Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chemical Composition and Evaluation of the Biological Properties of the Essential Oil of the Dietary Phytochemical Lippia citriodora

The aim of the study was to characterize the chemical composition and biological properties of the essential oil from the plant Lippia citriodora grown in Greece. The essential oil volatiles were analyzed by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry GC-MS indicating citral as the major component. Τhe antimicrobial properties were assayed using the disk diffusion method and the minimum inhibitory and non-inhibitory concentration values were determined. Listeria monocytogenes, Staphylococcus epidermidis, Staphylococcus aureus, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and Aspergillus niger were sensitive to Lippia citriodora oil, but not Escherichia coli, Salmonella Enteritidis, Salmonella typhimurium, and Pseudomonas fragi. Adversely, all microbes tested were sensitive to citral. 2,2-Diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) and 2,2′-azino-bis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulphonic acid) (ABTS) assays were used to assess direct antioxidant activity, which proved to be weak for both agents, while comet assay was utilized to study the cytoprotective effects against H2O2-induced oxidative damage in Jurkat cells. Interestingly, the oil showed a more profound cytoprotective effect compared to citral. The antiproliferative activity was evaluated in a panel of cancer cell lines using the sulforhodamine B (SRB) and 2,3-bis(2-methoxy-4-nitro-5-sulfophenyl)-S-(phenylamino) carbonyl-2-tetrazolium hydroxide (XTT) assays and both agents demonstrated potent antiproliferative activity with citral being more cytotoxic than the oil. Taken together, the essential oil of Lippia citriodora and its major component, citral, exert diverse biological properties worthy of further investigation.
Accelerating two-dimensional page walks for virtualized systems

Nested paging is a hardware solution for alleviating the software memory management overhead imposed by system virtualization. Nested paging complements existing page walk hardware to form a two-dimensional (2D) page walk, which reduces the need for hypervisor intervention in guest page table management. However, the extra dimension also increases the maximum number of architecturally-required page table references. This paper presents an in-depth examination of the 2D page table walk overhead and options for decreasing it. These options include using the AMD Opteron processor's page walk cache to exploit the strong reuse of page entry references. For a mix of server and SPEC benchmarks, the presented results show a 15%-38% improvement in guest performance by extending the existing page walk cache to also store the nested dimension of the 2D page walk. Caching nested page table translations and skipping multiple page entry references produce an additional 3%-7% improvement. Much of the remaining 2D page walk overhead is due to low-locality nested page entry references, which result in additional memory hierarchy misses. By using large pages, the hypervisor can eliminate many of these long-latency accesses and further improve the guest performance by 3%-22%.
Distinct Role of Antigen-Specific T Helper Type 1 (Th1) and Th2 Cells in Tumor Eradication in Vivo

The role of T helper type 1 (Th1) and Th2 cells in tumor immunity was investigated using Th cells induced from ovalbumin (OVA)-specific T cell receptor transgenic mice. Although Th1 cells exhibited stronger cytotoxicity than Th2 cells, both cell types completely eradicated tumors when transferred into mice bearing A20 tumor cells transfected with the OVA gene (A20-OVA). Th1 cells eradicated the tumor mass by inducing cellular immunity, whereas Th2 cells destroyed the tumor by inducing tumor necrosis. Both Th1 and Th2 cells required CD8+ T cells to eliminate tumors, and neither of these cells were able to completely eliminate A20-OVA tumors from T and B cell–deficient RAG2−/− mice. Mice cured from tumors by Th1 and Th2 cell therapy rejected A20-OVA upon rechallenge, but CD8+ cytotoxic T lymphocytes were induced only from spleen cells prepared from cured mice by Th1 cell therapy. Moreover, we demonstrated that Th1 and Th2 cells used distinct adhesion mechanisms during tumor eradication: the leukocyte function-associated antigen (LFA)-1–dependent cell–cell adhesion step was essential for Th1 cell therapy, but not for Th2 cell therapy. These findings demonstrated for the first time the distinct role of antigen-specific Th1 and Th2 cells during eradication of established tumors in vivo.
Mitochondria in Cardiovascular Physiology and Disease L-type Ca 2 channel contributes to alterations in mitochondrial calcium handling in the mdx ventricular myocyte

Viola HM, Davies SM, Filipovska A, Hool LC. The L-type Ca channel contributes to alterations in mitochondrial calcium handling in the mdx ventricular myocyte. Am J Physiol Heart Circ Physiol 304: H767–H775, 2013. First published January 18, 2013; doi:10.1152/ajpheart.00700. 2012. —The L-type Ca channel is the main route for calcium entry into cardiac myocytes, and it is essential for contraction. Alterations in whole cell L-type Ca channel current and Ca homeostasis have been implicated in the development of cardiomyopathies. Cytoskeletal proteins can influence whole cell L-type Ca current and mitochondrial function. Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a fatal X-linked disease that leads to progressive muscle weakness due to the absence of cytoskeletal protein dystrophin. This includes dilated cardiomyopathy, but the mechanisms are not well understood. We sought to identify the effect of alterations in whole cell L-type Ca channel current on mitochondrial function in the murine model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (mdx). Activation of the L-type Ca channel with the dihydropyridine agonist BayK( ) caused a significantly larger increase in cytosolic Ca in mdx vs. wild-type (wt) ventricular myocytes. Consistent with elevated cytosolic Ca , resting mitochondrial Ca , NADH, and mitochondrial superoxide were significantly greater in mdx vs. wt myocytes. Activation of the channel with BayK( ) caused a further increase in mitochondrial Ca , NADH, and superoxide in mdx myocytes. The ratios of the increases were similar to the ratios recorded in wt myocytes. In mitochondria isolated from 8-wk-old mdx hearts, respiration and mitochondrial electron transport chain complex activity were similar to mitochondria isolated from wt hearts. We conclude that mitochondria function at a higher level of resting calcium in the intact mdx myocyte and activation of the L-type Ca channel contributes to alterations in calcium handling by the mitochondria. This perturbation may contribute to the development of cardiomyopathy.
Military route planning in battle field simulations for a multi-agent system

As the army continues to develop virtual systems for combative support missions, it needs to also develop representations of intelligent systems for its battlefield simulations. Military route planning is a challenging problem in many domains such as military mission planning, simulated war games, and battlefield simulations. The simulations have levels of complexity, abstraction, and scale. In this paper we discuss a framework for modeling intelligent systems in the context of a battlefield simulation tool. We apply this framework to model a battlefield simulation comprising of enemy outposts, minefields, barriers, and platoons of soldiers in a multi-agent system to aid commanders in decision making strategies. The results shown in this paper could be used for decision making by commanders as they can visualize bottle-neck situations such as goal swapping for platoons, route planning, and strategy planning.
Linear models of student skills for static data

Current student skills models rely on non linear models such as Bayesian Networks and Bayesian Knowledge Tracing, and on general linear models, such as IRT which can be considered a logistic regression. Only a handful of recent studies have looked at linear models based on matrix factorization techniques. These studies obtained good success over data from dynamic student knowledge states when compared with widely used techniques such as Bayesian Knowledge Tracing. However, there are no reports of linear models applied to static knowledge states data. We introduce different linear models of student skill for small, static student test data that does not contain missing values. We compare their predictive performance the traditional psychometric Item Response Theory approach, and the k-nearest-neighbours approach that is widely used in recommender systems. The results show that that the IRT model is far better than all others. These results are somewhat unexpected given the recent relative success of factorization models for dynamic student test data. They raise the question of whether there is still a large amount of potential performance gain from other non-linear models for dynamic data.
SelfieBoost: A Boosting Algorithm for Deep Learning

We describe and analyze a new boosting algorithm for deep learning called SelfieBoost. Unlike other boosting algorithms, like AdaBoost, which construct ensembles of classifiers, SelfieBoost boosts the accuracy of a single network. We prove a $\log(1/\epsilon)$ convergence rate for SelfieBoost under some "SGD success" assumption which seems to hold in practice.
Roles of mutation and recombination in the evolution of protein thermodynamics

We present a comprehensive study of the evolutionary origin of the thermodynamic behavior of proteins. With the use of a simplified model, we exhaustively enumerate the space of all sequences and the space of all structures, simulate the evolutionary relationship between sequences and structures, and characterize the steady-state sequence distribution for all structures in terms of several thermodynamic variables. We assess the effects of two major forces of evolution: mutation and recombination. Three simplifications are made. First, a two-dimensional lattice model is used to represent protein sequences and structures. Second, proteins undergo neutral evolution so that the fitness landscape has a flat allowed region inside of which all sequences are equally fit. Third, we ignore otherwise important factors such as finite population size and evolutionary time. Two scenarios emerge from our study. The first occurs when evolution is dominated by mutation events. Even though the prototype sequence that is most mutationally robust is preferred by evolution, the preference is not strong enough to offset the huge size of sequence space. Most native sequences are located near the boundary of the fitness region and are marginally compatible with the native structure. The second scenario occurs when evolution is dominated by recombination events. Now evolutionary preference for prototype sequence is strong enough to overcome the size of sequence space so that most native sequences are located near the center of sequence-structure compatibility. We conclude that the relative frequency of mutation and recombination events is a major determinant of how optimal protein sequences are for their structures.
Hospitalization Risks in the Treatment of Schizophrenia: Comparison of Antipsychotic Medications

This study used administrative claims data to compare the relative risks for hospitalization among commercially insured patients with schizophrenia receiving atypical and typical antipsychotic drugs. Cox proportional hazard regression estimates, adjusted for differences in patient characteristics, suggested that among patients treated with the 4 atypical antipsychotic drugs, only olanzapine had a significantly higher risk for hospitalization than the typical antipsychotic drugs (hazard ratio [HR], 1.81; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.20-2.75). In addition, risk for hospitalization with olanzapine was significantly higher than that for risperidone (HR, 1.34; 95% CI, 1.03-1.74) and numerically higher than that for quetiapine (HR, 1.40; 95% CI, 0.94-2.07). Overall, olanzapine was associated with a higher risk for hospitalization than the typical antipsychotic drugs and among the atypical antipsychotic drugs, risperidone and, potentially, quetiapine.
SVM learning from imbalanced microanuerysm candidate datasets used feature selection by gini index

In the view of the characteristic of the imbalanced microanuerysm candidate datasets: a large number of negative samples, the different distributions of different classes and the irrelevant features exacted from each candidate for learning task, this paper proposes a feature selection algorithm that we selected the top features out of all features that were ranked in the increasing order of feature weights generated by Gini index, and then a modified SVM classifier is used to divide the microanuerysm candidates into two groups: true microaneurysms and false microaneurysms. The experiment on the training set of a publicly available database shows that the proposed new method has the best performance including the best free-response receiver operating characteristic (FROC) curve. Furthermore the proposed method based on top features selected by feature Gini index outperforms over all features.
Estimating Number of People Using Calibrated Monocular Camera Based on Geometrical Analysis of Surface Area

We propose a novel technique for estimating the number of people in a video sequence; it has the advantages of being stable even in crowded situations and needing no ground-truth data. By analyzing the geometrical relationships between image pixels and their intersection volumes in the real world quantitatively, a foreground image directly indicates the number of people. Because foreground detection is possible even in crowded situations, the proposed method can be applied in such situations. Moreover, it can estimate the number of people in an a priori manner, so it needs no ground-truth data unlike existing feature-based estimation techniques. Experiments show the validity of the proposed method.
Accuracy Enhancement of Inertial Sensors Utilizing High Resolution Spectral Analysis

In both military and civilian applications, the inertial navigation system (INS) and the global positioning system (GPS) are two complementary technologies that can be integrated to provide reliable positioning and navigation information for land vehicles. The accuracy enhancement of INS sensors and the integration of INS with GPS are the subjects of widespread research. Wavelet de-noising of INS sensors has had limited success in removing the long-term (low-frequency) inertial sensor errors. The primary objective of this research is to develop a novel inertial sensor accuracy enhancement technique that can remove both short-term and long-term error components from inertial sensor measurements prior to INS mechanization and INS/GPS integration. A high resolution spectral analysis technique called the fast orthogonal search (FOS) algorithm is used to accurately model the low frequency range of the spectrum, which includes the vehicle motion dynamics and inertial sensor errors. FOS models the spectral components with the most energy first and uses an adaptive threshold to stop adding frequency terms when fitting a term does not reduce the mean squared error more than fitting white noise. The proposed method was developed, tested and validated through road test experiments involving both low-end tactical grade and low cost MEMS-based inertial systems. The results demonstrate that in most cases the position accuracy during GPS outages using FOS de-noised data is superior to the position accuracy using wavelet de-noising.
Cache injection on bus based multiprocessors

Software-controlled cache prefetching and data forwarding are widely used techniques for tolerating memory latency in shared memory multiprocessors. However, some previous studies show that cache prefetching is not so effective on bus-based multiprocessors, while the effectiveness of data forwarding has not been explored in this environment, yet. In this paper, a novel technique called cache injection is proposed. Cache injection, tuned to the properties of bus-based architectures, combines advantages of both cache prefetching and data forwarding. Some preliminary experiments show that the proposed solution can significantly help in reducing the overall miss ratio and bus traffic in applications where write-shared data prevails.
Ag Nanowire Reinforced Highly Stretchable Conductive Fibers for Wearable Electronics

Stretchable conductive fibers have received significant attention due to their possibility of being utilized in wearable and foldable electronics. Here, highly stretchable conductive fiber composed of silver nanowires (AgNWs) and silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) embedded in a styrene–butadiene–styrene (SBS) elastomeric matrix is fabricated. An AgNW‐embedded SBS fiber is fabricated by a simple wet spinning method. Then, the AgNPs are formed on both the surface and inner region of the AgNW‐embedded fiber via repeated cycles of silver precursor absorption and reduction processes. The AgNW‐embedded conductive fiber exhibits superior initial electrical conductivity (σ0 = 2450 S cm−1) and elongation at break (900% strain) due to the high weight percentage of the conductive fillers and the use of a highly stretchable SBS elastomer matrix. During the stretching, the embedded AgNWs act as conducting bridges between AgNPs, resulting in the preservation of electrical conductivity under high strain (the rate of conductivity degradation, σ/σ0 = 4.4% at 100% strain). The AgNW‐embedded conductive fibers show the strain‐sensing behavior with a broad range of applied tensile strain. The AgNW reinforced highly stretchable conductive fibers can be embedded into a smart glove for detecting sign language by integrating five composite fibers in the glove, which can successfully perceive human motions.
Relationship between herd calving to conception interval and culling rate for failure to conceive

The factors affecting herd calving to conception intervals and culling rate are the interval to first service, the efficiency of heat detection, the pregnancy rate and the maximum number of oestrous cycles allowed to occur before the cow is considered to be so far into lactation that even if it does conceive, the length of the dry period and the delay to the next calving will make its production uneconomic. Depending on the fertility factor (the product of the average herd pregnancy rate and the oestrus detection rate) it is the maximum number of oestrous cycles, usually dictated by the length of the calving interval desired, that decides the outcome. A graphical representation of these mathematical relationships demonstrates methods for achieving different economic and other objectives.
Simulation of adaptive statistically multiplexed routing in ad hoc networks

This paper develops a solution to the problems of discovery, maintenance, and use of multiple routes in ad hoc networks. Performance criterion is the average time taken by a packet to reach its destination through multiple hops. A source node considers each of its reachable neighbors (by direct wireless transmission) as gateways for every possible destination. The effect of delay at a gateway and beyond, until the packet reaches its destination, is approximately modeled as an M/M/1 queuing system. Potential gateways at every node provide multiple routes. Multiple routes are statistically multiplexed to distribute the load as well as to deal with changes in data and network configuration. The potential of each gateway of a node is estimated on-line and the proportions of traffic routed through multiple gateways are also updated adaptively. Simulation results are presented and discussed.
Regional Influence of Cannabinoid CB1 Receptors in the Regulation of Ethanol Self-Administration by Wistar Rats

Substantial evidence suggests a facilitatory influence of cannabinoid CB1 receptors in the modulation of ethanol consumption by rodents. Studies performed in rats selectively bred for high alcohol preference point to an involvement of CB1 receptors in the nucleus accumbens (NAC), ventral tegmental area (VTA) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in the modulation ethanol self-administration. However, the neural mechanisms through which CB1 receptors regulate ethanol intake in out-bred Wistar rats have not been investigated. The present study evaluated alterations in ethanol self-administration induced by localized infusions of the CB1 receptor antagonist SR141716A (0, 1 and 3 μg/side) into the NAC, anterior and posterior VTA and mPFC. Separate groups of Wistar rats were trained to operantly respond for an oral ethanol solution and prepared with bilateral injection cannulae aimed at each brain region. Results revealed significant decreases in ethanol intake following intra-NAC SR141716A administration, consistent with our prior observation of ethanol-induced increases extracellular 2-arachidonoyl glycerol (2-AG) in this brain region. We also observed a significant dose-dependent reduction in ethanol intake following SR141716A administration into the posterior, but not anterior VTA, consistent with evidence of a specific involvement of the posterior VTA in the regulation of ethanol intake. Ethanol consumption was unaltered following intra-mPFC SR141716A administration and ethanol self-administration did not induce robust changes in anandamide or 2-AG levels in mPFC microdialysates. These findings implicate an involvement of CB1 receptors in the NAC and posterior VTA, but not anterior VTA and mPFC in the regulation of ethanol self-administration behavior by outbred Wistar rats.
FPGA based Remote Object Tracking for Real-time Control

Most sensing applications require some form of digital signal processing. This processing can be performed on an FPGA rather than a microprocessor or DSP. While real-time tracking and processing is achievable on serial processors, it can be beneficial to take advantage of the parallelism, low cost, and low power consumption offered by FPGAs. The design and implementation of a real-time object tracking algorithm on an FPGA focuses on minimising resource utilisation to allow functionality of the application that uses the tracking information to be added. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through an interactive arcade-style game that allows the user to manipulate the game environment in real time. The game effectively simulates any application that may use the information derived from sensing and tracking for control purposes, and illustrates the effectiveness of an FPGA based solution.