Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Precursors of murine B lymphocytes. Physical and functional characterization, and distinctions from myeloid stem cells

The emergence of functional B cells was monitored in irradiated or unirradiated CBA/N recipients of either adult bone marrow or fetal liver from CBA/HT6T6 donors. The cells that are primarily responsible for the generation of B lymphocytes, at least during the first 6 wk, are rapidly sedimenting (4.5-6 mm/h), lack surface immunoglobulin, and are found in both the adult bone marrow and the fetal liver from day 12 onward. These pre-B cells are distinct from the colony-forming unit spleen (CFU-s) as demonstrated by the following criteria: (a) absence from yolk sac (19), (b) lack of correlation between CFU-s number and the ability to generate B cells in fetal liver populations of different ages of gestation, and (c) hybridoma antibodies that significantly inhibited B cell reconstitution but have no effect on CFU-s numbers. The antigen detected by this antiserum is present on both the fetal liver and bone marrow B cell progenitor, although its expression is not restricted to the B lineage. The pre-B cells that we monitor are not homogeneous, however, as both physical and functional differences are found. These observations reinforce our thesis that committed progenitor cells for the humoral immune system are formed early in development and thereafter constitute the major precursor pool for the generation of B lymphocytes.
A study of natural eye movement detection and ocular implant movement control using processed EOG signals

This paper describes an intelligent sensor and control system, robotic prosthetic eye system, with artificial eye model, biomedical electrodes and a micro controller. The system intends to provide a rehabilitation ocular implant device that can be used by people with ocular implant. The proposed system can acquire the dynamic natural eye orientation signal, which is sent to the micro controller to control the artificial eye to have the same orientation. This paper starts with a brief review of various eye movement detection methods and then a proposed system is set up to carry out experimental study. Pilot study has demonstrated its potential for clinical applications.
Enhanced Syllable Discrimination Thresholds in Musicians

Speech processing inherently relies on the perception of specific, rapidly changing spectral and temporal acoustic features. Advanced acoustic perception is also integral to musical expertise, and accordingly several studies have demonstrated a significant relationship between musical training and superior processing of various aspects of speech. Speech and music appear to overlap in spectral and temporal features; however, it remains unclear which of these acoustic features, crucial for speech processing, are most closely associated with musical training. The present study examined the perceptual acuity of musicians to the acoustic components of speech necessary for intra-phonemic discrimination of synthetic syllables. We compared musicians and non-musicians on discrimination thresholds of three synthetic speech syllable continua that varied in their spectral and temporal discrimination demands, specifically voice onset time (VOT) and amplitude envelope cues in the temporal domain. Musicians demonstrated superior discrimination only for syllables that required resolution of temporal cues. Furthermore, performance on the temporal syllable continua positively correlated with the length and intensity of musical training. These findings support one potential mechanism by which musical training may selectively enhance speech perception, namely by reinforcing temporal acuity and/or perception of amplitude rise time, and implications for the translation of musical training to long-term linguistic abilities.
One miR level of control: microRNA-155 directly regulates endothelial nitric oxide synthase mRNA and protein levels.

See related article, pp 1407–1414 The ability of the endothelium to produce nitric oxide (NO) is important for the maintenance of vascular homeostasis, and either the altered expression of the endothelial NO synthase (eNOS) or its activity is thought to make a major contribution to the pathogenesis of vascular disease. The expression of eNOS is tightly regulated and numerous physiological and pathophysiological stimuli have been identified that modulate eNOS gene transcription, mRNA processing, and mRNA stability. A role for microRNAs (miRNAs) in the regulation of eNOS has long been suspected because knocking down Dicer, which is necessary for miRNA maturation, increased eNOS expression.1 In addition, miR-221 and miR-222 mimics partially reversed the increase in eNOS elicited by Dicer downregulation, although neither of these miRNAs directly targets the eNOS mRNA.1 In this issue of Hypertension , Sun et al2 report that miR-155 directly targets eNOS mRNA by binding to its 3′ untranslated region (UTR) to decrease enzyme expression and NO production. Which physiological situation could involve the regulation of eNOS expression via miR-155? There are several stimuli that have been reported to decrease eNOS levels and these are generally linked with inflammation, for example, proinflammatory cytokines such as tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, interleukin-1, interferon-γ, and bacterial lipopolysaccharide. Using these stimuli, Sun et al2 were able to demonstrate that proinflammatory cytokines increase miR-155 expression, most probably via AP-1 and nuclear factor-κB, and that …
The Microstructure Characterization and the Mechanical Properties of Electrospun Polyacrylonitrile-Based Nanofibers

Electrospinning provides a straightforward and cost-effective approach to produce fibers from polymer solutions or melts having the diameters ranging from sub-microns to nanometers (Reneker & Chun 1996 ; Dzenis 2004; Hammel et al. 2004; Greine & Wendorff 2007). The nanofiber fabrication by the electrospinning technique can also provides high orientation of the polymer chains by some special colleting accessories due to the high elongation forces that developed during the electrospinning process. This process is accompanied by massive solvent evaporation which leads to fibers with high packaging density(Doshi & Reneker 1995). The carbon fibers possess high mechanical strengths and moduli, superior stiffness, excellent thermal and electrical conductivities, as well as strong fatigue and corrosion resistance; therefore carbon nanofibers have recently received increased attention for their potential applications as composite reinforcing fillers, heatmanagement materials, high-temperature catalysts, membrane-based separation media, and components in nanoelectronics and photonics etc.(Chand 2000). There are several precursors for the production of carbon fiber, such as polyacrylonitrile (PAN), pitch and cellulose(Edie 1998; Basova et al. 2004) etc. But PAN is the most widely used precursor for manufacturing high-performance fibers due to its combination of tensile and compressive properties as well as its high carbon yield(Sutasinpromprae et al. 2006). Usually, the PAN or PAN-based carbon fiber is produced by the following steps: (1) first, spinning the precursor under different drawing ratio, (2) then, the precursor fiber is stabilized at 200 to ca. 300oC in an oxidation atmosphere; (3) finally, the stabilized fiber is heated at temperatures from 1200 to ca. 3000 oC in an inert atmosphere to wipe off nearly all of the non-carbon element to obtain the final carbon fibers. There are two critical factors in these manufacturing processes of PAN carbon fibers which one is to control the suitable orientation and crystallization of the precursors and the other is the post-treatment steps such as pre-oxidization, stabilization and carbonization. Conventional PAN-based carbon fibers typically have diameters ranging from 5 to 10 um (Morgan 2005). However, the electrospun PAN nanofibers are uniform with the diameters of approximately 300 nm (Chun et al. 1999; MacDiarmid et al. 2001), which is more than 30 times smaller than their conventional counterparts. The high specific surface
Semi-supervised dimensionality reduction using estimated class membership probabilities

Abstract. In solving pattern-recognition tasks with partially labeled training data, the semi-supervised dimensionality reduction method, which considers both labeled and unlabeled data, is preferable for improving the classification and generalization capability of the testing data. Among such techniques, graph-based semi-supervised learning methods have attracted a lot of attention due to their appealing properties in discovering discriminative structure and geometric structure of data points. Although they have achieved remarkable success, they cannot promise good performance when the size of the labeled data set is small, as a result of inaccurate class matrix variance approximated by insufficient labeled training data. In this paper, we tackle this problem by combining class membership probabilities estimated from unlabeled data and ground-truth class information associated with labeled data to more precisely characterize the class distribution. Therefore, it is expected to enhance performance in classification tasks. We refer to this approach as probabilistic semi-supervised discriminant analysis (PSDA). The proposed PSDA is applied to face and facial expression recognition tasks and is evaluated using the ORL, Extended Yale B, and CMU PIE face databases and the Cohn–Kanade facial expression database. The promising experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Measures of dispersion for corpus data: an overview, a suggestion, and a research program I

The most frequently used statistic in corpus linguistics are the frequency of occurrence of some linguistic variable and the frequency of co-occurrence of two or more linguistic variables. However, as has been pointed out correctly and repeatedly, frequencies of (co-)occurrence in isolation may sometimes be severely misleading given that they alone to not take into consideration the degree of dispersion of the relevant linguistic variable in question. In order to handle such problems, several scholars suggested a variety of dispersion measures and adjusted frequency measures. Unfortunately, however, few scholars appear to be aware of this issue and measures of dispersion are apparently not widely know and even less widely used. Another unfortunate aspect of such measures is that many of them also come with a variety of problems. I pursue three objectives with this article. First, in order to raise awareness of this thematic complex and make the available measures more widely known, I present an overview of a large number of dispersion measures and adjusted frequency measures – including some more recent measures that have not found their way into research articles and textbooks yet – and summarily discuss some of their advantages and disadvantages. Second, I propose for discussion a conceptually very simple alternative measure, DP, explain and exemplify its properties, and compare it to the more or less established measures on the basis of fictitious distributions from the literature, word frequencies from the BNC Sampler, and co-occurrence data from the ICEGB. I will conclude that DP is at least as discriminatory as most if not all other existing measures but conceptually simpler and even better in some respects.
Direct capillary electrophoretic detection of carbohydrate‐deficient transferrin in neat serum

Transferrin, an iron transport protein found in serum and cerebrospinal fluid, is known to be microheterogeneous with respect to its carbohydrate and sialic acid content. The forms of transferrin deficient in sialic acid and/or carbohydrate, termed carbohydrate‐deficient transferrin (CDT), have been of clinical interest for almost two decades as a result of the initial finding that elevated CDT concentrations are associated with chronic, excessive alcohol abuse. We demonstrate the utility of capillary electrophoresis for examining the CDT sialoform profile via the direct electrophoresis of serum. The need for negligible preelectrophoresis sample preparation and absence of postelectrophoresis processing dramatically decreases analysis time compared to slab gel‐based separations. Using a fluorocarbon‐coated capillary containing a hydroxyethyl cellulose/borate buffer, the high resolution separation of serum components is effected in less than 30 min. Under these conditions, the beta region proteins (including transferrin) are well resolved from the alpha‐2 and gamma zone proteins in a window where the individual transferrin sialoforms can be detected. The usefulness of this method is demonstrated with the electrophoresis of serum from subjects known to be either nonalcoholic and alcoholic.
Concatenations of the hidden weighted bit function and their cryptographic properties

To resist Binary Decision Diagrams (BDD) based attacks, a Boolean function should have a high BDD size. The hidden weighted bit func- tion (HWBF), introduced by Bryant in 1991, seems to be the simplest function with exponential BDD size. In (28), Wang et al. investigated the cryptographic properties of the HWBF and found that it is a very good candidate for being used in real ciphers. In this paper, we modify the HWBF and construct two classes of functions with very good cryptographic properties (better than the HWBF). The new functions are balanced, with almost optimum algebraic de- gree and satisfy the strict avalanche criterion. Their nonlinearity is higher than that of the HWBF. We investigate their algebraic immunity, BDD size and their resistance against fast algebraic attacks, which seem to be better than those of the HWBF too. The new functions are simple, can be implemented eciently, have high BDD sizes and rather good cryptographic properties. Therefore, they might be excellent candidates for constructions of real-life ciphers.
p73, the “Assistant” Guardian of the Genome?

Abstract: Although p53 is clearly involved in the salvage pathway to DNA damage, its frequent mutations do not explain the efficacy of radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Indeed, around 50% of all human cancers show mutations in p53, and a further fraction show a functional inactivation of the protein. Nevertheless, patients seem to respond to therapy that would otherwise require a functional p53. At least in part, these responses could be explained by the pathway mediated by p73. This mechanism is parallel to, but independent of the p53 pathway. Several pieces of evidence show a significant interaction between these two proteins. Therefore, while p53 can be rightly defined as the guardian of the genome, we could think of p73 as the “assistant” guardian of the genome!
Inductively coupled plasma etching of through-cell vias in III–V multijunction solar cells using SiCl4/Ar

In this work, inductively coupled plasma reactive ion etching processes with SiCl4/Ar gas chemistries were optimized to fabricate wafer-scale, high-density, small-area via-holes for InGaP/GaAs/InGaAs inverted metamorphic triple-junction solar cells. Anisotropic and smooth etching with good uniformity of both the etch profiles and etch depths across a full 4-in. wafer were obtained. By combining optical emission spectroscopy with an analytical size-effect model, calibrated end-point detection for small features is demonstrated.
Opportunities in Software Engineering Research for Web API Consumption

Nowadays, invoking third party code increasingly involves calling web services via their web APIs, as opposed to the more traditional scenario of downloading a library and invoking the library's API. However, there are also new challenges for developers calling these web APIs. In this paper, we highlight abroad set of these challenges and argue for resulting opportunities for software engineering research to support developers in consuming web APIs. We outline two specific research threads in this context: (1) web API specification curation, which enables us to know the signatures of web APIs, and (2) static analysis that is capable of extracting URLs, HTTP methods etc. of web API calls. Furthermore, we present new work on how we combine (1) and (2) to provide IDE support for application developers consuming web APIs. As web APIs are used broadly, research in supporting the consumption of web APIs offers exciting opportunities.
[First finding of Chagas disease vectors associated with wild bushes in the Metropolitan Region of Chile].

BACKGROUND Insects of the subfamily triatominae are the biological vectors of Trypanosoma cruzi, the causal agent of Chagas disease. AIM To search for wild colonies of triatomines in the Metropolitan Region of Chile. MATERIAL AND METHODS Ad hoc traps were placed in two endemic zones of the Metropolitan Region of Chile, during 30 nights. The dejections of 16 T infestans and 43 M spinolai specimens were examined under the microscope, searching for live metacyclic trypomastigotes. A polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was performed in macerates of all insects looking for T cruzi DNA. RESULTS A total of 269 bugs were captured. Forty four were Triatoma infestans and 225 were Mepraia spinolai. They were not syntopic, since T infestans was restricted to a Southern zone (Calera de Tango) while M spinolai was only found in the Northern zone (Til-Til). Both species were found associated to terrestrial bromeliads (Puya sp) but M spinolai was also detected in stony grounds. Microscopic examination of dejections yielded a trypano-triatomine index of 56.3 and 32.6 for T infestans and M spinolai, respectively. PCR detected T cruzi DNA in 41 and 43% of T infestans and M spinolai specimens, respectively. CONCLUSIONS The finding of T infestans in a wild habitat is noticeable. This is the first report of such phenomenon in Chile. The high infection rates with T cruzi, explains the maintenance of Chagas disease wild cycle in Chile.
Experimental Investigation of the Self{ and N 2 {broadened Continuum within the 2 Band of Water Vapor

We present here an experimental study of the self-and N 2-broadened H 2 O continuum in microwindows within the 2 fundamental centered at 1600 cm ? 1. The continuum is derived from transmission spectra recorded at room temperature with a BOMEM Fourier Transform Spectrometer at a resolution of 0.040 cm ? 1. Although we nd general agreement with previous studies, our results suggest that there is signiicant near-wing super-Lorentzian behavior which produces highly wavenumber dependent structure in the continuum as it is presently deened.
FAME: a Functional Annotation Meta-scheme for multi-modal and multi-lingual Parsing Evaluation

The paper describes FAME, a functional annotation meta-scheme for comparison and evaluation of existing syntactic annotation schemes, intended to be used as a flexible yardstick in multi-lingual and multi-modal parser evaluation campaigns. We show that FAME complies with a variety of non-trivial methodological requirements, and has the potential for being effectively used as an "interlingua" between different syntactic representation formats.
Scalable fine-grained call path tracing

Applications must scale well to make efficient use of even medium-scale parallel systems. Because scaling problems are often difficult to diagnose, there is a critical need for scalable tools that guide scientists to the root causes of performance bottlenecks. Although tracing is a powerful performance-analysis technique, tools that employ it can quickly become bottlenecks themselves. Moreover, to obtain actionable performance feedback for modular parallel software systems, it is often necessary to collect and present fine-grained context-sensitive data --- the very thing scalable tools avoid. While existing tracing tools can collect calling contexts, they do so only in a coarse-grained fashion; and no prior tool scalably presents both context- and time-sensitive data. This paper describes how to collect, analyze and present fine-grained call path traces for parallel programs. To scale our measurements, we use asynchronous sampling, whose granularity is controlled by a sampling frequency, and a compact representation. To present traces at multiple levels of abstraction and at arbitrary resolutions, we use sampling to render complementary slices of calling-context-sensitive trace data. Because our techniques are general, they can be used on applications that use different parallel programming models (MPI, OpenMP, PGAS). This work is implemented in HPCToolkit.
Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature Version 4 (ERSST.v4). Part I: Upgrades and Intercomparisons

AbstractThe monthly Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature (ERSST) dataset, available on global 2° × 2° grids, has been revised herein to version 4 (v4) from v3b. Major revisions include updated and substantially more complete input data from the International Comprehensive Ocean–Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) release 2.5; revised empirical orthogonal teleconnections (EOTs) and EOT acceptance criterion; updated sea surface temperature (SST) quality control procedures; revised SST anomaly (SSTA) evaluation methods; updated bias adjustments of ship SSTs using the Hadley Centre Nighttime Marine Air Temperature dataset version 2 (HadNMAT2); and buoy SST bias adjustment not previously made in v3b.Tests show that the impacts of the revisions to ship SST bias adjustment in ERSST.v4 are dominant among all revisions and updates. The effect is to make SST 0.1°–0.2°C cooler north of 30°S but 0.1°–0.2°C warmer south of 30°S in ERSST.v4 than in ERSST.v3b before 1940. In comparison with the Met Office SST product.
Pre-clinical evaluation of the mechanical properties of a low-stiffness cement-injectable hip stem

Abstract In total hip arthroplasty (THA), the femoral stem can be fixed with or without bone cement. Cementless stem fixation is recommended for young and active patients as it eliminates the risk of loss of fixation at the bone–cement and cement–implant interfaces. Cementless fixation, however, suffers from a relatively high early revision rate. In the current research, a novel low-stiffness hip stem was designed, fabricated and tested. The stem design provided the option to inject biodegradable bone cement that could enhance initial stem stability. The stem was made of Ti6Al4V alloy. The proximal portion of the stem was porous, with cubic cells. The stem was fabricated using electron beam melting (EBM) technology and tested in compression and bending. Finite-element analysis was used to evaluate stem performance under a dynamic load representing a stair descending cycle and compare it to the performance of a solid stem with similar geometry. The von Mises stresses and maximum principal strains generated within the bone increased after porous stem insertion compared to solid stem insertion. The low-modulus stem tested in this study has acceptable mechanical properties and generates strain patterns in bone that appear compatible with clinical use.