Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Melatonin Metabolism in the Central Nervous System

The metabolism of melatonin in the central nervous system is of interest for several reasons. Melatonin enters the brain either via the pineal recess or by uptake from the blood. It has been assumed to be also formed in some brain areas. Neuroprotection by melatonin has been demonstrated in numerous model systems, and various attempts have been undertaken to counteract neurodegeneration by melatonin treatment. Several concurrent pathways lead to different products. Cytochrome P450 subforms have been demonstrated in the brain. They either demethylate melatonin to N-acetylserotonin, or produce 6-hydroxymelatonin, which is mostly sulfated already in the CNS. Melatonin is deacetylated, at least in pineal gland and retina, to 5-methoxytryptamine. N1-acetyl-N2-formyl-5-methoxykynuramine is formed by pyrrole-ring cleavage, by myeloperoxidase, indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase and various non-enzymatic oxidants. Its product, N1-acetyl-5-methoxykynuramine, is of interest as a scavenger of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species, mitochondrial modulator, downregulator of cyclooxygenase-2, inhibitor of cyclooxygenase, neuronal and inducible NO synthases. Contrary to other nitrosated aromates, the nitrosated kynuramine metabolite, 3-acetamidomethyl-6-methoxycinnolinone, does not re-donate NO. Various other products are formed from melatonin and its metabolites by interaction with reactive oxygen and nitrogen species. The relative contribution of the various pathways to melatonin catabolism seems to be influenced by microglia activation, oxidative stress and brain levels of melatonin, which may be strongly changed in experiments on neuroprotection. Many of the melatonin metabolites, which may appear in elevated concentrations after melatonin administration, possess biological or pharmacological properties, including N-acetylserotonin, 5-methoxytryptamine and some of its derivatives, and especially the 5-methoxylated kynuramines.
The Role of Artificial Intelligence Research Methods in Cognitive Science

The gold standard for cognitive science is transdisciplinary cognitive modeling of human behavior evaluated by quantitative comparisons with experiments involving human participants. However, this restrictive standard excludes much work in the history of cognitive science, and we argue sticking to this strict definition would impede future work in the field. In this paper, we examine conceptions of cognitive science and apply them to a breakdown of different kinds of cognitive modeling and AI, demonstrating that many different kinds of AI research have contributions to make to cognitive science. Even when a system cannot be evaluated by direct quantitative comparisons, rigorous methods exist to evaluate even novel qualitative work’s contribution.
Application of new cholesterol guidelines to a population-based sample.

BACKGROUND The 2013 guidelines of the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association (ACC-AHA) for the treatment of cholesterol expand the indications for statin therapy for the prevention of cardiovascular disease. METHODS Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys of 2005 to 2010, we estimated the number, and summarized the risk-factor profile, of persons for whom statin therapy would be recommended (i.e., eligible persons) under the new ACC-AHA guidelines, as compared with the guidelines of the Third Adult Treatment Panel (ATP III) of the National Cholesterol Education Program, and extrapolated the results to a population of 115.4 million U.S. adults between the ages of 40 and 75 years. RESULTS As compared with the ATP-III guidelines, the new guidelines would increase the number of U.S. adults receiving or eligible for statin therapy from 43.2 million (37.5%) to 56.0 million (48.6%). Most of this increase in numbers (10.4 million of 12.8 million) would occur among adults without cardiovascular disease. Among adults between the ages of 60 and 75 years without cardiovascular disease who are not receiving statin therapy, the percentage who would be eligible for such therapy would increase from 30.4% to 87.4% among men and from 21.2% to 53.6% among women. This effect would be driven largely by an increased number of adults who would be classified solely on the basis of their 10-year risk of a cardiovascular event. Those who would be newly eligible for statin therapy include more men than women and persons with a higher blood pressure but a markedly lower level of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol. As compared with the ATP-III guidelines, the new guidelines would recommend statin therapy for more adults who would be expected to have future cardiovascular events (higher sensitivity) but would also include many adults who would not have future events (lower specificity). CONCLUSIONS The new ACC-AHA guidelines for the management of cholesterol would increase the number of adults who would be eligible for statin therapy by 12.8 million, with the increase seen mostly among older adults without cardiovascular disease. (Funded by the Duke Clinical Research Institute and others.).
Institute for Mathematical Physics Dirac Submanifolds and Poisson Involutions Dirac Submanifolds and Poisson Involutions

Dirac submanifolds are a natural generalization in the Poisson category for symplectic sub-manifolds of a symplectic manifold. In a certain sense they correspond to symplectic sub-groupoids of the symplectic groupoid of the given Poisson manifold. In particular, Dirac sub-manifolds arise as the stable locus of a Poisson involution. In this paper, we provide a general study for these submanifolds including both local and global aspects. In the second part of the paper, we study Poisson involutions and the induced Poisson structures on their stable locuses. We discuss the Poisson involutions on a special class of Poisson groups, and more generally Poisson groupoids, called symmetric Poisson groups (and symmetric Poisson groupoids). Many well-known examples, including the standard Poisson group structures on semi-simple Lie groups, Bruhat Poisson structures on compact semi-simple Lie groups, and Poisson groupoids connecting with dynamical r-matrices of semi-simple Lie algebras are symmetric, so they admit a Poisson involution. For symmetric Poisson groups, the relation between the stable locus Poisson structure and Poisson symmetric spaces is discussed. As a consequence, we show that the Dubrovin-Ugaglia-Boalch-Bondal Poisson structure on the space of Stokes matrices U + appearing in Dubrovin's theory of Frobenius manifolds is indeed a Poisson symmetric space for the Poisson group B + * B − .
In vitro Propagation and In vivo Acclimatization of Three Coffee Cultivars (Coffea arabica L.) From Yemen

Micropropagation of Coffea arabica cvs. Oudayni, Hammady and Dawaeiry from Yemen were initiated from seeds. Seeds were surface sterilized and inoculated into media supplemented with different salt strengths and germinated under dark. Seeds germinated on agar medium gave high hypocotyl length, high root length and full cotyledonary leaves expansion after 120 days of culture. Proliferation of these cultivars was experimented on MS media supplemented with different levels (0.0, 2.0, 4.0. 6.0 or 8.0 mg l ) of 1 N6-Benzyladenine (BA), Thidiazuron (TDZ), 6-furfurylaminopurine (Kinetin), 6-(4-hydroxy-3-methyl-2- butenylamino) purine (Zeatin) or 6-( , -Dimethylallylamino) purine (2ip). Highest proliferation for all cultivars was obtained when BA was used at the highest level (8.0 mg l ). Satisfactory proliferation rate in the three 1 cultivars was achieved at 8.0 mg l kinetin and 6.0 mg l TDZ. Zeatin and 2ip were both failed to promote 11 proliferation at any used level. Rooting was experimented on half-strength MS media supplemented with different levels (0.0, 2.0, or 3.0 mg l ) of indole-3- butyric acid (IBA), indole-3- acetic acid (IAA) or 1
There’s a consultant for that

School districts experience considerable pressure to continuously improve, and the pursuit of improvement typically leads to the adoption of new — and purportedly more effective — initiatives. Often districts engage consultants to help navigate the selection and implementation of an initiative, and while these partnerships can prove fruitful, they present a set of challenges that are often underestimated by districts. Districts can increase the likelihood of an initiative’s effectiveness by asking a few key questions before embarking (or not) on the initiative. In particular, districts need to attend to issues of coherence, capacity, and commitment.
Experimental Validation of a Faithful Binary Circuit Model

Fast digital timing simulations based on continuous-time, digital-value circuit models are an attractive and heavily used alternative to analog simulations. Models based on analytic delay formulas are particularly interesting here, as they also facilitate formal verification and delay bound synthesis of complex circuits. Recently, Függer et al. (arXiv:1406.2544 [cs.OH]) proposed a circuit model based on so-called involution channels. It is the first binary circuit model that realistically captures solvability of short-pulse filtration, a non-trivial glitch propagation problem related to building one-shot inertial delays. In this work, we address the question of whether involution channels also accurately model the delay of real circuits. Using both Spice simulations and physical measurements, we confirm that modeling an inverter chain by involution channels accurately describes reality. We also demonstrate that transitions in vanishing pulse trains are accurately predicted by the involution model. For our Spice simulations, we used both UMC-90 and UMC-65 technology, with varying supply voltages from nominal down to near sub-threshold range. The measurements were performed on a special-purpose UMC-90 ASIC that combines an inverter chain with low-intrusive high-speed on-chip analog amplifiers.
Arsenic Trioxide Modulates DNA Synthesis and Apoptosis in Lung Carcinoma Cells

Arsenic trioxide, the trade name Trisenox, is a drug used to treat acute promyleocytic leukemia (APL). Studies have demonstrated that arsenic trioxide slows cancer cells growth. Although arsenic influences numerous signal-transduction pathways, cell-cycle progression, and/or apoptosis, its apoptotic mechanisms are complex and not entirely delineated. The primary objective of this research was to evaluate the effects of arsenic trioxide on DNA synthesis and to determine whether arsenic-induced apoptosis is mediated via caspase activation, p38 mitogen–activated protein kinase (MAPK), and cell cycle arrest. To achieve this goal, lung cancer cells (A549) were exposed to various concentrations (0, 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 μg/mL) of arsenic trioxide for 48 h. The effect of arsenic trioxide on DNA synthesis was determined by the [3H]thymidine incorporation assay. Apoptosis was determined by the caspase-3 fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC) assay, p38 MAP kinase activity was determined by an immunoblot assay, and cell-cycle analysis was evaluated by the propidium iodide assay. The [3H]thymidine-incorporation assay revealed a dose-related cytotoxic response at high levels of exposure. Furthermore, arsenic trioxide modulated caspase 3 activity and induced p38 MAP kinase activation in A549 cells. However, cell-cycle studies showed no statistically significant differences in DNA content at subG1 check point between control and arsenic trioxide treated cells.
Analysis of LexA binding sites and transcriptomics in response to genotoxic stress in Leptospira interrogans

We determined the effects of DNA damage caused by ultraviolet radiation on gene expression in Leptospira interrogans using DNA microarrays. These data were integrated with DNA binding in vivo of LexA1, a regulator of the DNA damage response, assessed by chromatin immunoprecipitation and massively parallel DNA sequencing (ChIP-seq). In response to DNA damage, Leptospira induced expression of genes involved in DNA metabolism, in mobile genetic elements and defective prophages. The DNA repair genes involved in removal of photo-damage (e.g. nucleotide excision repair uvrABC, recombinases recBCD and resolvases ruvABC) were not induced. Genes involved in various metabolic pathways were down regulated, including genes involved in cell growth, RNA metabolism and the tricarboxylic acid cycle. From ChIP-seq data, we observed 24 LexA1 binding sites located throughout chromosome 1 and one binding site in chromosome 2. Expression of many, but not all, genes near those sites was increased following DNA damage. Binding sites were found as far as 550 bp upstream from the start codon, or 1 kb into the coding sequence. Our findings indicate that there is a shift in gene expression following DNA damage that represses genes involved in cell growth and virulence, and induces genes involved in mutagenesis and recombination.
Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer for Two-hop OFDM Relay System

This paper investigates the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) for two-hop orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) decode-and-forward (DF) relay communication system, where a relay harvests energy from radio frequency signals transmitted by the source and then uses the harvested energy to assist the information transmission from the source to its destination. The power splitting receiver is considered at the relay, which splits the received signal into two power streams to perform information decoding (ID) and energy harvesting (EH) respectively. For better understanding the behavior and exploring the performance limit of such a system, resource allocation is studied to maximize the total achievable transmission rate. An optimization problem, which jointly takes into account the power allocation, the subcarrier pairing and the power splitting, is formulated. Due to its non-convexity, a resource allocation policy with low complexity based on separation principle is designed. Simulation results show that the system performance can be significantly improved by using our proposed policy. Moreover, the system performance behavior to the relay position is also discussed, and results show that in the two-hop OFDM system with EH relay, the relay should be deployed near the source, while in that with conventional non-EH relay, it should be deployed at the middle between the source and the destination.
Phase-Remapping Attack in Practical Quantum Key Distribution Systems

Quantum key distribution (QKD) can be used to generate secret keys between two distant parties. Even though QKD has been proven unconditionally secure against eavesdroppers with unlimited computation power, practical implementations of QKD may contain loopholes that may lead to the generated secret keys being compromised. In this paper, we propose a phase-remapping attack targeting two practical bidirectional QKD systems (the 'plug-and-play' system and the Sagnac system). We showed that if the users of the systems are unaware of our attack, the final key shared between them can be compromised in some situations. Specifically, we showed that, in the case of the Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) protocol with ideal single-photon sources, when the quantum bit error rate (QBER) is between 14.6% and 20%, our attack renders the final key insecure, whereas the same range of QBER values has been proved secure if the two users are unaware of our attack; also, we demonstrated three situations with realistic devices where positive key rates are obtained without the consideration of Trojan horse attacks but in fact no key can be distilled. We remark that our attack is feasible with only current technology. Therefore, it is very important to be aware of our attackmore » in order to ensure absolute security. In finding our attack, we minimize the QBER over individual measurements described by a general POVM, which has some similarity with the standard quantum state discrimination problem. « less
Mechanisms of Action of Carvacrol on the Food-Borne Pathogen Bacillus cereus

ABSTRACT Carvacrol, a naturally occurring compound mainly present in the essential oil fraction of oregano and thyme, was studied for its effect on bioenergetic parameters of vegetative cells of the food-borne pathogen Bacillus cereus. Incubation for 30 min in the presence of 1 to 3 mM carvacrol reduced the viable cell numbers exponentially. Carvacrol (2 mM) significantly depleted the intracellular ATP pool to values close to 0 within 7 min. No proportional increase of the extracellular ATP pool was observed. Depletion of the internal ATP pool was associated with a change of the membrane potential (Δψ). At concentrations of 0.01 mM carvacrol and above, a significant reduction of Δψ was observed, leading to full dissipation of Δψ at concentrations of 0.15 mM and higher. Finally, an increase of the permeability of the cytoplasmic membrane for protons and potassium ions was observed (at 0.25 and 1 mM carvacrol, respectively). From this study, it could be concluded that carvacrol interacts with the membranes of B. cereus by changing its permeability for cations like H+ and K+. The dissipation of ion gradients leads to impairment of essential processes in the cell and finally to cell death.
Determination of Foraging Thresholds and Effects of Application on Energetic Carrying Capacity for Waterfowl

Energetic carrying capacity of habitats for wildlife is a fundamental concept used to better understand population ecology and prioritize conservation efforts. However, carrying capacity can be difficult to estimate accurately and simplified models often depend on many assumptions and few estimated parameters. We demonstrate the complex nature of parameterizing energetic carrying capacity models and use an experimental approach to describe a necessary parameter, a foraging threshold (i.e., density of food at which animals no longer can efficiently forage and acquire energy), for a guild of migratory birds. We created foraging patches with different fixed prey densities and monitored the numerical and behavioral responses of waterfowl (Anatidae) and depletion of foods during winter. Dabbling ducks (Anatini) fed extensively in plots and all initial densities of supplemented seed were rapidly reduced to 10 kg/ha and other natural seeds and tubers combined to 170 kg/ha, despite different starting densities. However, ducks did not abandon or stop foraging in wetlands when seed reduction ceased approximately two weeks into the winter-long experiment nor did they consistently distribute according to ideal-free predictions during this period. Dabbling duck use of experimental plots was not related to initial seed density, and residual seed and tuber densities varied among plant taxa and wetlands but not plots. Herein, we reached several conclusions: 1) foraging effort and numerical responses of dabbling ducks in winter were likely influenced by factors other than total food densities (e.g., predation risk, opportunity costs, forager condition), 2) foraging thresholds may vary among foraging locations, and 3) the numerical response of dabbling ducks may be an inconsistent predictor of habitat quality relative to seed and tuber density. We describe implications on habitat conservation objectives of using different foraging thresholds in energetic carrying capacity models and suggest scientists reevaluate assumptions of these models used to guide habitat conservation.
Two lossy source coding problems with causal side-information

Single-letter characterisations of the admissible rate regions of the Gu-Effros two-hop network and the Gray-Wyner network with side-information are open problems. We show that both problems permit single-letter solutions under the assumption of causal side-information. In particular, the special structure of the causal side-information decoder allows one to match converse theorems to known coding theorems using standard information-theoretic tools. This observation complements similar results by Maor and Merhav for the Heegard-Berger problem and the successive-refinement problem with side-information, and suggests that more general results for causal side-information networks may be possible.
MMS21/HPY2 and SIZ1, Two Arabidopsis SUMO E3 Ligases, Have Distinct Functions in Development

The small ubiquitin related modifier (SUMO)-mediated posttranslational protein modification is widely conserved among eukaryotes. Similar to ubiquitination, SUMO modifications are attached to the substrate protein through three reaction steps by the E1, E2 and E3 enzymes. To date, multiple families of SUMO E3 ligases have been reported in yeast and animals, but only two types of E3 ligases have been identified in Arabidopsis: SAP and Miz 1 (SIZ1) and Methyl Methanesulfonate-Sensitivity protein 21 (MMS21)/HIGH PLOIDY 2 (HPY2), hereafter referred to as HPY2. Both proteins possess characteristic motifs termed Siz/PIAS RING (SP-RING) domains, and these motifs are conserved throughout the plant kingdom. Previous studies have shown that loss-of-function mutations in HPY2 or SIZ1 cause dwarf phenotypes and that the phenotype of siz1-2 is caused by the accumulation of salicylic acid (SA). However, we demonstrate here that the phenotype of hpy2-1 does not depend on SA accumulation. Consistently, the expression of SIZ1 driven by the HPY2 promoter does not complement the hpy2-1 phenotypes, indicating that they are not functional homologs. Lastly, we show that the siz1-2 and hpy2-1 double mutant results in embryonic lethality, supporting the hypothesis that they have non-overlapping roles during embryogenesis. Together, these results suggest that SIZ1 and HPY2 function independently and that their combined SUMOylation is essential for plant development.
Recursive adaptive control for an underwater vehicle carrying a manipulator

The low level control for an underwater vehicle equipped with a manipulator is addressed in this paper. The end-effector trajectory is assumed to be properly inverted into vehicle and joint desired trajectories to be sent to the respective low level controllers. Off-the-shelf manipulators are often equipped with low level position or velocity joint control thus preventing the design of a controller at system level, i.e., taking into account the whole dynamic interactions. Design for the vehicle controller taking into account the presence of the manipulator is achieved resorting to an adaptive, recursive approach. A stability analysis is provided to analytically support the proposed controller. After physical considerations a minimal set of dynamic parameters is used in order to implement a light version of the controller. Numerical simulations validate the proposed approach.