Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lysophosphatidic Acid Induces Early Growth Response Gene 1 Expression in Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells: CRE and SRE Mediate the Transcription

Objective—Lysophosphatidic acid (LPA), one component of oxidized low-density lipoprotein, is a potent bioactive phospholipid. Early growth response gene-1 (Egr-1), an important transcription factor, regulates expression of an array of genes involved in vascular diseases. Whether and how LPA regulates the transcriptional machinery of Egr-1 gene is unknown and is addressed in this study. Method and Results—We found that LPA markedly induces Egr-1 mRNA and protein in aortic smooth muscle cells (SMCs). RNA stability and nuclear run-on assays reveal that LPA-induced Egr-1 gene expression is controlled at the transcriptional level. Reporter gene analyses have shown that the −141 to +20 nt region of the Egr-1 promoter contains regulatory elements. Electrophoretic mobility shift assays reveal that the DNA-binding activities of both CREB and SRF to the CRE and SRE motifs of the Egr-1 promoter are markedly elevated in response to LPA. The increased binding activity depends on the phosphorylation of CREB and SRF. Luciferase assays of a series of deleted or mutated Egr-1 promoter-reporter gene constructs, along with dominant negative CREB transfection analysis revealed that the 2 CRE sites and the 2 proximal SRE sites in the Egr-1 promoter are required for maximal LPA-induced Egr-1 gene expression. Conclusions—Our data reveal that LPA regulates Egr-1 expression via transcription factors CREB and SRF. These results establish a novel role for CREB in mediating LPA-induced gene expression. Our results imply that elevated LPA levels may, through activation of Egr-1, which regulates an array of atherogenic genes, exacerbate atheromatous lesions.
Experimental diabetic nephropathy is accelerated in matrix metalloproteinase-2 knockout mice.

BACKGROUND Matrix metalloproteinase-2 (MMP-2) is responsible for the degradation of various types of extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins such as type IV collagen. Decreased MMP-2 expression and activity has been generally thought to contribute to increased accumulation of ECM at the advanced stage of diabetic nephropathy. However, the kinetics and role of MMP-2 in the early phase of diabetic nephropathy remain unclear. To address this issue, we examined whether streptozotocin (STZ)-induced early diabetic nephropathy was accelerated in MMP-2 knockout (KO) mice. METHODS Diabetes was induced by the injection of STZ in 6-week-old control and MMP-2 KO mice. Animals were killed after 16 weeks of diabetes of after observation alone. RESULTS Compared with non-diabetic control mice, renal MMP-2 expression and activity were increased in 16-week old diabetic mice. Serum levels of blood urea nitrogen and creatinine and urinary excretion levels of albumin and N-acetyl-β-D-glucosaminidase were significantly elevated in diabetic MMP-2 KO mice when compared with wild-type diabetic littermates. Further, accumulation of ECM in the glomeruli and atrophy and fibrosis in the tubulointerstitium were exacerbated, and renal α-smooth muscle actin expression was enhanced in diabetic MMP-2 KO mice. CONCLUSIONS Our present study suggests that renal expression and activity of MMP-2 are increased as a compensatory mechanism in the early phase of diabetic nephropathy. Since MMP-2 could play a protective role against the progression of diabetic nephropathy, further enhancement of MMP-2 expression and/or activity in the kidney may be a therapeutic target for the treatment of early diabetic nephropathy.
Voltage Dependence of the Ca2+-activated Cation Channel TRPM4*

TRPM4 is a Ca2+-activated but Ca2+-impermeable cation channel. An increase of [Ca2+]i induces activation and subsequent reduction of currents through TRPM4 channels. This inactivation is strikingly decreased in cell-free patches. In whole cell and cell-free configuration, currents through TRPM4 deactivate rapidly at negative potentials. At positive potentials, currents are much larger and activate slowly. This voltage-dependent behavior induces a striking outward rectification of the steady state currents. The instantaneous current-voltage relationship, derived from the amplitude of tail currents following a prepulse to positive potentials, is linear. Currents show a Boltzmann type of activation; the fraction of open channels increases at positive potentials and is low at negative potentials. Voltage dependence is not due to block by divalent cations or to voltage-dependent binding of intracellular Ca2+ to an activator site, indicating that TRPM4 is a transient receptor potential channel with an intrinsic voltage-sensing mechanism. Voltage dependence of TRPM4 may be functionally important, especially in excitable tissues generating plateau-like or bursting action potentials.
Cross-checking semantic correctness: the case of finding file system bugs

Today, systems software is too complex to be bug-free. To find bugs in systems software, developers often rely on code checkers, like Linux's Sparse. However, the capability of existing tools used in commodity, large-scale systems is limited to finding only shallow bugs that tend to be introduced by simple programmer mistakes, and so do not require a deep understanding of code to find them. Unfortunately, the majority of bugs as well as those that are difficult to find are semantic ones, which violate high-level rules or invariants (e.g., missing a permission check). Thus, it is difficult for code checkers lacking the understanding of a programmer's true intention to reason about semantic correctness. To solve this problem, we present Juxta, a tool that automatically infers high-level semantics directly from source code. The key idea in Juxta is to compare and contrast multiple existing implementations that obey latent yet implicit high-level semantics. For example, the implementation of open() at the file system layer expects to handle an out-of-space error from the disk in all file systems. We applied Juxta to 54 file systems in the stock Linux kernel (680K LoC), found 118 previously unknown semantic bugs (one bug per 5.8K LoC), and provided corresponding patches to 39 different file systems, including mature, popular ones like ext4, btrfs, XFS, and NFS. These semantic bugs are not easy to locate, as all the ones found by Juxta have existed for over 6.2 years on average. Not only do our empirical results look promising, but the design of Juxta is generic enough to be extended easily beyond file systems to any software that has multiple implementations, like Web browsers or protocols at the same layer of a network stack.
Heavy-traffic asymptotic expansions for the asymptotic decay rates in the BMAP/G/1 queue

In great generality, the basic steady-state distributions in theBMAP/G/l queue have asymptotically exponential tails. Here we develop asymptotic expansions for the asymptotic decay rates of these tail probabilities in powers of one minus the traffic intensity. The first term coincides with the decay rate of the exponential distribution arising in the standard heavy-traffic limit. The coefficients of these heavy-traffic expansions depend on the moments of the service-time distribution and the derivatives of the Perron-Frobenius eigenvalue δ(z) of the BMAP matrix generating function D (z) at z = 1. We give recursive formulas for the derivatives δ(κ) (1). The asymptotic expansions provide the basis for efficiently computing the asymptotic decay rates as functions of the traffic intensity, i.e., the caudal characteristic curves. The asymptotic expansions also reveal what features of the model the asymptotic decay rates primarily depend upon. In particular, δ(z) coincides with the limiting time-average of the .
Role of prenatal undernutrition in the expression of serotonin, dopamine and leptin receptors in adult mice: Implications of food intake

Perturbations in the levels of serotonin expression have a significant impact on behavior and have been implicated in the pathogenesis of several neuropsychiatric disorders including anxiety, mood and appetite. Fetal programming is a risk factor for the development of metabolic diseases during adulthood. Moreover, previous studies have shown that serotonin (5-HT), dopamine and leptin are important in energy balance. In the present study, the impact of maternal malnutrition-induced prenatal undernutrition (UN) was investigated in mice and the expression of 5-HT1A, dopamine (D)1, D2 and Ob-Rb receptors was analyzed in the hypothalamus during adulthood. The UN group showed a low birth weight compared with the control group. With regard to receptor expression, 5-HT1A in the UN group was increased in the hypothalamus and D1 was reduced, whereas D2 showed an increase from postnatal day (P)14 in the arcuate nucleus. Ob-Rb receptor expression was increased in the hypothalamus at P14 and P90. These observations indicated that maternal caloric restriction programs a postnatal body weight gain in offspring with an increased food intake in early postnatal life which continues into adulthood. In addition, UN in mice was found to be affected by Ob-Rb, 5-HT1A and D1/2 receptor expression, indicating that these observations may be associated with hyperphagia and obesity.
Heterotic string compactifications on half-flat manifolds II

In this paper, we continue the analysis of heterotic string compactifications on half-flat mirror manifolds by including the 10-dimensional gauge fields. It is argued, that the heterotic Bianchi identity is solved by a variant of the standard embedding. Then, the resulting gauge group in four dimensions is still E6 despite the fact that the Levi-Civita connection has SO(6) holonomy. We derive the associated four-dimensional effective theories including matter field terms for such compactifications. The results are also extended to more general manifolds with SU(3) structure.
A mobile RFID localization algorithm based on instantaneous frequency estimation

In recent years, the application demand for mobile location techniques have kept rising and the potential market is enormous. In this paper, analysis on the characteristic of receiving signal of mobile reader and time-frequency change caused by relative movement between reader and tags are performed. Then, the Doppler shift estimation method is introduced in RFID system for feature extraction of mobile targets. On the basis of that above, a mobile RFID localization algorithm based on instantaneous frequency estimation is presented. By mining the function relationship among Doppler frequency shift, speed and position of reader, the evaluation of position and speed of mobile target has been solved. The experiment results show that the location algorithm is able to meet the requirement of low complexity, less computation and real-time processing features required by mobile RFID systems.
Fully Homomorphic Encryption for Secure Computations in Protected Database

Outsourced computations and, more particularly, cloud computations, are widespread nowadays. That is why the problem of keeping the data security arises. Multiple fully homomorphic cryptosystems were proposed in order to perform secret computations in untrusted environments. But most of the existent solutions are practically inapplicable as they require huge computation resources and produce big (�1Gb) keys and ciphertexts. Therefore, we propose the undemanding fully homomorphic scheme with practically acceptable (�few Kb) keys and output data. Our solution uses modular arithmetic in order to avoid the increase in data size. We have validated our approach through the implementation of the proposed cryptosystem. The details of used algorithms and the results of security evaluation are covered in this paper.
Effects of probiotics and yeast culture on rumen development and growth of dairy calves

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to extend my deepest thanks to my advisor and friend Dr. Cathleen C. Williams for her unending guidance, support, and comic relief during my program of study. I would also like to express my appreciation to my committee members, Dr. for their support and endless direction. A special thanks goes to Dr. Jenny for his additional financial support throughout the project. I would like to extend a thanks to Dr. Claudia Leonardi for her assistance with statistical analysis and patience while trying to explain it to me. for their assistance in data collection and analysis. A special thanks goes to Ashley Dolejsiova for lending her time and patience during the laboratory procedures, especially the ammonia assay. I would like to thank my fellow graduate students Ryan Doescher and Katherine Simon. Most of all I would like to thank my partner in crime and fellow graduate student, Bethany Fisher for all of her help, friendship, emotional support, and shopping therapy. Bethany was there from the beginning to the end of my project, day in and day out, literally rain or shine. Lastly, I would like to thank my parents Gerard and Susan Laborde. Their guidance and endless support have made me the person I am today. I could not have done this without their iii support and many days of pet sitting. I would mostly like to thank my son, Dylan for the time he has given up with me and the assistance he has given during calf feedings, who has, through my experience, gained a great love for dairy cows. I would also like to thank Anthony Bridges, for the support and assistance he provided to me on and off the farm during this endeavor. 3. Least squares means of average daily starter intake and water intake for calves fed diets containing no additives (C), yeast culture (YC), probiotics (P), or yeast culture and probiotics (YCP) through day 56 of age . 4. Least squares means for average body weight (kg) of calves fed diets containing no additives (C), yeast culture (YC), probiotics (P), or yeast culture and probiotics (YCP) at d 0, 42, 5. Least squares means for hip height and wither height through 112 days of age and fecal scores through 56 days of age of calves fed diets containing no additives (C), yeast culture (YC), probiotics (P), or yeast culture and probiotics …
Ultrasonic Guided Wave Imaging for Damage Characterization

Guided wave imaging with a sparse array of inexpensive transducers offers a fast, reliable, and cost-efficient means for damage detection and localization in plate-like structures such as aircraft and spacecraft skins. As such, this technology is a natural choice for inclusion in condition-based maintenance and integrated structural health management programs. One of the implementation challenges results from the complex interaction of propagating ultrasonic waves with both the interrogation structure and potential defects or damage. For example, a guided wave interacts with a surface or sub-surface defect differently depending on the angle of incidence, defect orientation, and ultrasonic frequency. Fortunately, however, this complex interaction also provides a mechanism for guided wave imaging algorithms to perform damage characterization in addition to damage detection and localization. Damage characterization provides a mechanism to help discriminate between actual damage (e.g. fatigue cracks) and benign changes, and can be used with crack propagation models to characterize the stress state. This work proposes the combined use of two guided wave imaging techniques to perform both damage localization and characterization. The robustness of conventional delay-and-sum imaging to errors in a priori assumptions make it ideal for use in locating potential damage locations. Minimum variance imaging, which is highly sensitive to errors in a priori assumptions, can then be leveraged to characterize the potential damage location by determining which scattering assumptions best match the measured data. Scattering assumptions are obtained through finite element modeling (FEM). Experimental data from an in situ sparse array are used to demonstrate feasibility of this approach using two through-thickness notches of different orientations, one inside and one outside the array bounds, to simulate damage in an aluminum plate.
Vitamins and minerals functioning as antioxidants with supplementation considerations

Free radicals are atoms or molecules containing one or more unpaired electrons, making them very “reactive” (Surai, 2003). Biologically relevant free radicals are activated atoms or groups of atoms (usually containing oxygen or nitrogen) with an odd (unpaired) number of electrons. In a non-radical compound, all orbits are occupied by two electrons. When a chemical reaction breaks the bonds that hold paired electrons together, free radicals are produced. Therefore in a ‘free radical’ compound, there is a single unpaired electron in the outer orbit.
Domestic Violence Offenders: Characteristics and Offending related needs

Risk factors such as antisocial attitudes, drug dependency, low level education and poor vocational, cognitive and interpersonal skills contribute directly to criminal behaviour ( Ve n n a rd and Hedderman, 1998). These risk factors can be targeted for change in p rogrammes designed to reduce further offending (Andrews, Bonta and Hart, 1995). The study re p o rted here investigated and described the characteristics and off e n d i n g related or ‘criminogenic’ needs of domestic violence offenders on probation or re f e rred for a pre sentence re p o rt, in order to inform the Probation Services’ response to this group of off e n d e r s .
Stock Constrained Recommendation in Tmall

A large number of recommender systems have been developed to serve users with interesting news, ads, products or other contents. One main limitation with the existing work is that they do not take into account the inventory size of of items to be recommended. As a result, popular items are likely to be out of stock soon as they have been recommended and sold to many users, significantly affecting the impact of recommendation and user experience. This observation motivates us to develop a novel aware recommender system. It jointly optimizes the recommended items for all users based on both user preference and inventory sizes of different items. It requires solving a non-smooth optimization involved estimating a matrix of nxn, where n is the number of items. With the proliferation of items, this approach can quickly become computationally infeasible. We address this challenge by developing a dual method that reduces the number of variables from n^2 to n, significantly improving the computational efficiency. We also extend this approach to the online setting, which is particularly important for big promotion events. Our empirical studies based on a real benchmark data with 100 millions of user visits from Tmall verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Influence of Time-of-Day on Maximal Exercise Capacity Is Related to Daily Thermal Balance but Not to Induced Neuronal Activity in Rats

In the present study, we investigated whether the daily fluctuations of internal body temperature (Tb) and spontaneous locomotor activity (SLA) interact with the thermal and neuronal adjustments induced by high-intensity aerobic exercise until fatigue. The body temperature and SLA of adult Wistar rats (n = 23) were continuously recorded by telemetry for 48 h. Then, the rats were subjected to a protocol of graded exercise until fatigue or rest on the treadmill during light and dark-phases. Tb, tail skin temperature and ambient temperature during each experimental session were recorded. At the end of the last experimental session, the animals were anaesthetized; the brains were perfused and removed for immunohistochemical analysis of c-fos neuronal activation. The daily rhythms of SLA and Tb were strongly correlated (r = 0.88 and p < 0.001), and this was followed by a daily oscillation in both the ratio and the correlation index between these variables (p < 0.001). Exercise capacity was associated with a lower resting Tb (p < 0.01) and was higher in the light-phase (p < 0.001), resulting in an increased capacity to accumulate heat during exercise (p < 0.01). Independent of time-of-day, high intensity exercise strongly activated the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus (PVN), the supra-optic nucleus (SON) and the locus coeruleus (LC) (p < 0.001) but not the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). Taken together, our results points toward a role of the circadian system in a basal activity control of the thermoregulatory system as an important component for the onset of physical activities. In fact, rather than directly limiting the adjustments induced by exercise the present study brings new evidence that the effect of time-of-day on exercise performance occurs at the threshold level for each thermoregulatory system effector activity. This assumption is based on the observed resilience of the central clock to high-intensity exercise and the similarities in exercise-induced neuronal activation in the PVN, SON, and LC.
Mobile Sink based Routing Protocol (MSRP) for Prolonging Network Lifetime in Clustered Wireless Sensor Network

In WSN, sensors near the sink have to relay the data of the nodes away from the sink and as a result they drain their energy very quickly. It result in network partitioning and can significantly limit the network lifetime. This problem is termed as hotspot problem. Recently, formation of hot spot or energy hole near the sink has emerged as a critical issue for data gathering in WSN. In this paper, we address hotspot problem and purposed Mobile Sink based Routing Protocol (MSRP) for Prolonging Network Lifetime in Clustered Wireless Sensor Network. In MSRP, mobile sink moves in the clustered WSN to collect sensed data from the CHs within its vicinity. During data gathering mobile sink also maintains information about the residual energy of the CHs. Mobile sink based on the residual energy of CHs move to the CHs having higher energy. Consequently, the hotspot problem is minimized as the immediate neighbor of the sink is high energy node and it changes because of regular sink movement. It results in a balanced use of WSN energy and improves network life time. To evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy intensive simulation are carried out using OMNet-4.0. Performance of the proposed strategy is compared to the static sink and multiple sinks strategies, using metrics such as energy per packet, and throughput. The simulation results demonstrate that MSRP is effective in prolonging the network lifetime as well as in improving throughput than static sink and multiple sink strategies.
Assessment and diagnosis of personality disorders: International personality disorder examination (IPDE)

Background and History One of the aims of the World Health Organization (WHO) and US Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration (ADAMHA) joint program on psychiatric diagnosis and classification was the development and standardization of diagnostic assessment instruments for use in clinical research around the world. The International Personality Disorder Examination (IPDE) is a semistructured clinical interview originally designed to assess the personality disorders (PDs) in the ICD-10 and DSM-III-R classification systems, and subsequently modified for compatibility with DSM-IV. The IPDE is an outgrowth and adaptation for international use of the Personality Disorder Examination (PDE) (Loranger, 1988). To facilitate the development of the IPDE, beginning in 1985 several international workshops were convened. At these meetings WHO and ADAMHA officials, together with representatives of the international psychiatric community, discussed the format of the interview, the wording of items, and the development of a scoring manual. Frequent revisions were made to reflect the experience of interviewers with trial versions. Investigators at the various centres involved in the field trial described in this volume translated the instrument into the following languages: Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Kannada, Norwegian, Swahili, and Tamil. The translations were back-translated into English by a psychiatrist or psychologist who had not seen the original English version. Variations and problems in the back-translation were then reviewed with those who undertook the original translation, and corrections were made when indicated.