Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Control of starch branching in barley defined through differential RNAi suppression of starch branching enzyme IIa and IIb

The roles of starch branching enzyme (SBE, EC 2.4.1.18) IIa and SBE IIb in defining the structure of amylose and amylopectin in barley (Hordeum vulgare) endosperm were examined. Barley lines with low expression of SBE IIa or SBE IIb, and with the low expression of both isoforms were generated through RNA-mediated silencing technology. These lines enabled the study of the role of each of these isoforms in determining the amylose content, the distribution of chain lengths, and the frequency of branching in both amylose and amylopectin. In lines where both SBE IIa and SBE IIb expression were reduced by >80%, a high amylose phenotype (>70%) was observed, while a reduction in the expression of either of these isoforms alone had minor impact on amylose content. The structure and properties of the high amylose starch resulting from the concomitant reduction in the expression of both isoforms of SBE II in barley were found to approximate changes seen in amylose extender mutants of maize, which result from lesions eliminating expression of the SBE IIb gene. Amylopectin chain length distribution analysis indicated that both SBE IIa and SBE IIb isoforms play distinct roles in determining the fine structure of amylopectin. A significant reduction in the frequency of branches in amylopectin was noticed only when both SBE IIa and SBE IIb were reduced, whereas there was a significant increase in the branching frequency of amylose when SBE IIb alone was reduced. Functional interactions between SBE isoforms are suggested, and a possible inhibitory role of SBE IIb on other SBE isoforms is discussed.
CNF1 Enhances Brain Energy Content and Counteracts Spontaneous Epileptiform Phenomena in Aged DBA/2J Mice

Epilepsy, one of the most common conditions affecting the brain, is characterized by neuroplasticity and brain cell energy defects. In this work, we demonstrate the ability of the Escherichia coli protein toxin cytotoxic necrotizing factor 1 (CNF1) to counteract epileptiform phenomena in inbred DBA/2J mice, an animal model displaying genetic background with an high susceptibility to induced- and spontaneous seizures. Via modulation of the Rho GTPases, CNF1 regulates actin dynamics with a consequent increase in spine density and length in pyramidal neurons of rat visual cortex, and influences the mitochondrial homeostasis with remarkable changes in the mitochondrial network architecture. In addition, CNF1 improves cognitive performances and increases ATP brain content in mouse models of Rett syndrome and Alzheimer's disease. The results herein reported show that a single dose of CNF1 induces a remarkable amelioration of the seizure phenotype, with a significant augmentation in neuroplasticity markers and in cortex mitochondrial ATP content. This latter effect is accompanied by a decrease in the expression of mitochondrial fission proteins, suggesting a role of mitochondrial dynamics in the CNF1-induced beneficial effects on this epileptiform phenotype. Our results strongly support the crucial role of brain energy homeostasis in the pathogenesis of certain neurological diseases, and suggest that CNF1 could represent a putative new therapeutic tool for epilepsy.
Correlation of clinical score to pulmonary function and oxygen saturation in children with asthma attack.

BACKGROUND The aim of this study is to demonstrate the importance of the relation between clinical score, pulse oximetry and spirometric tests in an asthma attack. METHODS In this randomized, double blind, observational study, 110 children (age 2-15 years) with an asthma attack who were admitted to emergency room were evaluated. Patient history, physical examination, clinical score and oxygen saturation were recorded in all patients; however pulmonary function tests were obtained only in 54 children who were over 5 years of age. The clinical score was derived from respiratory rate, wheezing, dyspnea and retractions. RESULTS Both oxygen saturation and spirometric tests were found to be significantly correlated with the clinical score in children. CONCLUSION The clinical score could be used for assessing the severity of the asthma attack particularly in developing countries where laboratory facilities are not available or pulmonary function tests are not feasible.
Spotting Symbol Using Sparsity over Learned Dictionary of Local Descriptors

This paper proposes a new approach to spot symbols into graphical documents using sparse representations. More specifically, a dictionary is learned from a training database of local descriptors defined over the documents. Following their sparse representations, interest points sharing similar properties are used to define interest regions. Using an original adaptation of information retrieval techniques, a vector model for interest regions and for a query symbol is built based on its sparsity in a visual vocabulary where the visual words are columns in the learned dictionary. The matching process is performed comparing the similarity between vector models. Evaluation on SESYD datasets demonstrates that our method is promising.
A freeware 1D emitter model for silicon solar cells

Heavily doped surfaces—often called emitters, diffusions, or back-surface fields—are complicated regions of a solar cell. In these regions, the dopant concentration varies over many orders of magnitude in a short distance, causing large variations in the minority carrier concentration, Auger recombination, Shockley-Read-Hall recombination, carrier mobility and even the band gap. Moreover, when the diffusion is heavily doped, the semiconductor becomes degenerate and the carrier concentrations must be calculated with Fermi-Dirac statistics rather than the simpler Boltzmann statistics. Until now, computer simulation packages that account for all of these aspects are either expensive or not freely accessible, and they do not cater specifically to the PV industry. We therefore present a new freeware computer program that models a 1D emitter in silicon. Given a user-defined dopant profile, a surface recombination velocity, and an incident spectrum, the program calculates recombination as a function of depth within the emitter and as a function of the applied voltage. This permits the computation of the emitter saturation current density, the transparency factor, the collection current density, and the collection efficiency. The program can be applied to both phosphorus and boron diffusions and will assist in their optimisation for practical solar cells. In this paper, we present the equations, the assumptions, and the procedure that are employed by the freeware program.
Luminal Flow Amplifies Stent-Based Drug Deposition in Arterial Bifurcations

Background Treatment of arterial bifurcation lesions using drug-eluting stents (DES) is now common clinical practice and yet the mechanisms governing drug distribution in these complex morphologies are incompletely understood. It is still not evident how to efficiently determine the efficacy of local drug delivery and quantify zones of excessive drug that are harbingers of vascular toxicity and thrombosis, and areas of depletion that are associated with tissue overgrowth and luminal re-narrowing. Methods and Results We constructed two-phase computational models of stent-deployed arterial bifurcations simulating blood flow and drug transport to investigate the factors modulating drug distribution when the main-branch (MB) was treated using a DES. Simulations predicted extensive flow-mediated drug delivery in bifurcated vascular beds where the drug distribution patterns are heterogeneous and sensitive to relative stent position and luminal flow. A single DES in the MB coupled with large retrograde luminal flow on the lateral wall of the side-branch (SB) can provide drug deposition on the SB lumen-wall interface, except when the MB stent is downstream of the SB flow divider. In an even more dramatic fashion, the presence of the SB affects drug distribution in the stented MB. Here fluid mechanic effects play an even greater role than in the SB especially when the DES is across and downstream to the flow divider and in a manner dependent upon the Reynolds number. Conclusions The flow effects on drug deposition and subsequent uptake from endovascular DES are amplified in bifurcation lesions. When only one branch is stented, a complex interplay occurs – drug deposition in the stented MB is altered by the flow divider imposed by the SB and in the SB by the presence of a DES in the MB. The use of DES in arterial bifurcations requires a complex calculus that balances vascular and stent geometry as well as luminal flow.
Fast confocal endomicroscopy based on multi-fiber parallel scanning

Confocal endomicroscopy has been developed very quickly for its high resolution and high sensitivity. It could be used for early diagnoses of disease, such as cancer. In existing confocal endomicroscopy, fiber bundle or single fiber was used for transferring exciting laser and excited fluorescence signal. Neither of these technologies had high resolution nor high imaging speed. In this paper, a fast confocal endomicroscopy(FCM) is presented. In the FCM, a multi-fiber array with 9 fibers is used for light signal transferring, including exciting laser and excited fluorescence. In the distal end of the endomicroscopy, the fibers are arranged in two dimension and form a 3X3 area array. The fibers are not arrayed closely, but with space. Under driving of a MEMS scanner, the fibers move and scan tissue in parallel. Each fiber takes charge of 1/9 of the whole diagnoses field. Then the whole field is scanned and image is acquired. In the other end, the fibers are arranged in linear array. Exciting laser is coupled into the linear fiber array and transferred to the distal end of the area fiber array. Fluorophore molecules in tissue are excited and emit fluorescence. The fluorescence is collected into the 3X3 area fiber array and transferred to the linear array end. An imaging objective lens couples the fluorescence from the fiber end to a CCD, which converts the light intensity into electrical signal. Image of tissue is reconstructed from the electrical signal. By parallel scanning, the imaging speed of confocal endomicroscope is improved by several times, which is associated with the number of fibers in the array.
Estimation from Rapid Omnidirectional Exploration

A new generation of practical, low-cost indoor robots is now using wide-angle cameras to aid navigation, but usually this is limited to position estimation via sparse featurebased SLAM. Such robots usually have little global sense of the dimensions, demarcation or identities of the rooms they are in, information which would be very useful to enable behaviour with much more high level intelligence. In this paper we show that we can augment an omnidirectional SLAM pipeline with straightforward dense stereo estimation and simple and robust room model fitting to obtain rapid and reliable estimation of the global shape of typical rooms from short robot motions. We have tested our method extensively in real homes, offices and on synthetic data. We also give examples of how our method can extend to making composite maps of larger rooms, and detecting room transitions.
Hy-Sim: model based hybrid simulation framework for WSN application development

Bridging the physical world with the virtual one often broadens the possibilities of accelerating and easing embedded system design. This is even more true for WSNs, where generally the developed applications need to be tested and executed in hundreds to thousands of nodes. Often times, it is hard to manage test beds that have huge number of nodes. The most common solution is to rely on simulation frameworks that allow the developers to create virtual sensor nodes and then provides levels of abstraction to specify the applications which will be executed on the nodes. The foremost drawback of this kind of simulation is the absence of direct interfaces with the physical environment. Hence in this paper we propose a hybrid simulation framework for WSN application development that interconnects a virtual network with the physical network and then allows one to simulate the networks as a whole. Moreover, the developers model WSN applications by using high level abstractions which could be used for multi-platform automatic code generation (in TinyOS and Ember ZigBee platforms).
HIV/AIDS surging in Eastern Europe.

According to a report released last November 2000 by the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the WHO number of new HIV cases in Eastern Europe has been rapidly increasing. The report further stated that some 700000 people in Eastern Europe are estimated to be living with HIV as compared to 420000 cases a year ago. While in Russian Federation and Estonia more HIV cases were reported for the year 2000 than in any previous years. According to Dr. Peter Piot executive director of UNAIDS most of these new infections are among injecting drug users. Similarly in many former Soviet Bloc countries increased poverty unemployment poor public health system and other manifestations of socioeconomic turmoil have fostered drug use an increase in prostitution and epidemics of sexually transmitted infections--which in turn increase the spread of HIV. Also the report noted that there is some encouraging news about political and legal reforms that support HIV prevention efforts in Eastern Europe.
Imaging of Neurovascular Compression Syndromes: Trigeminal Neuralgia, Hemifacial Spasm, Vestibular Paroxysmia, and Glossopharyngeal Neuralgia

SUMMARY: Neurovascular compression syndromes are usually caused by arteries that directly contact the cisternal portion of a cranial nerve. Not all cases of neurovascular contact are clinically symptomatic. The transition zone between the central and peripheral myelin is the most vulnerable region for symptomatic neurovascular compression syndromes. Trigeminal neuralgia (cranial nerve V) has an incidence of 4–20/100,000, a transition zone of 4 mm, with symptomatic neurovascular compression typically proximal. Hemifacial spasm (cranial nerve VII) has an incidence of 1/100,000, a transition zone of 2.5 mm, with symptomatic neurovascular compression typically proximal. Vestibular paroxysmia (cranial nerve VIII) has an unknown incidence, a transition zone of 11 mm, with symptomatic neurovascular compression typically at the internal auditory canal. Glossopharyngeal neuralgia (cranial nerve IX) has an incidence of 0.5/100,000, a transition zone of 1.5 mm, with symptomatic neurovascular compression typically proximal. The transition zone overlaps the root entry zone close to the brain stem in cranial nerves V, VII, and IX, yet it is more distal and does not overlap the root entry zone in cranial nerve VIII. Although symptomatic neurovascular compression syndromes may also occur if the neurovascular contact is outside the transition zone, symptomatic neurovascular compression syndromes are more common if the neurovascular contact occurs at the transition zone or central myelin section, in particular when associated with nerve displacement and atrophy.
Hardware Development and Locomotion Control Strategy for an Over-Ground Gait Trainer: NaTUre-Gaits

Therapist-assisted body weight supported (TABWS) gait rehabilitation was introduced two decades ago. The benefit of TABWS in functional recovery of walking in spinal cord injury and stroke patients has been demonstrated and reported. However, shortage of therapists, labor-intensiveness, and short duration of training are some limitations of this approach. To overcome these deficiencies, robotic-assisted gait rehabilitation systems have been suggested. These systems have gained attentions from researchers and clinical practitioner in recent years. To achieve the same objective, an over-ground gait rehabilitation system, NaTUre-gaits, was developed at the Nanyang Technological University. The design was based on a clinical approach to provide four main features, which are pelvic motion, body weight support, over-ground walking experience, and lower limb assistance. These features can be achieved by three main modules of NaTUre-gaits: 1) pelvic assistance mechanism, mobile platform, and robotic orthosis. Predefined gait patterns are required for a robotic assisted system to follow. In this paper, the gait pattern planning for NaTUre-gaits was accomplished by an individual-specific gait pattern prediction model. The model generates gait patterns that resemble natural gait patterns of the targeted subjects. The features of NaTUre-gaits have been demonstrated by walking trials with several subjects. The trials have been evaluated by therapists and doctors. The results show that 10-m walking trial with a reduction in manpower. The task-specific repetitive training approach and natural walking gait patterns were also successfully achieved.
Interlaminar stresses and delamination of composite laminates under extension and bending

The metis element method (Hung 1978) has been applied to analyse free edge interlaminar stresses and delamination in composite laminates, which are subjected to extension and bending. The paper recalls Lekhnitskii`s solution for generalized plane strain state of composite laminate and Wang`s singular solution for determination of stress singularity order and of eigen coefficients for delamination problem. Then the formulae of metis displacement finite element in two-dimensional problem are established. Computation of the stress intensity factors and the energy release rates are presented in details. The energy release rate, G, is computed by Irwin`s virtual crack technique using metis elements. Finally, results of interlaminar stresses, the three stress intensity factors and the energy release rates for delamination crack in composite laminates under extension and bending are illustrated and compared with the literature to demonstrate the efficiency of the present method.
Characterizing the Consistency of Online Services (Practical Experience Report)

While several proposals for the specification and implementation of various consistency models exist, little is known about what is the consistency currently offered by online services with millions of users. Such knowledge is important, not only because it allows for setting the right expectations and justifying the behavior observed by users, but also because it can be used for improving the process of developing applications that use APIs offered by such services. To fill this gap, this paper presents a measurement study of the consistency of the APIs exported by four widely used Internet services, the Facebook Feed, Facebook Groups, Blogger, and Google+. To conduct this study, our work (1) proposes definitions for a set of relevant consistency properties, (2) develops a simple, yet generic methodology comprising a small number of tests, which probe these services from a user perspective, and try to uncover consistency anomalies that are key to our definitions, and (3) reports on the analysis of the data obtained from running these tests for a period of several weeks. Our measurement study shows that some of these services do exhibit consistency anomalies, including some behaviors that may appear counter-intuitive for users, such as the lack of session guarantees for write monotonicity.
Magnetic maps of indoor environments for precise localization of legged and non-legged locomotion

The magnetic field in indoor environments is rich in features and exceptionally easy to sense. In conjunction with a suitable form of odometry, such as signals produced from inertial sensors or wheel encoders, a map of this field can be used to precisely localize a human or robot in an indoor environment. We show how the use of this field yields significant improvements in terms of localization accuracy for both legged and non-legged locomotion. We suggest various likelihood functions for sequential Monte Carlo localization and evaluate their performance based on magnetic maps of different resolutions. Specifically, we investigate the influence that measurement representation (e.g., intensity-based, vector-based) and map resolution have on localization accuracy, robustness, and complexity. Compared to other localization approaches (e.g., camera-based, LIDAR-based), there exist far fever privacy concerns when sensing the indoor environment's magnetic field. Furthermore, the required sensors are less costly, compact, and have a lower raw data rate and power consumption. The combination of technical and privacy-related advantages makes the use of the magnetic field a very viable solution to indoor navigation for both humans and robots.
Is pride a prosocial emotion? Interpersonal effects of authentic and hubristic pride

Pride is associated with both prosocial and antisocial behaviour. Do others also infer such behaviours when pride is expressed and does this affect their own prosocial behaviour? We expected that authentic pride (i.e., confidence, accomplishment) would signal and elicit more prosocial behaviour than hubristic pride (i.e., arrogance, conceit). In a first laboratory experiment, a target in a public-good dilemma was inferred to have acted less prosocially when displaying a nonverbal expression of pride versus no emotion. As predicted, inferences of hubristic pride—but not authentic pride—mediated this effect. Participants themselves also responded less prosocially. A second laboratory experiment where a target verbally expressed authentic pride, hubristic pride, or no emotion replicated the effects of hubristic pride and showed that authentically proud targets were assumed to have acted prosocially, but especially by perceivers with a dispositional tendency to take the perspective of others. We conclude that authentic pride is generally perceived as a more prosocial emotion than hubristic pride.
Secretory function in subplate neurons during cortical development

Subplate cells are among the first generated neurons in the mammalian cerebral cortex and have been implicated in the establishment of cortical wiring. In rodents some subplate neurons persist into adulthood. Here we would like to highlight several converging findings which suggest a novel secretory function of subplate neurons during cortical development. Throughout the postnatal period in rodents, subplate neurons have highly developed rough endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and are under an ER stress condition. By comparing gene expression between subplate and layer 6, we found that several genes encoding secreted proteins are highly expressed in subplate neurons. One of these secreted proteins, neuroserpin, encoded by the serpini1 gene, is localized to the ER in subplate cells. We propose that subplate might influence cortical circuit formation through a transient secretory function.
The central kinematics of NGC 1399 measured with 14 pc resolution

We present near infra-red (NIR) adaptive optics assisted spectroscopic observations of the CO (�µ = 2) absorption bands towards the centre of the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 1399. The observations were made with NAOS-CONICA (ESO VLT) and have a FWHM resolution of 0. 15 (14pc). Kinematic analysis of the observations reveals a decoupled core and strongly non-Gaussian line-of-sight velocity profiles (VPs) in the central 0.2 arcsec (19pc). NIR imaging also indicates an asymmetric elongation of the central isophotes in the same region. We use spherical orbit-superposition models to interpret the kinematics, using a set of orthogonal “eigenVPs” that allow us to fit models directly to spectra. The models require a central black hole of mass 1.2 +0.5 −0.6 ×10 9 M⊙, with a strongly tangentially biased orbit distribution in the inner 40pc.