. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that sets of probabilistic feature vectors yield a compact and descriptive representation of video clips. Additionally, we show that our new query algorithms outperform compet- itive approaches when answering the given types of queries on a database of over 900 real world video clips.
Stem cell therapy for neuropathic pain treatment

Pain initiated or caused by a primary lesion or dysfunction in the nervous system is defined as neuropathic pain. About 75 -150 million people in the United States are suffering for chronic pain disorder. Neuropathic pain has a great impact on the human wellbeing. It is very debilitating and often has an associated degree of depression that contributes to decreasing the quality of life. Moreover, the management of chronic pain is costly to the health care system. Pain is a national healthcare priority in US: the United States Congress has declared the present decade (2001-2010) as the “Decade of Pain Control and Research”. Neuropathic pain is a very complex disease, involving several molecular pathways. Due to its individual character, its treatment is extremely difficult. Current available drugs are usually not acting on the several mechanisms underlying the generation and propagation of pain. Nowadays, pain research is focusing on newer molecular ways, such as stem cell therapy, gene therapy, and viral vectors for delivery of biologic anti-nociceptive molecules. These methods could provide a new therapeutic approach to neuropathic pain relief.
What is bioinformatics? An introduction and overview

A flood of data means that many of the challenges in biology are now challenges in computing. Bioinformatics, the application of computational techniques to analyse the information associated with biomolecules on a large-scale, has now firmly established itself as a discipline in molecular biology, and encompasses a wide range of subject areas from structural biology, genomics to gene expression studies. In this review we provide an introduction and overview of the current state of the field. We discuss the main principles that underpin bioinformatics analyses, look at the types of biological information and databases that are commonly used, and finally examine some of the studies that are being conducted, particularly with reference to transcription regulatory systems.
Kolmogorov Complexity and the Recursion Theorem

We introduce the concepts of complex and autocomplex sets, where a set A is complex if there is a recursive, nondecreasing and unbounded lower bound on the Kolmogorov complexity of the prefixes (of the characteristic sequence) of A, and autocomplex is defined likewise with recursive replaced by A-recursive. We observe that exactly the autocomplex sets allow to compute words of given Kolmogorov complexity and demonstrate that a set computes a diagonally nonrecursive (DNR) function if and only if the set is autocomplex. The class of sets that compute DNR functions is intensively studied in recursion theory and is known to coincide with the class of sets that compute fixed-point free functions. Consequently, the Recursion Theorem fails relative to a set if and only if the set is autocomplex, that is, we have a characterization of a fundamental concept of theoretical computer science in terms of Kolmogorov complexity. Moreover, we obtain that recursively enumerable sets are autocomplex if and only if they are complete, which yields an alternate proof of the well-known completeness criterion for recursively enumerable sets in terms of computing DNR functions. All results on autocomplex sets mentioned in the last paragraph extend to complex sets if the oracle computations are restricted to truth-table or weak truth-table computations, for example, a set is complex if and only if it wtt-computes a DNR function. Moreover, we obtain a set that is complex but does not compute a Martin-Lof random set, which gives a partial answer to the open problem whether all sets of positive constructive Hausdorff dimension compute Martin-Lof random sets. Furthermore, the following questions are addressed: Given n, how difficult is it to find a word of length n that (a) has at least prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity n, (b) has at least plain Kolmogorov complexity n or (c) has the maximum possible prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity among all words of length n. All these questions are investigated with respect to the oracles needed to carry out this task and it is shown that (a) is easier than (b) and (b) is easier than (c). In particular, we argue that for plain Kolmogorov complexity exactly the PA-complete sets compute incompressible words, while the class of sets that compute words of maximum complexity depends on the choice of the universal Turing machine, whereas for prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity exactly the complete sets allow to compute words of maximum complexity.
The Prohibition of the Proposed Springer-Prosiebensat.1-Merger: How Much Economics in German Merger Control?

We review the Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office Germany) decision on the proposed merger between Springer and ProSiebenSat.1 from an economic point of view. In doing so, it is not our goal to analyse whether the controversial decision by the Bundeskartellamt has been correct or flawed from a legal point of view. Instead, we analyse whether the economic reasoning in the decision document reflects state-of-the-art economic theory on conglomerate mergers. Regarding such types of mergers, anticompetitive effects either do not occur regularly or are more often than not overcompensated by efficiency gains, so that a standard welfare perspective demands reluctance concerning antitrust interventions. This is particularly true if two-sided markets, like media markets, are involved. However, anticompetitive conglomerate mergers are not impossible, in particular in neighbouring markets where there is some relationship between the products of the merging companies. In line with the more-economic approach in European merger control, a particular thorough line of argumentation, backed with particularly convincing economic evidence, is necessary to justify a prohibition of a conglomerate merger from an economic point of view. Against this background, we do not find the reasoning of the Bundeskartellamt entirely convincing and sufficiently strong to justify a prohibition of the proposed combination from an economic perspective. The reasons are that (i) the Bundeskartellamt fails to continuously consider consumer and customer welfare as the relevant standards, (ii) positive efficiency and welfare effects of cross-media strategies are neglected, (iii) in contrast, the competition agency sometimes appears to view profitability of post-merger strategy options to be per se anticompetitive (efficiency offence), (iv) the incontestability of the relevant markets is not sufficiently substantiated, (v) inconsistencies occur regarding the symmetry of the TV advertising market duopoly versus the unique role of the BILD-Zeitung and (vi) the employment of modern economic instruments appears to be underdeveloped. Thus, we conclude that the Bundeskartellamt has not embraced the European more-economic approach in the analysed decision. However, one can discuss whether economic effects are overcompensated in this case by concerns about a reduction in diversity of opinion and threats to free speech. Similar to the Bundeskartellamt, we do not consider these concerns in our analysis.
Measuring the intelligibility of conversational speech in children

Conversational speech is the most socially‐valid context for evaluating speech intelligibility, but it is not routinely examined. This may be because it is difficult to reliably count the number of words in the unintelligible portions of the sample. In this study four different approaches to dealing with this problem are examined. Each is based on the assumption that it is possible to perceive syllables in unintelligible strings even when the target words are unknown; these unintelligible syllables can then be used to estimate the number of unintelligible words in these samples using at least four different approaches. Preliminary data are presented for each of the four approaches based on conversational speech from two convenience samples including 320 children with normal (or normalized) speech and 202 children with speech delay. Differences among the four approaches are discussed.
Dual capacitive-inductive nature of periodic graphene patches: Transmission characteristics at low-terahertz frequencies

We report on the dual nature (capacitive and inductive) of the surface impedance of periodic graphene patches at low-terahertz frequencies. The transmission spectra of a graphene-dielectric stack shows that patterned graphene exhibits both the low-frequency (capacitive) passband of metal patch arrays and the higher-frequency (inductive) passband of metal aperture arrays in a single tunable configuration. The analysis is carried out using a transfer-matrix approach with two-sided impedance boundary conditions, and the results are verified using full-wave numerical simulations. In addition, the Bloch-wave analysis of the corresponding infinite periodic structure is presented in order to explain the passband and stopband characteristics of the finite graphene-dielectric stack.
Bacteraemia caused by Anaerotruncus colihominis and emended description of the species

Background:Anaerotruncus colihomonis is a newly described bacterial genus and species isolated from the stool specimens of children. Its clinical significance, however, is unknown. Aims: To describe a case of A colihominis bacteraemia identified by 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene sequencing and provide an emended description of the species. Methods: An unidentified anaerobic bacillus (strain HKU19) that stains Gram negative was subjected to characterisation by 16S rRNA gene sequencing, G+C content determination and electron microscopy. Results: Strain HKU19 was isolated from the blood culture of a 78-year-old woman with nosocomial bacteraemia. It was found to be an anaerobic, non-motile, pleomorphic, thin bacillus that stains Gram negative. It produces Indole and utilises glucose and mannose. Identifying the strain to the species level was not possible by conventional phenotypic tests and commercial identification systems. The G+C content of strain HKU19 was found to be 53.43 mol%. A similarity of 99.3% nucleotide identities was found between the 16S rRNA gene sequence of strain HKU19 and that of A colihominis WAL 14 565T, which was isolated from a human faecal specimen. In contrast with the original description of A colihominis, HKU19 was found to produce occasional oval, terminal spores, although the other phenotypic characteristics matched. Spores were also occasionally observed when the two previously reported strains were re-examined. Conclusions: Although the source of the bacteraemia in the patient cannot be determined, this report suggests that A colihominis is of clinical significance. Spore formation is proposed as an emended description of A colihominis.
Time-to-Digital Converter with Direct Successive Charge Redistribution

Abstrac tIn the paper, the enhanced version of time-to-digital converter with self-timed successive charge redistribution is presented. In the proposed solution, time-to-charge mapping realized by constant rate charge accumulation is run concurrently to the charge redistribution in the binary-weighted capacitor array. By introducing concurrent charge accumulation and redistribution, the conversion is characterized by reduced conversion time and conversion time jitter, reduction of die area of the chip, and of the number of state transitions per a single conversion cycle.
The integration of Urban Agriculture and the Socio-ecomomic landscape of Future cities.

Cities rely upon the provision of imported foods in order to feed their large populations. As a result, the ecological footprint of cities is far greater than their geographical areas. Through the integration of facade and roof‐based food systems, agriculture within urban environments has the ability to grow vast amounts of food upon some of the most underused and undervalued areas of the built environment. Such large‐scale agricultural systems would not only reduce a city’s ecological footprint by reducing the need for imported foods, but they would also engage with the city at an economic and social level. The following paper aims to understand the additional positive impacts of urban agriculture ‐ such as reduce air pollution, decrease depression, promote healthy lifestyles and create jobs ‐ and postulates how such impacts might affect the physical health, mental well‐being and financial security of urban populations. Urban agriculture is a viable driver of environmental change, but it is also a catalyst for social and economic reform.