Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Secretome of Bone Marrow and Wharton Jelly Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells Induces Differentiation and Neurite Outgrowth in SH-SY5Y Cells

The goal of this study was to determine and compare the effects of the secretome of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) isolated from human bone-marrow (BMSCs) and the Wharton jelly surrounding the vein and arteries of the umbilical cord (human umbilical cord perivascular cells (HUCPVCs)) on the survival and differentiation of a human neuroblastoma cell line (SH-SY5Y). For this purpose, SH-SY5Y cells were differentiated with conditioned media (CM) from the MSCs populations referred above. Retinoic acid cultured cells were used as control for neuronal differentiated SH-SY5Y cells. SH-SY5Y cells viability assessment revealed that the secretome of BMSCs and HUCPVCs, in the form of CM, was able to induce their survival. Moreover, immunocytochemical experiments showed that CM from both MSCs was capable of inducing neuronal differentiation of SH-SY5Y cells. Finally, neurite lengths assessment and quantitative real-time reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) analysis demonstrated that CM from BMSCs and HUCPVCs differently induced neurite outgrowth and mRNA levels of neuronal markers exhibited by SH-SY5Y cells. Overall, our results show that the secretome of both BMSCs and HUCPVCs was capable of supporting SH-SY5Y cells survival and promoting their differentiation towards a neuronal phenotype.
[18F]-3′Deoxy-3′-Fluorothymidine Positron Emission Tomography and Breast Cancer Response to Docetaxel

Purpose: To establish biomarkers indicating clinical response to taxanes, we determined whether early changes in [18F]-3′deoxy-3′-fluorothymidine positron emission tomography (FLT-PET) can predict benefit from docetaxel therapy in breast cancer. Experimental Design: This was a prospective unblinded study in 20 patients with American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) stage II–IV breast cancer unresponsive to first-line chemotherapy or progressing on previous therapy. Individuals underwent a baseline dynamic FLT-PET scan followed by a scan 2 weeks after initiating the first or second cycle of docetaxel. PET variables were compared with anatomic response midtherapy (after 3 cycles). Results: Average and maximum tumor standardized uptake values at 60 minutes (SUV60,av and SUV60,max) normalized to body surface area ranged between 1.7 and 17.0 and 5.6 and 26.9 × 10−5 m2/mL, respectively. Docetaxel treatment resulted in a significant decrease in FLT uptake (P = 0.0003 for SUV60,av and P = 0.0002 for SUV60,max). Reduction in tumor SUV60,av was associated with target lesion size changes midtherapy (Pearson R for SUV60,av = 0.64; P = 0.004) and predicted midtherapy target lesion response (0.85 sensitivity and 0.80 specificity). Decreases in SUV60,av in responders were due, at least in part, to reduced net intracellular trapping of FLT (rate constant, Ki). Docetaxel significantly reduced Ki by 51.1% (±28.4%, P = 0.0009). Conclusion: Changes in tumor proliferation assessed by FLT-PET early after initiating docetaxel chemotherapy can predict lesion response midtherapy with good sensitivity warranting prospective trials to assess the ability to stop therapy in the event of non–FLT-PET response. Clin Cancer Res; 17(24); 7664–72. ©2011 AACR.
Cortical rhythms as markers of neural processing

Aalto University, P.O. Box 11000, FI-00076 Aalto www.aalto. fi Author Hannu Laaksonen Name of the doctoral dissertation Cortical rhythms as markers of neural processing Publisher School of Science Unit O.V. Lounasmaa Laboratory Series Aalto University publication series DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS 119/2012 Field of research Engineering Physics, Biomedical Engineering Manuscript submitted 1 June 2012 Date of the defence 10 October 2012 Permission to publish granted (date) 16 August 2012 Language English Monograph Article dissertation (summary + original articles) Abstract Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is an excellent tool for noninvasive investigation of neuronal activity from outside of the head. It provides millisecond temporal accuracy and good spatial resolution. The classical measure of task-related brain activity is the evoked response that is phase-locked to task or stimulus. But the brain also exhibits spontaneous oscillations, or rhythmic activity, that has been observed to be modulated during task or in response to stimuli.Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is an excellent tool for noninvasive investigation of neuronal activity from outside of the head. It provides millisecond temporal accuracy and good spatial resolution. The classical measure of task-related brain activity is the evoked response that is phase-locked to task or stimulus. But the brain also exhibits spontaneous oscillations, or rhythmic activity, that has been observed to be modulated during task or in response to stimuli. This Thesis mainly focuses on investigations of cortical brain rhythms, developing methods for analyzing them and probing their relationship with evoked responses. While the sensor level MEG signal can be used successfully for studying evoked responses and cortical rhythmic activity, a proper evaluation of the data requires localization of the active brain areas. For this purpose, a beamforming technique called Dynamic Imaging of Coherent Sources (DICS) was used and modified in this Thesis. With DICS, it is possible to examine both power level modulations of rhythmic activity and functional connectivity between different brain regions conveyed by rhythmic activity. In this Thesis, an event-related version of a beamformer method DICS was implemented to assist the modeling of rhythmic activity. The feasibility of this new method, erDICS, was shown with simulations and real MEG data. The method was further applied to compare evoked responses and rhythmic activity in a high-level cognitive task of picture naming, with the conclusion that the two measures of cortical processes are largely detached and that both measures are needed for an accurate portrayal of brain activity. With another data set from a word priming study, erDICS was used to investigate connections between the left superior temporal cortex and other cortical regions. The method revealed different brain networks for phonological and semantic priming.
Key-Block Systematic Method and Application in Reinforcement Unstable Rock on Slope

The concept of key-block system is proposed on the basis of the key-block theory developed by Goodman-Shi and the key-block group theory developed by A.R. Yarahmadi Bafghi.It describes the method of how to find out the key-block and key-block system,the graphical key-block analysis technique and the vector key-block analysis technique,and proposes the method that reinforcing rock combined with characteristics of unstable rocks,deformation and failure mechanism and effective reinforcement measures.The key-block system anchoring technique includs the key-block system method and anchoring rock with systematic,it avoids the shortcomings of the current design theory.By establishing geological model and mechanics model of unstable rock of Jidan road from K49+790 m to K55+550 m and analyzing the deformation failure mechanism of slope and anchoring mechanism,a anchoring plan to control the dangerous rocks is suggested which is clearing the unstable rock at the top of slope,shotcreting the fractured slope face,and then bolting the rock blocks.The plan saves 35% of amount of bolts,32% of toatal SNS,19% of sum of beams compared with traditional method.
STUDIES OF DUNG-DWELLING INSECTS IN CATTLE-GRAZING REGIONS OF THE COLUMBIA BASIN, WASHINGTON STATE

Veterinary parasiticides (VPs) are used frequently to control internal parasites of livestock. These powerful medicines are metabolized, degraded by the host animal, and excreted in the urine or feces. In this form non-target organisms can be exposed to the parasiticides. The purpose of this study was to determine what effects VP residues in cattle dung might have on dung-dwelling insects. Experiments were conducted over a 2year period to examine the effects of VPs on colonizing dung fauna in the Columbia Basin region of Washington, USA. In 2006, 2007, and 2008 cattle were left untreated or treated with commercial formulations of either ivermectin or doramectin. Ivermectin in various forulations is the predominant parasiticide used in Washington State and has been used commercially on livestock for over 20 years (Ferguson et al. 2006) Doramectin is used less frequently but it is readily available. After treatment cattle were monitored, and manure was collected at regular intervals. Once collected, artificial dung pats were formed and placed in the field where they were colonized by insects. Pats were removed from the field and monitored for insect emergence. The results of the three experiments varied, with reduced emergence from dung treated with VPs for the Diptera in one experiment, but not in the other experiment. Emergence rates for Hymenoptera were significantly lower in control pats compared to pats from treated cattle in one experiment. There were no reductions in
Indicator-Assisted Evaluation and Fu Visualizing the Influence of Grants on Counts of Research Papers

This paper reports research on analyzing and visualizing the impac counts of research publications. For the first time, grant and publicati overview of related work and a discussion of available techniques. Behavioral and Social Science Research, one of four extramural resea is analyzed and visualized using the VxInsight® visualization tool. related to the quality and existence of data, data analysis, an recommendations on how to improve the quality of grant-publicat indicator-assisted evaluation and funding of research.
Grime and Punishment: Job Insecurity and Wage Arrears in the Russian Federation

The initial years of transition in the Russian Federation have been characterised by relatively smaller falls in employment than in other reform-orientated countries of eastern Europe, despite the huge negative shock caused by the move from planned to market economy. Using information from two complementary household survey data sets, we show that for many Russian workers, the dominant form of labour market adjustment has instead been the delayed receipt of wages. Other forms of adjustment at the intensive margin have not been used much. Wage arrears are found across the private, state and budgetary sector in approximately equal proportions. There are large regional variations in the incidence of wage arrears. Workers in the metropolitan centre are significantly less affected by delayed and incomplete wage payments than workers in the provinces. There is less evidence that individual characteristics contribute much toward the incidence of wage arrears, though unobserved heterogeneity may have some role to play. As with the incidence of unemployment, however, there is evidence that the persistence of arrears is concentrated on a subset of the working population. We show that workers can only exercise the exit option of a job quit from a firm paying wages in arrears if the outside labour market is sufficiently dynamic.
How to Seize a Window of Opportunity: The Entry Strategy of Retail Firms into Transition Economies

In most western countries, grocery retailers are faced with maturing domestic markets with a year-to-year sales growth close to zero. Moreover, most Western-European markets are characterized by a high concentration rate, with a combined market share of the top five players easily exceeding 70%. One important outcome of this evolution has been a growing interest in cross-border initiatives. However, even though the industry gained importance, retailers are still struggling to develop the competencies to compete and survive in this new, more global, arena. In this paper, we study entry investments into Central and Eastern-European transition economies to unveil when, to what extent, and to which retailer the strategic window in these different markets opens. We develop and empirically test a set of hypotheses on factors that affect (1) the speed (timing) and (2) size of retailers’ decisions to enter Central and Eastern European markets. A conceptual framework is proposed which looks at strategic decisions through the option lens. This perspective offers an economic rationale for the behavioral process of major resource allocations. The resulting hypotheses are tested, using a joint hazard/poisson-regression framework, on a data set covering all entry decisions of the top 75 European grocery retailers towards Central and Eastern Europe. We find that in these transition economies important legitimization effects can be derived from rivals’ actions. Especially the moves, made and anticipated, by home rivals are carefully monitored. This reflects the idea that retailers are motivated not only by the chance of creating value in these new markets, but also by the fear of being left out.
SURVEY AND SUMMARY The morph server: a standardized system for analyzing and visualizing macromolecular motions in a database framework

The number of solved structures of macromolecules that have the same fold and thus exhibit some degree of conformational variability is rapidly increasing. It is consequently advantageous to develop a standardized terminology for describing this variability and automated systems for processing protein structures in different conformations. We have developed such a system as a ‘front-end’ server to our database of macromolecular motions. Our system attempts to describe a protein motion as a rigid-body rotation of a small ‘core’ relative to a larger one, using a set of hinges. The motion is placed in a standardized coordinate system so that all statistics between any two motions are directly comparable. We find that while this model can accommodate most protein motions, it cannot accommodate all; the degree to which a motion can be accommodated provides an aid in classifying it. Furthermore, we perform an adiabatic mapping (a restrained interpolation) between every two conformations. This gives some indication of the extent of the energetic barriers that need to be surmounted in the motion, and as a by-product results in a ‘morph movie’. We make these movies available over the Web to aid in visualization. Many instances of conformational variability occur between proteins with somewhat different sequences. We can accommodate these differences in a rough fashion, generating an ‘evolutionary morph’. Users have already submitted hundreds of examples of protein motions to our server, producing a comprehensive set of statistics. So far the statistics show that the median submitted motion has a rotation of ~10° and a maximum Cα displacement of 17 A. Almost all involve at least one large torsion angle change of >140°. The server is accessible at http://bioinfo.mbb. yale.edu/MolMovDB
The Financial Crisis and the Geography of Wealth Transfers

This paper studies the geography of wealth transfers during the 2008 global financial crisis. We construct valuation changes on bilateral external positions in equity, direct investment and portfolio debt at the height of the crisis to map who benefited and who lost on their external exposure. We find a very diverse set of fortunes governed by the structure of countries' external portfolios. In particular, we are able to relate the gains and losses on debt portfolios to the country's exposure to ABCP conduits and the extent of dollar shortage.
Proof theoretic approach to specification languages

In this thesis I study FORUM as a specification language. FORUM is a higher-order logic based on the logical connectives of Linear Logic. As an initial example, I demonstrate that FORUM is well suited for specifying concurrent computations by specifying the higher-order $\pi$ calculus. Next, I focus on the problem of specifying programming languages with higher-order functions, and imperative features such as assignable variables, exceptions and first-class continuations. I provide a modular and declarative specification of an untyped programming language, UML, which contains the above mentioned features. Further, I use the proof theory of FORUM to study program equivalence for the functional core of UML augmented with assignable variables. Using my compositional specifications in FORUM, I prove equivalence of programs that have been challenging for other specification languages. Finally I study the operation semantics of DLX, a prototypical RISC machine. I specify the sequential and pipelined operational semantics of DLX with important optimizations such as call-forwarding and early branch resolution, and prove them to be equivalent. Furthermore, I study the problem of code equivalence via the FORUM specification, and, in particular, analyze the problem of code rescheduling for DLX.
Event-triggered H 1 stabilization for networked stochastic systems with multiplicative noise and network-induced delays

This paper is concerned with event-triggered H1 stabilization (in the mean square sense) for networked stochastic system with multiplicative noise and network-induced delays. Firstly, a new discrete event-triggered transmission protocol (DETTP) is proposed to reduce the utilization rate of communication bandwidth. The main features of the proposed protocol involve three aspects: (1) it allows the presence of external disturbances and multiplicative noise; (2) it is more general than some existing event-triggered transmission schemes in the deterministic setting; and (3) the minimum inter-event time is implicity defined and is naturally given by the sampling period chosen for the plant. Secondly, under the DETTP, a new closed-loop stochastic networked control system model is established. Remarkably, to facilitate theoretical analysis, the resultant event-based stochastic networked control system is further transformed into a system with two successive delay components in the state, considering the effects of network-induced delays, multiplicative noise and DETTP in a unified framework. By using stochastic system theory, sufficient conditions on the existence of the desired event-based H1 state feedback controller are derived such that the resultant event-based stochastic networked control system is exponentially stable in the mean square sense with a prescribed H1 performance while reducing the number of sampled-state transmission along the feedback link as much as possible. Thirdly, a co-design algorithm for determining the parameters of the DETTP and the state feedback controller gain matrix are also proposed. Finally, two practical examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness and advantage of the proposed method over some existing results in the literature. 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Implications of CO 2 pooling on δ 13 C of ecosystem respiration and leaves in Amazonian forest

Abstract. The carbon isotope of a leaf (δ13Cleaf) is generally more negative in riparian zones than in areas with low soil moisture content or rainfall input. In Central Amazonia, the small-scale topography is composed of plateaus and valleys, with plateaus generally having a lower soil moisture status than the valley edges in the dry season. Yet in the dry season, the nocturnal accumulation of CO2 is higher in the valleys than on the plateaus. Samples of sunlit leaves and atmospheric air were collected along a topographical gradient in the dry season to test whether the δ13Cleaf of sunlit leaves and the carbon isotope ratio of ecosystem respired CO2 (δ13CReco) may be more negative in the valley than those on the plateau. The δ13Cleaf was significantly more negative in the valley than on the plateau. Factors considered to be driving the observed variability in δ13Cleaf were: leaf nitrogen concentration, leaf mass per unit area (LMA), soil moisture availability, more negative carbon isotope ratio of atmospheric CO2 (δ 13Ca) in the valleys during daytime hours, and leaf discrimination (Δleaf). The observed pattern of δ13Cleaf might suggest that water-use efficiency (WUE) is higher on the plateaus than in the valleys. However, there was no full supporting evidence for this because it remains unclear how much of the difference in δ13Cleaf was driven by physiology or &delta13Ca. The δ13CReco was more negative in the valleys than on the plateaus on some nights, whereas in others it was not. It is likely that lateral drainage of CO2 enriched in 13C from upslope areas might have happened when the nights were less stable. Biotic factors such as soil CO2 efflux (Rsoil) and the responses of plants to environmental variables such as vapor pressure deficit (D) may also play a role. The preferential pooling of CO2 in the low-lying areas of this landscape may confound the interpretation of δ13Cleaf and δ13CReco.
Clark's nutcracker occurrence, whitebark pine stand health, and cone production in the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park

Clark’s nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana) are the main seed dispersers for whitebark pine and primarily responsible for whitebark pine regeneration through their seed caching behavior. On-going losses of whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) in the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem, from white pine blister rust (caused by the exotic fungus Cronartium ribicola), historical losses of whitebark pine to mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae), as well as successional replacement of whitebark pine by fir and spruce exacerbated by fire suppression, may together diminish the likelihood of stand visitation by nutcrackers. In the absence of seed dispersal, management strategies are needed to maintain whitebark pine communities. Here, I focus my studies on the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park to determine: 1) if nutcrackers occur in whitebark pine communities in the park and at what density, 2) if nutcracker densities vary with whitebark pine cone production, 3) how whitebark pine cone production varies with density and health, and 4) whether the relationship between the likelihood of nutcracker visitation and whitebark pine cone density in the park is predicted by the models in McKinney et al. (2009) and Barringer et al. (2012). To address these objectives, I selected five study areas across the park to examine stand condition and sample nutcracker visitation.Within each study area, I delineated one to three transects per study area, each with two 500 m 2 stand assessment plots. For this study, I developed a protocol for estimating both nutcracker (2009, 2010) and whitebark pine cone densities