Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Maintenance of a certain rumen protozoal population in a continuous in vitro fermentation system

A continuous culture system suitable for maintaining certain rumen protozoa was developed by modifying the procedure of Walter and Pilgrim (R.A. Weller and A.F. Pilgrim, Br. J. Nutr. 32:341-351, 1974) to include a dialyzing system. The concentration of ciliate protozoa, the pH value, and concentrations of volatile fatty acid and ammonia-N could be maintained within normal rumen limits for more than 15 days by appropriate choice of mechanical agitation and of the amount of substrate and physical form of the substrate bags. The average concentration of protozoa in the free fluid around the substrate was about 10% that in the fluid squeezed from solid digesta residues. More than 10(6) protozoa per ml was present in the fresh substrates only 2 h after supplying the substrate. These facts suggest that sequestration of the protozoa among particulate digesta is an important factor in maintaining the concentration of protozoa.
Development and characterization of a novel nanoemulsion drug-delivery system for potential application in oral delivery of protein drugs

Background: The stability of protein drugs remains one of the key hurdles to their success in the market. The aim of the present study was to design a novel nanoemulsion drug-delivery system (NEDDS) that would encapsulate a standard-model protein drug – bovine serum albumin (BSA) – to improve drug stability. Methods: The BSA NEDDS was prepared using a phase-inversion method and pseudoternary phase diagrams. The following characteristics were studied: morphology, size, zeta potential, drug loading, and encapsulation efficiency. We also investigated the stability of the BSA NEDDS, bioactivity of BSA encapsulated within the NEDDS, the integrity of the primary, secondary, and tertiary structures, and specificity. Results: The BSA NEDDS consisted of Cremophor EL-35, propylene glycol, isopropyl myristate, and normal saline. The average particle diameter of the BSA NEDDS was about 21.8 nm, and the system showed a high encapsulation efficiency (>90%) and an adequate drug-loading capacity (45 mg/mL). The thermodynamic stability of the system was investigated at different temperatures and pH levels and in room-temperature conditions for 180 days. BSA NEDDS showed good structural integrity and specificity for the primary, secondary, and tertiary structures, and good bioactivity of the loaded BSA. Conclusions: BSA NEDDS showed the properties of a good nanoemulsion-delivery system. NEDDS can greatly enhance the stability of the protein drug BSA while maintaining high levels of drug bioactivity, good specificity, and integrity of the primary, secondary, and tertiary protein structures. These findings indicate that the nanoemulsion is a potential formulation for oral administration of protein drugs.
Automatic Generation of Implied Constraints

A well-known difficulty with solving Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) is that, while one formulation of a CSP may enable a solver to solve it quickly, a different formulation may take prohibitively long to solve. We demonstrate a system for automatically reformulating CSP solver models by combining the capabilities of machine learning and automated theorem proving with CSP systems. Our system is given a basic CSP formulation and outputs a set of reformulations, each of which includes additional constraints. The additional constraints are generated through a machine learning process and are proven to follow from the basic formulation by a theorem prover. Experimenting with benchmark problem classes from finite algebras, we show how the time invested in reformulation is often recovered many times over when searching for solutions to more difficult problems from the problem class.
Lorentz violation and synchrotron radiation

We consider the radiation emitted by an ultrarelativistic charged particle moving in a magnetic field, in the presence of an additional Lorentz-violating interaction. In contrast with prior work, we treat a form of Lorentz violation that is represented by a renormalizable operator. Neglecting the radiative reaction force, the particle's trajectory can be determined exactly. The resulting orbit is generally noncircular and does not lie in the plane perpendicular to the magnetic field. We do not consider any Lorentz violation in the electromagnetic sector, so the radiation from the accelerated charge can be determined by standard means, and the radiation spectrum will exhibit a Lorentz-violating directional dependence. Using data on emission from the Crab nebula, we can set a bound on a particular combination of Lorentz-violating coefficients at the 6x10{sup -20} level.
Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling: the laws of diminishing returns

Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is a commonly-used power-management technique where the clock frequency of a processor is decreased to allow a corresponding reduction in the supply voltage. This reduces power consumption, which can lead to significant reduction in the energy required for a computation, particularly for memory-bound workloads. However, recent developments in processor and memory technology have resulted in the saturation of processor clock frequencies, larger static power consumption, smaller dynamic power range and better idle/sleep modes. Each of these developments limit the potential energy savings resulting from DVFS. We analyse this trend by examining the potential of DVFS across three platforms with recent generations of AMD processors. We find that while DVFS is effective on the older platforms, it actually increases energy usage on the most recent platform, even for highly memory-bound workloads.
Dietary pattern and depressive symptoms in middle age.

BACKGROUND Studies of diet and depression have focused primarily on individual nutrients. AIMS To examine the association between dietary patterns and depression using an overall diet approach. METHOD Analyses were carried on data from 3486 participants (26.2% women, mean age 55.6 years) from the Whitehall II prospective cohort, in which two dietary patterns were identified: 'whole food' (heavily loaded by vegetables, fruits and fish) and 'processed food' (heavily loaded by sweetened desserts, fried food, processed meat, refined grains and high-fat dairy products). Self-reported depression was assessed 5 years later using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies - Depression (CES-D) scale. RESULTS After adjusting for potential confounders, participants in the highest tertile of the whole food pattern had lower odds of CES-D depression (OR = 0.74, 95% CI 0.56-0.99) than those in the lowest tertile. In contrast, high consumption of processed food was associated with an increased odds of CES-D depression (OR = 1.58, 95% CI 1.11-2.23). CONCLUSIONS In middle-aged participants, a processed food dietary pattern is a risk factor for CES-D depression 5 years later, whereas a whole food pattern is protective.
Spectral Analysis Identifies Sites of High-Frequency Activity Maintaining Atrial Fibrillation in Humans

Background—The identification of sites of dominant activation frequency during atrial fibrillation (AF) in humans and the effect of ablation at these sites have not been reported. Methods and Results—Thirty-two patients undergoing AF ablation (19 paroxysmal, 13 permanent) during ongoing arrhythmia were studied. Electroanatomic mapping was performed, acquiring 126±13 points per patient throughout both atria and coronary sinus. At each point, 5-second electrograms were obtained to determine the highest-amplitude frequency on spectral analysis and to construct 3D dominant frequency (DF) maps. The temporal stability of the recording interval was confirmed in a subset. Ablation was performed with the operator blinded to the DF maps. The effect of ablation at sites with or without high-frequency DF sites (maximal frequencies surrounded by a decreasing frequency gradient ≥20%) was evaluated by determining the change in AF cycle length (AFCL) and the termination and inducibility of AF. The spatial distribution of the DF sites was different in patients with paroxysmal and permanent AF; paroxysmal AF patients were more likely to harbor the DF site within the pulmonary vein, whereas in permanent AF, atrial DF sites were more prevalent. Ablation at a DF site resulted in significant prolongation of the AFCL (180±30 to 198±40 ms; P<0.0001; &kgr;= 0.77), whereas in the absence of a DF site, there was no change in AFCL (169±22 to 170±22 ms; P=0.4). AF terminated during ablation in 17 of 19 patients with paroxysmal and 0 of 13 with permanent AF (P<0.0001). When 2 patients with nonsustained AF during mapping were excluded, 13 of 15 (87%) had AF termination at DF sites (54% at the initially ablated DF site): 11 pulmonary veins and 2 atrial. In addition, AF could no longer be induced in 69% with termination of AF at a DF site. There were no significant differences in the number or percentage of DF sites detected (5.4±1.6 versus 4.9±2.1; P=0.3) and ablated (1.9±1.0 versus 2.4±1.0; P=0.3) in those with and without AF termination. The duration of radiofrequency ablation to achieve termination was significantly shorter than that delivered in those with persisting AF (34.8±24.0 versus 73.5±22.9 minutes; P=0.0002). All patients with persisting AF had additional DF sites outside the ablated zones. Conclusions—Spectral analysis and frequency mapping identify localized sites of high-frequency activity during AF in humans with different distributions in paroxysmal and permanent AF. Ablation at these sites results in prolongation of the AFCL and termination of paroxysmal AF, indicating their role in the maintenance of AF.
Shield as Signal: Lipopolysaccharides and the Evolution of Immunity to Gram-Negative Bacteria

According to the innate immunity concept [1], animals defend themselves from microbes by recognizing pathogen-associated molecular patterns. To detect many Gram-negative bacteria, animals use the CD14–MD-2–TLR4 receptor mechanism to recognize the lipid A moiety of the cell wall lipopolysaccharide (LPS). Lipid A is a glucosamine disaccharide that carries phosphates at positions 1 and 4′ and usually has four primary (glucosamine-linked) hydroxyacyl chains and one or more secondary acyl chains. Gram-negative bacteria produce numerous variations on this basic structure, yet sensitive LPS recognition and pro-inflammatory signaling by human TLR4 occur only when lipid A has both phosphates and is hexaacyl, with two secondary acyl chains. What might bacteria derive from producing this type of lipid A, and what do animals gain from recognizing it? A survey of diverse lipid A structures found that the best-recognized configuration is produced by most of the aerobic or facultatively anaerobic Gram-negative bacteria that can live in the gastrointestinal and upper respiratory tracts. We hypothesize that the CD14–MD-2–TLR4 mechanism evolved to recognize not just pathogens, but also many of the commensals (normal flora) and colonizers that can inhabit the body's most vulnerable surfaces. Producing this lipid A structure seems to favor bacterial persistence on host mucosae, whereas recognizing it allows the host to kill invading bacteria within subepithelial tissues and prevent dissemination. A conserved host lipase can then limit the inflammatory response by removing a key feature of the lipid A signal, the secondary acyl chains.
Cytotoxicity of hydro-alcoholic extracts of Cucurbita pepo and Solanum nigrum on HepG2 and CT26 cancer cell lines

Plants are used worldwide for the treatment of diseases, and novel drugs continue to be developed through research from plants. There are more than 20,000 species of plants used in traditional medicines, and these are all potential reservoirs for new drugs. Cucurbita pepo has been used in traditional folk medicine to treat cold and alleviate ache. Previous pharmacological tests have shown that it possesses antiviral, anti-inflammatory, and analgesic effects. Also, Solanum nigrum has been used as a diuretic and an antipyretic agent and it has also been used to cure inflammation, edema, mastitis and hepatic cancer. In this investigation, cytotoxicity of specific concentrations of hydro-alcoholic extracts of C. pepo and S. nigrum was studied on normal [Chinese hamster ovarian cells (CHO) and rat fibroblast] and cancer (HepG2 and CT26) cell lines. The cytotoxic effects and IC50 of the extracts on the selected cell lines were studied followed by colonogenic assay method. The results showed that IC50 of S. nigrum extract was significantly lower than that of the C. pepo extract on all four cell lines (P < 0.05). On the other hand, IC50 of S. nigrum extract was significantly higher than the extract of Taxus baccata and Cisplatin, herbal and chemical control positive anticancer compounds, respectively, on all four cell lines (P < 0.05). As a result, it is concluded that the extract of S. nigrum has almost similar cytotoxicity to the extract of T. baccata on cancer cells.
Dexamethasone inhibits growth hormone induction of insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) in hypophysectomized rats and reduces IGF-I mRNA abundance in the intact rat.

Exogenous glucocorticoids are potent inhibitors of skeletal growth in experimental animals and children. The mechanism whereby glucocorticoids exert this effect is unclear, and circulating somatomedin levels have been reported to be low, normal, or high in this situation. Since recent studies have emphasized the importance of autocrine or paracrine insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I), we have examined the effects of dexamethasone (DXM) on IGF-I gene expression in the hypophysectomized (hypox) and pituitary intact rat. An increase in IGF-I messenger RNA (mRNA) abundance of approximately 5-, 3-, 2-, and 1.5-fold in the liver, proximal tibia, lung, and kidney, respectively, was seen in hypox rats killed 6 h after injection of human GH (100 micrograms/100 g body wt). As little as 1 micrograms/100 g body wt of DXM administered 3 h before GH injection significantly reduced GH induction of IGF-I mRNA in the liver and the proximal tibia (P less than 0.05 and P less than 0.005, respectively). Higher doses of DXM were required to reduce IGF-I mRNA abundance in the kidney and lung. Of the tissues examined the order of sensitivity to DXM was liver greater than tibia greater than kidney greater than lung. In contrast to the effects of DXM on tissue IGF-I mRNA abundance, an approximately 10-fold higher dose of DXM was required to inhibit the GH-induced rise in serum IGF-I concentration. The effect of DXM on steady state IGF-I mRNA abundance in pituitary-intact rats which were killed 9 h after DXM was also examined. The reduction in IGF-I mRNA abundance required higher doses of DXM (6-360 micrograms/100 g body wt) and was less marked in pituitary-intact rats than in GH-treated hypox rats. In the pituitary-intact rats the order of sensitivity to DXM was tibia greater than liver greater than lung greater than kidney. In acute studies serum IGF-I levels were not decreased by any dose of DXM; rather a significant increase in serum IGF-I was apparent in pituitary intact rats, treated with the lowest and highest doses of DXM. When DXM was administered daily for 6 days to pituitary intact rats, body wt gain and hepatic and tibial IGF-I mRNA abundance were significantly reduced. No significant changes were seen in serum IGF-I concentrations. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Formal requirement and architecture specifications of a multi-agent robotic system

One of the most challenging tasks in specification engineering for a multi-agent robotic system is to formally specify and architect the system, especially as a multi-agent robotic system is concurrent having concurrent processing, and often having dynamic environment. The formal requirement and architecture specifications along with step-wise refinement from abstract to concrete concepts play major role in formalizing the system. This paper proposes the formal requirement and architecture specifications aspects of an approach that supports analysis with respect to functional as well as non-functional properties by step-wise refinement from abstract to concrete specifications and formal architecture definition. These formal specifications have been exemplified by a case study. As formal specification techniques are getting more mature, our capability to build a correct complex multi-agent robotic system also grows quickly.
The boundary manifold of a complex line arrangement

We study the topology of the boundary manifold of a line arrangement in 2 , with emphasis on the fundamental group G and associated invariants. We determine the Alexander polynomial A.G/, and more generally, the twisted Alexander polynomial associated to the abelianization of G and an arbitrary complex representation. We give an explicit description of the unit ball in the Alexander norm, and use it to analyze certain Bieri‐Neumann‐Strebel invariants of G . From the Alexander polynomial, we also obtain a complete description of the first characteristic variety of G . Comparing this with the corresponding resonance variety of the cohomology ring of G enables us to characterize those arrangements for which the boundary manifold is formal. 32S22; 57M27 For Fred Cohen on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday
Exploring Structurally Similar Protein Sequence Motifs using Relative-Distance Measures

Protein sequence motifs are short conserved subsequences common to related protein sequences. Information about motifs is extremely important to the study of biologically significant conserved regions in protein families. These conserved regions can determine the functions and conformation of proteins. Conventionally, recurring patterns of proteins are explored using short protein segments and classification based on similarity measures between the segments. Two protein sequences are classified into the same class if they have high homology in terms of feature patterns extracted through sequence alignment algorithms. Such methodology focuses on finding position specific motifs only. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to explore protein sequences by studying subsequences with relative-positioning of amino acids followed by K-Means clustering of fixed-sized segments. The dataset used for our work is most updated among studies for sequence motifs. The various biochemical tests that are found in literature are used to test the significance of motifs and these tests show that motifs generated are of both structural and functional interest. The results suggest that this method may also be applied to closely-related area of finding DNA motifs.
Efficient face recognition with compensation for aging variations

Face recognition is identifying a person based on facial characteristics. Automated face recognition is identifying a given query face called probe from a target population known as gallery. The face recognition algorithms perform well when the interpersonal images have more discriminating features than intra personal images. The changes in the face bring down the similarity of the intrapersonal images. The variations in the face can be due to pose, expression, illumination changes and aging of a person. Face recognition accuracy is largely influenced by the age related changes in face. Aging effects on face are not uniform and depend on both intrinsic as well as external factors like geographic location, race, food habits etc. The facial changes are exclusive for each person in spite of aging being an apparent phenomenon among all individuals. Hence there are many challenges still open in compensating age related variations. In this paper we have proposed a novel self-PCA based approach in order to consider distinctiveness of the effects of aging of a person for age invariant face recognition. The region around the eyes is used as the input feature instead of the entire face as it is more stable part of the face with respect to aging and also requires less space. The proposed approach is tested using the images of the FG-NET database.
Burst Firing in the Electrosensory System of Gymnotiform Weakly Electric Fish: Mechanisms and Functional Roles

Neurons across sensory systems and organisms often display complex patterns of action potentials in response to sensory input. One example of such a pattern is the tendency of neurons to fire packets of action potentials (i.e., a burst) followed by quiescence. While it is well known that multiple mechanisms can generate bursts of action potentials at both the single-neuron and the network level, the functional role of burst firing in sensory processing is not so well understood to date. Here we provide a comprehensive review of the known mechanisms and functions of burst firing in processing of electrosensory stimuli in gymnotiform weakly electric fish. We also present new evidence from existing data showing that bursts and isolated spikes provide distinct information about stimulus variance. It is likely that these functional roles will be generally applicable to other systems and species.
A smarter exemplar-based inpainting algorithm using local and global heuristics for more geometric coherence

In this paper, we propose two major improvements to the exemplar-based image inpainting algorithm, initially formulated by Criminisi et al. [1]. First, we introduce a structure-tensor-based data-term for a better selection of pixel candidates to fill in based on priority. Then, we propose a new lookup heuristic in order to locate the best source patches to copy/paste to these targeted points. These two contributions clearly make the inpainting algorithm reconstruct more geometrically coherent images, as well as speed up the process drastically. We illustrate the great performances of our approach compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.
Three-level APF control strategy based on the double sampling timing comparison

High frequency harmonics generated by active power Alter (APF) play a negative role on the power quality of grid. To eliminate the impact without reduction on harmonic compensating effectiveness, this paper proposed a three-level diode-clamped APF topology. Besides, the double sampling and the neutral voltage balancing technology based on the short vector switching were utilized to accomplish the timing comparison control strategy proposed in this paper. Moreover, the influence of feedback current sampled position and the system delay on APF performance were also analyzed in this paper. Finally, an experimental prototype was established, and the whole scheme was validated by the experimental results.
Automated Unique Input Output Sequence Generation for Conformance Testing of FSMs

This paper describes a method for automatically generating unique input output (UIO) sequences for FSM conformance testing. UIOs are used in conformance testing to verify the end state of a transition sequence. UIO sequence generation is represented as a search problem and genetic algorithms are used to search this space. Empirical evidence indicates that the proposed method yields considerably better (up to 62% better) results compared with random UIO sequence generation.
Fast power/ground network optimization based on equivalent circuit modeling

This paper presents an efficient algorithm for optimizing the area of power or ground networks in integrated circuits subject to the reliability constraints. Instead of solving the original power/ground networks extracted from circuit layouts as previous methods did, the new method first builds the equivalent models for many series resistors in the original networks, then the sequence of linear programming method is used to solve the simplified networks. The solutions of the original networks then are back solved from the optimized, simplified networks. The new algorithm simply exploits the regularities in the power/ground networks. Experimental results show that the complexities of simplified networks are typically significantly smaller than that of the original circuits, which renders the new algorithm extremely fast. For instance, power/ground networks with more than one million branches can be sized in a few minutes on modern SUN workstations.