Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Thematic Review Series: Nutrient Control of Metabolism and Cell Signaling Brain Responses to High-protein Diets 1,2

Proteins are suspected to have a greater satiating effect than the other 2 macronutrients. After protein consumption, peptide hormones released from the gastrointestinal tract (mainly anorexigenic gut peptides such as cholecystokinin, glucagon peptide 1, and peptide YY) communicate information about the energy status to the brain. These hormones and vagal afferents control food intake by acting on brain regions involved in energy homeostasis such as the brainstem and the hypothalamus. In fact, a high-protein diet leads to greater activation than a normal-protein diet in the nucleus tractus solitarius and in the arcuate nucleus. More specifically, neural mechanisms triggered particularly by leucine consumption involve 2 cellular energy sensors: the mammalian target of rapamycin and AMP-activated protein kinase. In addition, reward and motivation aspects of eating behavior, controlled mainly by neurons present in limbic regions, play an important role in the reduced hedonic response of a high-protein diet. This review examines how metabolic signals emanating from the gastrointestinal tract after protein ingestion target the brain to control feeding, energy expenditure, and hormones. Understanding the functional roles of brain areas involved in the satiating effect of proteins and their interactions will demonstrate how homeostasis and reward are integrated with the signals from peripheral organs after protein consumption.
Observation and quantification of individual microtubule behavior in vivo: microtubule dynamics are cell-type specific

Recent experiments have demonstrated that the behavior of the interphase microtubule array is cell-type specific: microtubules in epithelial cells are less dynamic than microtubules in fibroblasts (Pepper-kok et al., 1990; Wadsworth and McGrail, 1990). To determine which parameters of microtubule dynamic instability behavior are responsible for this difference, we have examined the behavior of individual microtubules in both cell types after injection with rhodamine-labeled tubulin subunits. Individual microtubules in both cell types were observed to grow, shorten, and pause, as expected. The average amount of time microtubules remained within the lamellae of CHO fibroblasts, measured from images acquired at 10-s intervals, was significantly shorter than the average amount of time microtubules remained within lamellae of PtK1 epithelial cells. Further analysis of individual microtubule behavior from images acquired at 2-s intervals reveals that microtubules in PtK1 cells undergo multiple brief episodes of growth and shortening, resulting in little overall change in the microtubule network. In contrast, microtubules in lamellae of CHO fibroblasts are observed to undergo fewer transitions which are of longer average duration, resulting in substantial changes in the microtubule network over time. A small subset of more stable microtubules was also detected in CHO fibroblasts. Quantification of the various parameters of dynamic instability behavior from these sequences demonstrates that the average rates of both growth and shortening are significantly greater for the majority of microtubules in fibroblasts than for microtubules in epithelial cells (19.8 +/- 10.8 microns/min, 32.2 +/- 17.7 microns/min, 11.9 +/- 6.5 microns/min, and 19.7 +/- 8.1 microns/min, respectively). The frequency of catastrophe events (1/interval between catastrophe events) was similar in both cell types, but the frequency of rescue events (1/time spent shrinking) was significantly higher in PtK1 cells. Thus, individual microtubules in PtK1 lamellae undergo frequent excursions of short duration and extent, whereas most microtubules in CHO lamellae undergo more extensive excursions often resulting in the appearance or disappearance of microtubules within the field of view. These observations provide the first direct demonstration of cell-type specific behavior of individual microtubules in living cells, and indicate that these differences can be brought about by modulation of the frequency of rescue. These results directly support the view that microtubule dynamic instability behavior is regulated in a cell-type specific manner.
Are two document clusters better than one? The Cluster Performance Question for information retrieval

When do information retrieval systems using two document clusters provide better retrieval performance than systems using no clustering? We answer this question for one set of assumptions and suggest how this may be studied with other assumptions. The “Cluster Hypothesis” asks an empirical question about the relationships between documents and user‐supplied relevance judgments, while the “Cluster Performance Question” proposed here focuses on the when and why of information retrieval or digital library performance for clustered and unclustered text databases. This may be generalized to study the relative performance of m versus n clusters.
Acute fatigue‐induced changes in muscle mechanical properties and neuromuscular activity in elite handball players following a handball match

The purpose of the present study was to determine the acute fatigue development in muscle mechanical properties and neuromuscular activity in response to handball match play. Male elite handball players (n= 10) were tested before and after a simulated handball match for maximal isometric strength [maximal voluntary contraction (MVC)] and rate of force development (RFD) with synchronous electromyography (EMG) recording, while maximal vertical jump parameters were assessed using force plate analysis. Quadriceps and hamstrings MVC and RFD decreased significantly post‐match (∼10%, P<0.05 and ∼16–21%, P<0.05, respectively). During quadriceps, MVC mean EMG amplitude [mean average voltage (MAV)] decreased for the vastus lateralis (VL) and rectus femoris (RF) (21–42%, P≤0.05), while MAV also decreased in the antagonist biceps femoris (BF) muscle (48–55%, P<0.01). During hamstring MVC, MAV was reduced in BF (31%, P<0.01). Maximum EMG amplitude during quadriceps MVC was reduced for the VL (28%, P<0.01) and the RF (5%, P<0.05). During hamstring MVC, maximum EMG was reduced for BF (21%, P<0.01). Post‐match maximal jump height was reduced (5.2%, P<0.01), as was also work (6.8%, P<0.01), velocity of center of mass (2.4–4.0%, P<0.01) and RFD (∼30%, P<0.05). In conclusion, maximal (MVC) and rapid muscle force characteristics (RFD, impulse) were acutely affected concurrently with marked reductions in muscle EMG following handball match play, which may potentially lead to impaired functional performance.
DECOMPRESSIVE CRANIECTOMY – FROM OPTION TO STANDARD-PART I

INTRODUCTION The decompressive craniectomy is a surgical technique known for more than a century, but its utility variated from none to everything according to neurosurgeons. Actually, it reappears after the papers of Guerra [1] from 1998 and is utilised for a wide range of pathologies, from traumatic to vascular and tumoral, but all realising an refractory intracranial pressure. Unfortunately there is a lack of consensus upon when to realize a decompressive craniectomy among authors, which leads to the fact that most neurosurgeons seldom see a correct deompressive craniectomy and even less performs one.
Abnormalities of the Acoustic Reflex in Multiple Sclerosis

Acoustic reflect morphology was examined in 122 patients with a diagnosis of definite multiple sclerosis. Abnormality in some dimension of acoustic reflex morphology was observed in 75 per cent of the study population. The most commonly observed abnormality was an alteration in one or more of the three relative amplitude indices (afferent, efferent, or central pathway index). Other abnormalities included delayed onset latency, delayed offset latency, reduction in absolute amplitude, and threshold elevation.
The effects of realistic controller and real-life exposure to gun on psychology of violent video game players

A 2 (gun replica vs. mouse) x 2 (experience in real gun vs. no experience in real gun) between-subjects experiment was conducted to examine the effects of realistic controller and real-life exposure to gun on violent video game players' perceived degree of presence and state of aggression. The present study found that participants who played a violent video game with a gun replica (real gun-like controller) reported a greater level of physical presence and higher state of physical aggression than those who played the game with a conventional mouse did. An analysis of variance demonstrated the effects of physiological desensitization to violence; participants with real gun experience reported a lower state of aggression after playing the game than those without the experience did. The analysis also showed that there was no relationship between real gun experience and presence. Both limitations of the present study and guidelines for future research are discussed.
A feature selection method for automatic image annotation

Automatic image annotation (AIA) is the bridge of high-level semantic information and the low-level feature. AIA is an effective method to resolve the problem of “Semantic Gap”. According to the intrinsic character of AIA, some common features are selected from the labeled images by multiple instance learning method. The feature selection method is applied into the task of automatic image annotation in this paper. Each keyword is analyzed hierarchically in low-granularity-level under the framework of feature selection. Through the common representative instances are mined, the semantic similarity of images can be effectively expressed and the better annotation results are able to be acquired, which testifies the effectiveness of the proposed annotation method. Gaussian mixture model is built by the selected feature method to characterize the labeled keyword. The experimental results illustrate the good perfromance of AIA.
Differential effects of calcineurin inhibition and protein kinase A activation on nucleus accumbens amphetamine‐produced conditioned place preference in rats

The nucleus accumbens (NAc) plays a critical role in amphetamine‐produced conditioned place preference (CPP). In previous studies inhibition or activation of cyclic adenosine monophosphate‐dependent protein kinase (PKA) blocked NAc amphetamine‐produced CPP. PKA activation unrelated to ongoing DA transmission may disrupt reward‐related learning. Calcineurin (CN) down‐regulates downstream PKA targets. Unlike PKA activation, CN inhibition may preserve and enhance reward‐related learning. The PKA signalling cascade is negatively regulated by calcineurin (CN). We tested the hypothesis that post‐training CN inhibition in NAc will enhance NAc amphetamine‐produced CPP and that PKA activation will block CPP. Eight but not four or two 30‐min conditioning sessions were sufficient to establish significant CPP. Immediate post‐training, NAc injection of the calcineurin inhibitor FK506 (5.0 but not 1.0 µg in 0.5 µL per side) led to a significant amphetamine CPP in rats receiving four but not two training sessions; the 5.0‐µg dose had no effect on rats trained with eight sessions. Injections of the PKA activator Sp‐cAMPS (2.5 or 10.0 µg in 0.5 µL per side) failed to affect CPP following two or four training sessions and blocked CPP produced by a standard 8‐day conditioning schedule. Results suggest that CN acts as a negative regulator in the establishment of NAc amphetamine‐produced CPP, a form of reward‐related learning.
Zinc Protamine Insulin

In 1936 Hagedorn and his Danish colleagues introduced to the world a new insulin compound, protamine insulin. They had already employed it therapeutically in Denmark for some two years, and it has been on the market in this country for six months under the name Leo "insulin retard. " The uses and advantages of this protamine insulin have been described in many articles published in English and American medical journals (Hagedorn, 1936; Joslin et al., 1936; Krarup, 1935; Lawrence and Archer, 1936; Rabinowitch et al., 1936a; Root et al., 1936; Wilder, 1936).
Hammerstein predistorter for high power RF amplifiers in OFDM transmitters

OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing) is a wideband digital modulation scheme which is critically dependent on linearity in the hardware system, due to its reliance on Fourier Transformation and its inherently high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), and minimization of nonlinearity is thus a priority. In this paper the effectiveness of a predistortion based on the Hammerstein model dealing with the nonlinear response is investigated by measurement of Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) in AWGN channel and Adjacent Channel Power Ratio (ACPR). Accuracy of prediction of Power Amplifier (PA) nonlinearity with memory effect and baseband predistorter is investigated by the experimental results.
Team Incentives in BitTorrent Systems

Although the popular BitTorrent protocol strives to limit free-riding via its tit-for-tat incentives, recent research efforts have shown that it does not strictly enforce fairness. Freeriding opportunities indeed exist, mainly via optimistic unchokes, a BitTorrent mechanism that facilitates the continuous discovery of better peers to interact with. Our results in this work also show that increasing numbers of free-riders can considerably hurt the performance of compliant peers. In an effort to address this problem, this paper proposes a new BitTorrent-like protocol that dynamically organizes peers of similar upload bandwidth in teams— groups of peers collaborating for mutual benefit. Team members mostly satisfy their data download needs inside their team and only perform optimistic unchokes when absolutely necessary. As a result, this team-based protocol improves peer performance via explicit cooperation. At the same time, it limits bandwidth spent on optimistic unchokes, thereby rendering the system more robust against free-riders. We have modified an existing BitTorrent implementation to implement the team protocol and have evaluated its impact by running real experiments on a controlled PlanetLab testbed. Our results show that the protocol enables slightly improved performance for compliant peers, while free-riders are unable to sustain high download rates, as compared to regular BitTorrent. In addition, we observe a higher degree of robustness: increasing numbers of free-riders in the system have a significantly lower negative impact on the performance of contributing peers.
Hormone replacement use and cardiovascular function and structure in postmenopausal women

The incidence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in women increases substantially following the menopause, making CVD the leading specific cause of death in postmenopausal women. As the menopause is characterized by a lack of estrogen, the increased CVD risk was initially attributed to this phenomenon. Synthetic estrogen was first used in the 1930s for the relief of menopausal symptoms, and since then, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) grew in popularity due to observational studies that suggested potential benefits in reducing the incidence of CVD, osteoporotic fractures and colorectal cancer (1–3). However, these studies also suggested an increased incidence of endometrial cancer, breast cancer, stroke and venous thromboembolism – but this was perceived to be outweighed by the presumed benefit of CVD prevention. However, all this was soon to change. In 1998, the Heart and Estrogen/progestin Replacement Study (HERS) (4,5) showed that women with established coronary heart disease who were assigned to HRT had rates of recurrent coronary events similar to those in the placebo group. The Women’s Health Initiative study (WHI) published in 2002 (6,7), found that the rate of coronary heart disease was higher among women assigned to combination HRT than among those assigned to placebo. Thus, perhaps the bubble has burst for HRT and CVD prevention. Current CVD prevention guidelines do not even recommend HRT for primary (or secondary) prevention of CVD in postmenopausal women. However, many questions were raised after publication of HERS and WHI. For example, women with severe menopausal symptoms were dissuaded from enrolling in the study. The participants had a higher average age than those in other studies. Would the results be different had the form of administration been different? When compared to observational studies, why was there a divergence in CHD results but a concordance with the other findings? Perhaps, the route of administration and formulation could have shown a different outcome (8). Rather than answering the question of the usefulness of HRT in postmenopausal women, these trials have thrown open the doors for more debate. The so-called ‘‘cardioprotective effects’’ of HRT were based on the assumption that the longer life expectancy in women and the natural protection against CVD was due to cyclical endogenous ovarian hormonal production before menopause. Indeed, after menopause, the risk of CVD in women increases substantially (9). HRT has been shown to have a range of potentially cardioprotective effects by altering the lipid profile, vascular reactivity, hemodynamic and fibrinolytic variables (8,10). Estrogens also preserve low-density lipoproteins (LDLs) from oxidation and protect cells against cytotoxic effects of oxidized LDL, as well as raise high-density lipoprotein (HDL)-cholesterol levels. Diabetes and dyslipidemia are also deemed to be more prevalent in post-menopausal than premenopausal women (11).
Orogenital ulcers in a liver transplant recipient: discerning between mycophenolate‐mofetil‐induced complication and Behcet’s disease

A 51-yr-old man who had been diagnosed as having cryptogenic cirrhosis and who had received a deceased-donor liver transplant in April 2004 was on maintenance immunosuppressive therapy consisting of cyclosporine A, mycophenolate mofetil, and low-dose (5 mg) prednisolone.Hewas admitted to our hospital in April 2006 with a complaint of odynophagia and oral ulcerations of 10 days duration. He could eat nothing due to the pain and could drink only water. On physical examination, two ulcers were present on the lower lip and tongue; they were 1 and 2 cm in diameter, respectively (Fig. 1). There were no skin lesions, no deep vein thromboses, and no articular pathological findings. The patient was hospitalized, oral intake was stopped, and parenteral nutritional support was started. The results of a complete blood count and renal and liver function tests were within normal limits. Serological markers for herpes simplex virus, Epstein–Barr virus, cytomegalovirus, and Parvovirus B19 virus were all negative. Serum folic acid and vitamin B12 levels also were within normal levels. Bone marrow aspiration and a biopsy of the ulcerated tissues were performed, and the results were normal. The patient had diarrhea four to five times each day during hospitalization, but the results of a microscopic examination of the stool and a culture of the stool were normal. A colonoscopy was performed and the results of this, too, were normal. A biopsy of the ulcer on the tongue was taken, and the results of this showed an active inflammatory reaction and pseudoepitheliomatous hyperplasia. Unfortunately, viral culture of the ulcer could not be taken. The oral ulcers were related to mycophenolate mofetil, so mycophenolate mofetil was discontinued. On the sixth day after the mycophenolate mofetil had been discontinued, a third ulcer appeared on the tongue, and on the 10th day, a fourth ulcer appeared, this time on scrotum. The patient told us that he had had painful oral ulcers one or two times each year before the transplant. Given this information, a pathergy test was done, the results of which were negative. The results of an ocular examination were normal. Owing to the presence of oral and genital ulcers and the negative results on a pathergy test while undergoing immunosuppressive therapy, we made a diagnosis of incomplete Behcet s disease, and the patient was started on prednisolone 0.5 mg/kg/d. On the fifth day of high-dose prednisolone, his oral and scrotal ulcers began to regress, and he started eating. In the second month of prednisolone treatment, his ulcers totally resolved.
Natural Selection Fails to Optimize Mutation Rates for Long-Term Adaptation on Rugged Fitness Landscapes

Mutations are required for adaptation, yet most mutations with phenotypic effects are deleterious. As a consequence, the mutation rate that maximizes adaptation will be some intermediate value. This abstract summarizes a previous publication in which we used Avida, a well-studied artificial life platform, to investigate the ability of natural selection to adjust and optimize mutation rates. Our initial experiments occurred in a previously studied environment with a complex fitness landscape (Lenski et al. Nature, 423, 2003) where Avidians were rewarded for performing any of nine logic tasks. We assessed the optimal mutation rate by empirically determining which unchanging mutation rate produced the highest rate of adaptation. Then, we allowed mutation rates to evolve and we evaluated their proximity to the optimum. Although we chose conditions favorable for mutation rate optimization (asexual organisms not yet adapted to a new environment), the evolved rates were invariably far below the optimum across a wide range of experimental parameter settings (Fig. 1). We hypothesized that the reason mutation rates evolved to be suboptimal was the ruggedness of fitness landscapes. To test this hypothesis, we created a simplified 'counting ones' landscape without any fitness valleys and found that, in such conditions, populations evolved near-optimal mutation rates (Fig. 2, top row). In contrast, once moderate fitness valleys were added to this simple landscape, the ability of evolving populations to find the optimal mutation rate was lost (Fig. 2, bottom two rows). Additional experiments revealed that lowering the rate at which mutation rates evolved did not preclude the evolution of suboptimal mutation rates (see original manuscript). We conclude that rugged fitness landscapes can prevent the evolution of mutation rates that are optimal for long-term adaptation because of the short-term costs of traversing fitness valleys. This finding has important implications for evolutionary research in both biological and computational realms.
Reducing the Requirement in FEC Codes via Capillary Routing

In off-line packetized streaming, rateless forward error correction (FEC) codes spectacularly improve the reliability of transmission over lossy networks. This success relies on time diversity, which in its turn relies on unrestricted buffering time at the receiver. In realtime streaming the playback buffering time is very limited (shorter than one second) and even strong FEC codes cannot protect single path communication against failures lasting longer than the buffering time at the receiver. Path diversity is a strategy that is orthogonal to time diversity and can make FEC applicable also in case of limited buffering time of real-time streaming. In this paper we introduce capillary routing algorithm offering layer by layer a wide range of multi-path routing topologies of increasing path diversity. We introduce redundancy overall requirement (ROR), which for a given multi-path routing is the coefficient of the total number of redundant FEC packets to be transmitted by the sender for protecting the communication against non-simultaneous link failures. A dozen of capillary routing layers, built on several hundreds of network samples obtained from a random walk wireless mobile ad-hoc network (MANET), are rated with ROR. We show that flow diversity patterns built by capillary routing algorithm reduce substantially the amount of FEC codes required for protection of communication