Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Elastic Properties of Carbon Nanotubes and Nanoropes

Elastic properties of carbon nanotubes and nanoropes are investigated using an empirical force-constant model. For single and multiwall nanotubes the elastic moduli are shown to be insensitive to structural details such as the helicity, the radius, and the number of walls. The tensile Young{close_quote}s modulus and the torsion shear modulus of tubes are comparable to that of the diamond, while the bulk modulus is smaller. Nanoropes composed of single wall nanotubes have the ideal elastic properties of high tensile stiffness and light weight. {copyright} {ital 1997} {ital The American Physical Society}
Halophilic Archaea: Life with Desiccation, Radiation and Oligotrophy over Geological Times

Halophilic archaebacteria (Haloarchaea) can survive extreme desiccation, starvation and radiation, sometimes apparently for millions of years. Several of the strategies that are involved appear specific for Haloarchaea (for example, the formation of halomucin, survival in fluid inclusions of halite), and some are known from other prokaryotes (dwarfing of cells, reduction of ATP). Several newly-discovered haloarchaeal strategies that were inferred to possibly promote long-term survival—halomucin, polyploidy, usage of DNA as a phosphate storage polymer, production of spherical dormant stages—remain to be characterized in detail. More information on potential strategies is desirable, since evidence for the presence of halite on Mars and on several moons in the solar system increased interest in halophiles with respect to the search for extraterrestrial life. This review deals in particular with novel findings and hypotheses on haloarchaeal long-term survival.
Content and pattern of organic pollutants (PAHs, PCBs and DDT) in blue mussels Mytilus trossulus from the southern Baltic Sea

The objective of this work was to assess the contents and patterns of selected organic pollutants (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons – PAHs, polychlorinated biphenyls – PCBs, and chlorinated pesticides – DDT) in the southern part of the Baltic Sea proper, using blue mussels, Mytilus trossulus, as sentinel organisms. The mussels were collected from the Baltic Sea off Poland. The sampling programme focused on the mouths of the rivers Odra and Vistula, located respectively in the Pomeranian Bay and the Gulf of Gdansk, both known to be under anthropogenic pressure. * This work was carried out within the framework of bilateral co-operation between the Institute of Oceanology, Sopot, Poland and the Institute of Chemical and Environmental Investigations (IIQAB/CID), Barcelona, Spain. It was also financially supported by the Institute of Oceanology statutory research project no. 2001/3.3. The complete text of the paper is available in PDF format at http://www.iopan. gda.pl/ oceanologia/index.html 338 J. Potrykus, A. Albalat, J. Pempkowiak, C. Porte The analyses of PCBs and DDT were performed by GC-ECD, that of PAHs by GC-MS. Mussels from both the Vistula and Odra estuaries were found to contain higher levels of organic contaminants (PAHs, PCBs, DDT; 29.7 ng g−1 w.w. (wet weight), 22.3 ng g−1 w.w. , 11.2 ng g−1 w.w. respectively) as compared to the reference point (PAHs – 8.6 ng g−1 w.w., PCBs – 1.9 ng g−1 w.w., DDT – 1.3 ng g−1 w.w.). These results confirm the direct influence of land-based pollution sources on the content of organic pollutants (PAHs, PCBs, and DDT) in the southern Baltic Sea, and point to the Gulf of Gdansk as the area most under threat. P/A and Fluo/Py ratios indicate that in all the mussels analysed, the contaminants were derived mainly from pyrolitic combustion. The mussels collected along the Polish coast of the Baltic contain mostly tetra-aromatic isomers (fluoranthene, pyrene, benzo(a)anthracene and chrysene), penta-aromatic isomers (benzo(b)fluoranthene, benzo(e)fluorene, benzo(a)pyrene and dibenzo(a,h)anthracene) and hexa-aromatics (indeno(1,2,3-cd)pyrene and benzo(ghi)perylene) rather than diand tri-aromatics (naphthalene, fluorene, phenanthrene and anthracene). As regards PCBs, the Baltic mussels contain mostly the more highly chlorinated congeners (penta– and hexachlorobiphenyls). The PCB/pp′DDE and PAH/pp′DDE ratios indicate the predominance of PCBs and PAHs over agriculturally derived DDE in both the Pomeranian Bay and the Gulf of Gdansk.
Self-Protecting Electronic Medical Records Using Attribute-Based Encryption

We provide a design and implementation of self-protecting electronic medical records (EMRs) using attribute-based encryption. Our system allows healthcare organizations to export EMRs to storage locations outside of their trust boundary, including mobile devices, Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs), and cloud systems such as Google Health. In contrast to some previous approaches to this problem, our solution is designed to maintain EMR availability even when providers are offline, i.e., where network connectivity is not available (for example, during a natural disaster). To balance the needs of emergency care and patient privacy, our system is designed to provide for fine-grained encryption and is able to protect individual items within an EMR, where each encrypted item may have its own access control policy. To validate our architecture, we implemented a prototype system using a new dual-policy attribute-based encryption library that we developed. Our implementation, which includes an iPhone app for storing and managing EMRs offline, allows for flexible and automatic policy generation. An evaluation of our design shows that our ABE library performs well, has acceptable storage requirements, and is practical and usable on modern smartphones.
PTPN11 mutations in LEOPARD syndrome

LEOPARD syndrome is an autosomal dominant disorder with multiple lentigines, congenital cardiac abnormalities, ocular hypertelorism, and retardation of growth. Deafness and genital abnormalities are less frequently found. We report a father and daughter and a third, unrelated patient with LEOPARD syndrome. Recently, missense mutations in the PTPN11 gene located in 12q24 were found to cause Noonan syndrome. All three cases of LEOPARD syndrome reported here have a Y279C mutation in the PTPN11 gene. We hypothesise that some PTPN11 mutations are associated with the typical Noonan syndrome phenotype and that other mutations, such as the Y279C mutation reported here, are associated with both the Noonan syndrome phenotype and with skin pigmentation anomalies, such as multiple lentigines or café au lait spots.
Caracterización del potencial turístico del Geoparque Villuercas-Ibores-Jara (Extremadura, España)

La comarca de Villuercas-Ibores-Jara (Comunidad Autonoma de Extremadura, Espana) posee unos recursos geologicos, naturales y culturales que necesitan ser potenciados y gestionados por su valor patrimonial. En este trabajo se analizan los 15 geositios considerados de mayor potencial para el turismo y se documentaron mediante unas fichas que recogen aspectos como la situacion geografica, el estado de conservacion, cualidades o su importancia geologica. Entre ellos pueden ser destacados la Cueva del Castanar de Ibor, el Sinclinal de Santa Lucia o el Nacimiento del Rio Almonte. Sobre la base de dichos recursos, se analiza el modelo de gestion del patrimonio geologico y geomorfologico del recien declarado Geoparque Villuercas-Ibores-Jaraque tiene como puntos fuertes la conservacion, la revalorizacion, el estudio y la difusion del patrimonio geologico en el marco de un turismo de naturaleza y sostenible.
Degradation-Resilient Design of a Self-Healing xDSL Line Driver in 90 nm CMOS

Continuous scaling to smaller CMOS nodes has enlarged transistor degradation effects, reducing the long-term reliability of integrated circuits. This paper addresses the reliability of a high-voltage xDSL line driver and uses a failure-resilient topology to combine both optimal performance and guaranteed reliability, as verified by simulations in a predictive 32 nm CMOS technology. In addition, to illustrate the self-healing concept, a failure-resilient line driver with reconfigurable output stage, on-chip degradation monitors and system controller, resulting in a guaranteed power efficiency even in the presence of transistor degradation, has been implemented in 90 nm CMOS. Preservation of the power efficiency is verified experimentally using voltage-overstressing and temperature variation measurements.
Diuretics and beta-blockers: is there a risk for dyslipidemia?

BACKGROUND Hypertension is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, particularly in combination with other risk factors such as obesity, smoking, diabetes, and dyslipidemia. Effective management of hypertension, even a modest reduction in blood pressure, results in reduced mortality and morbidity from cerebrovascular and cardiovascular disease. METHODS Data from clinical trials were examined to assess the effect of low-dose diuretics or beta-blockers on lipoprotein profile. RESULTS Results of numerous clinical trials demonstrate that low doses of thiazides or cardioselective beta-blockers alone or in combination result in minimal changes in lipid profile. CONCLUSIONS Low doses of thiazide diuretics or beta-blockers are a safe and effective approach to the management of uncomplicated essential hypertension and have the advantage of an association with an evidence-based reduction in morbidity and mortality in long-term clinical trials. There is little or no evidence that the minimal changes in serum lipid profile associated with use of these drugs have resulted in a negation of the beneficial effects of these agents on blood pressure.
Fragment-Based Screening by Protein Crystallography: Successes and Pitfalls

Fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) concerns the screening of low-molecular weight compounds against macromolecular targets of clinical relevance. These compounds act as starting points for the development of drugs. FBDD has evolved and grown in popularity over the past 15 years. In this paper, the rationale and technology behind the use of X-ray crystallography in fragment based screening (FBS) will be described, including fragment library design and use of synchrotron radiation and robotics for high-throughput X-ray data collection. Some recent uses of crystallography in FBS will be described in detail, including interrogation of the drug targets β-secretase, phenylethanolamine N-methyltransferase, phosphodiesterase 4A and Hsp90. These examples provide illustrations of projects where crystallography is straightforward or difficult, and where other screening methods can help overcome the limitations of crystallography necessitated by diffraction quality.
Leveraging Collaborative Virtual Environment Technology for Inter-Population Research on Persuasion in a Classroom Setting

Immersive collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) allow us to interact with geographically distant others while experiencing social presence to a degree that goes far beyond text chatting or teleconferencing. Moreover, these environments provide this high level of realism within social contexts that are impossible in the physical world. Given these facts, CVEs provide behavioral researchers with an ideal platform to study social interaction both within and between geographically and culturally distinct communities. The study reported here leveraged these two unique capabilities of CVEs within a persuasive context by: (1) placing people who are seated in physically distal places into the exact same virtual world, and (2) structuring virtual space to maximize persuasion. Specifically, we report data from a study in which pairs of participants listened to a speaker deliver a persuasive passage within the same digital immersive virtual room. The individual members of each pair were separated by hundreds of kilometers, located at two different college campuses. Within the CVE, we digitally transformed the placement of participants' seats in the virtual classroom. Participants in the front of the classroom were more persuaded by the speaker and had more positive impressions of the speaker. Patterns in both persuasion and memory differed between campuses. Together these findings speak to the utility of wide range CVEs to maximize persuasion and demonstrate the viability of using CVEs for inter-site research.
Fuzzy pattern extraction for classification of protein sequences

Text mining is an important research area in applied statistics. The present article addresses an important problem from the Bioinformatics field, viz. classification of protein sequences as soluble proteins and inclusion body forming proteins when over-expressed in Escherichia coli (E. coli), using text mining and machine learning techniques. We propose a text mining based algorithm to extract patterns from the protein sequences that are later used in support vector classification algorithm. We report the best classification results for this dataset compared to the existing state of the art. Our algorithm is quite general and can be applied to any biological text data. The extracted patterns may give further insight in underlying dynamics of the sequences that decide the corresponding class membership.
Molecular Codes in Biological and Non-Biological Reaction Networks

Can we objectively distinguish chemical systems that are able to process meaningful information from those that are not suitable for information processing? Here, we present a formal method to assess the semantic capacity of a chemical reaction network. The semantic capacity of a network can be measured by analyzing the capability of the network to implement molecular codes. We analyzed models of real chemical systems (Martian atmosphere chemistry and various combustion chemistries), bio-chemical systems (gene expression, gene translation, and phosphorylation signaling cascades), as well as an artificial chemistry and random networks. Our study suggests that different chemical systems posses different semantic capacities. Basically no semantic capacity was found in the atmosphere chemistry of Mars and all studied combustion chemistries, as well as in highly connected random networks, i.e., with these chemistries molecular codes cannot be implemented. High semantic capacity was found in the bio-chemical systems, as well as in random networks where the number of second order reactions is at the number of species. Hypotheses concern the origin and evolution of life. We conclude that our approach can be applied to evaluate the information processing capabilities of a chemical system and may thus be a useful tool to understand the origin and evolution of meaningful information, e.g., at the origin of life.
The mechanism of fluid infiltration in peridotites at Almklovdalen, western Norway

A major Alpine-type peridotite located at Almklovdalen in the Western Gneiss Region of Norway was infiltrated by aqueous fluids at several stages during late Caledonian uplift and retrogressive metamorphism. Following peak metamorphic conditions in the garnet‐peridotite stability field, the peridotite experienced pervasive fluid infiltration and retrogression in the chlorite‐peridotite stability field. Subsequently, the peridotite was infiltrated locally by nonreactive fluids along fracture networks forming pipe-like structures, typically on the order of 10 m wide. Fluid migration away from the fractures into the initially impermeable peridotite matrix was facilitated by pervasive dilation of grain boundaries and the formation of intragranular hydrofractures. Microstructural observations of serpentine occupying the originally fluid-filled inclusion space indicate that the pervasively infiltrating fluid was characterized by a high dihedral angle (y > 608) and ‘curled up’ into discontinuous channels and fluid inclusion arrays following the infiltration event. Re-equilibration of the fluid phase topology took place by growth and dissolution processes driven by the excess surface energy represented by the ‘forcefully’ introduced external fluid. Pervasive fluid introduction into the peridotite reduced local effective stresses, increased the effective grain boundary diffusion rates and caused extensive recrystallization and some grain coarsening of the infiltrated volumes. Grain boundary migration associated with this recrystallization swept off abundant intragranular fluid inclusions in the original chlorite peridotite, leading to a significant colour change of the rock. This colour change defines a relatively sharp front typically located 1‐20 cm away from the fractures where the nonreactive fluids originally entered the peridotite. Our observations demonstrate how crustal rocks may be pervasively infiltrated by fluids with high dihedral angles (y > 608) and emphasize the coupling between hydrofracturing and textural equilibration of the grain boundary networks and the fluid phase topology.
La crisis nuclear de Corea del Norte: Sky News o Fox News

The information provided by News Corporation's two 24-hour news channels: Sky News and Fox News, concerning the North Korean nuclear crisis during April 9 -23, 2013 is examined in this paper from the standpoint of the framing theory. The authors focus on aspects such as "Foxificacion", the presence of military experts on news programs, and the diversity of frameworks for the news. In the case of Sky News, information is made available through the prism of national events, given the time devoted to the controversy with the BBC's "Panorama" program. Treatment of the nuclear crisis on Fox News translates into constant criticism of North Korea's military policy and patriotic exaltation of the United States, with emphasis on the defense system, all cloaked in fierce criticism of the Obama Administration for not promoting military intervention in the conflict.
A validation study of a new classification algorithm to identify rheumatoid arthritis using administrative health databases: case–control and cohort diagnostic accuracy studies. Results from the RECord linkage On Rheumatic Diseases study of the Italian Society for Rheumatology

Objectives To develop and validate a new algorithm to identify patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and estimate disease prevalence using administrative health databases (AHDs) of the Italian Lombardy region. Design Case–control and cohort diagnostic accuracy study. Methods In a randomly selected sample of 827 patients drawn from a tertiary rheumatology centre (training set), clinically validated diagnoses were linked to administrative data including diagnostic codes and drug prescriptions. An algorithm in steps of decreasing specificity was developed and its accuracy assessed calculating sensitivity/specificity, positive predictive value (PPV)/negative predictive value, with corresponding CIs. The algorithm was applied to two validating sets: 106 patients from a secondary rheumatology centre and 6087 participants from the primary care. Alternative algorithms were developed to increase PPV at population level. Crude and adjusted prevalence estimates taking into account algorithm misclassification rates were obtained for the Lombardy region. Results The algorithms included: RA certification by a rheumatologist, certification for other autoimmune diseases by specialists, RA code in the hospital discharge form, prescription of disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs and oral glucocorticoids. In the training set, a four-step algorithm identified clinically diagnosed RA cases with a sensitivity of 96.3 (95% CI 93.6 to 98.2) and a specificity of 90.3 (87.4 to 92.7). Both external validations showed highly consistent results. More specific algorithms achieved >80% PPV at the population level. The crude RA prevalence in Lombardy was 0.52%, and estimates adjusted for misclassification ranged from 0.31% (95% CI 0.14% to 0.42%) to 0.37% (0.25% to 0.47%). Conclusions AHDs are valuable tools for the identification of RA cases at the population level, and allow estimation of disease prevalence and to select retrospective cohorts.
Similarity Analysis of Time Series Gene Expression using Dual-Tree Wavelet Transform

This study presents a similarity-determining method for measuring regulatory relationships between pairs of genes from microarray time series data. The proposed similarity metrics are based on a new method to measure structural similarity to compare the quality of images. We make use of the fact that dual-tree wavelet transform (DTWT) can provide approximate shift invariance and maintain the structures between pairs of regulation-related time series expression data. Despite the simplicity of the presented method, experimental results demonstrate that it enhances the similarity index when tested on known transcriptional regulatory genes.
Fundamental Determinants of School Efficiency and Equity: German States as a Microcosm for OECD Countries

Cross-country evidence on student achievement might be hampered by omitted country characteristics such as language or legal differences. This paper uses cross-state variation in Germany, whose sixteen states share the same language and legal system, but pursue different education policies. The same results found previously across countries hold within Germany: Higher mean student performance is associated with central exams, private school operation, and socio-economic background, but not with spending, while higher equality of opportunity is associated with reduced tracking. In a model that pools German states with OECD countries, these fundamental determinants do not differ significantly between the two samples.
How and When to Screen for Atrial Fibrillation after Stroke: Insights from Insertable Cardiac Monitoring Devices

The introduction of insertable cardiac monitoring devices has dramatically altered our understanding of the role of intermittent atrial fibrillation in cryptogenic stroke. In this narrative review we discuss the incidence, timing and relationship between atrial fibrillation and cryptogenic stroke, how to select patients for monitoring and the value and limitations of different monitoring strategies. We also discuss the role of empirical anticoagulation, and atrial fibrillation burden as a means of tailoring anticoagulation in patients at high risk of bleeding.
Modeling Colloid‐Enhanced Contaminant Transport in Stormwater Infiltration Basin Best Management Practices

Rainfall runoff from stormwater often contains significant quantities of organic chemicals and metal elements. These constituents can adversely affect surface water and groundwater resources. Infiltration basins are best management practices (BMPs) that are designed for passive treatment and are increasingly used to control runoff and reduce stormwater contaminants in surface waters. The large amount of percolation in such BMPs over an extended duration may adversely affect groundwater quality, however, by eventual delivery of stormwater contaminants to the water table. Moreover, the existence of naturally occurring colloids and the deposition of air‐borne colloids in stormwater can enhance the transport of highly sorbing constituents to the groundwater. Due to the large surface area of fine colloids, contaminants with high affinity to the solid phase can bind to colloidal particles and therefore the colloids can act as a vehicle for transport of contaminants in the porous media. In this research, a previously developed colloid‐facilitated transport model was used to predict the effect of such colloids on the fate and transport of multiple metal contaminants in infiltration basins. The model was used to predict the transport of several metals in an infiltration basin in Fresno, CA, and a sensitivity analysis was performed to investigate the effect of various parameters on the fate and transport of metals. It was found that colloid‐facilitated transport can explain the fast movement of highly sorbing metals in a porous medium while the two‐phase model was not able to produce the observed movement in the soil.