Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Metabolic syndrome, its components, and mortality in the elderly.

CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVE The metabolic syndrome (MetS) has been shown to predict mortality in the middle-aged, but less is known on the impact of MetS and its components on mortality risk in the elderly. Our objectives were 1) to examine the association of MetS with the risk of all-cause and cause-specific mortality in a French elderly community-dweller cohort and 2) to determine the main components driving these associations. PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS Prospective analyses were carried out on 7118 men and women aged 65 yr and over from the Three-City cohort. Association between MetS (defined using the National Cholesterol Education Program Adult Treatment Panel III criteria) and mortality risk over the 7-yr follow-up was assessed using Cox proportional hazards models. RESULTS After adjusting for sociodemographic variables, health behaviors, and health status, a 50% increased risk for all-cause mortality was observed in participants with MetS at baseline compared with those without, with a hazard ratio of 1.54 [95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.24-1.92]. Elevated fasting blood glucose, high triglycerides, and low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol were the major contributors to this association, acting synergistically on mortality risk. For coronary heart disease mortality and cancer mortality, the hazard ratios associated with MetS were 2.21 (95% CI = 1.07-4.55) and 1.49 (95% CI = 1.04-2.14), respectively. CONCLUSIONS By showing that an elevated fasting blood glucose potentiates the excess mortality risk associated with lipid abnormality, our study supports the status of MetS as a risk factor for mortality in the elderly. Our findings emphasize the importance of MetS screening and managing dyslipidemia and hyperglycemia in older persons in general practice.
Compliance and port air quality features with respect to ship fuel switching regulation: a field observation campaign, SEISO-Bohai

Abstract. Since 1 January 2017, ships berthed at the core ports of three designated “domestic emission control areas” (DECAs) in China should be using fuel with a sulfur content less than or equal to 0.5 %. In order to evaluate the impacts of fuel switching, a measurement campaign (SEISO-Bohai) was conducted from 28 December 2016 to 15 January 2017 at Jingtang Harbor, an area within the seventh busiest port in the world. This campaign included meteorological monitoring, pollutant monitoring, aerosol sampling and fuel sampling. During the campaign, 16 ship plumes were captured by the on-shore measurement site, and 4 plumes indicated the usage of high-SF (SF refers to the sulfur content of marine fuels). The average reduction of the mean ΔNOx∕ΔSO2 ratio from high-sulfur plumes (3.26) before 1 January to low-sulfur plumes (12.97) after 1 January shows a direct SO2 emission reduction of 75 %, consistent with the sulfur content reduction (79 %). The average concentrations of PM2.5 (particulate matter with a diameter less than 2.5 µm), NOx, SO2, O3 and CO during campaign were 147.85 µg m−3, 146.93, 21.91, 29.68 ppb and 2.21 ppm, respectively, among which NOx reached a maximum hourly concentration of 692.6 ppb, and SO2 reached a maximum hourly concentration of 165.5 ppb. The mean concentrations of carbonaceous and dominant ionic species in particles were 6.52 (EC – elemental carbon), 23.10 (OC – organic carbon), 22.04 (SO42-), 25.95 (NO3-) and 13.55 (NH4+) µg m−3. Although the carbonaceous species in particles were not significantly affected by fuel switching, the gas and particle pollutants in the ambient air exhibited clear and effective improvements due to the implementation of low-sulfur fuel. Comparison with the prevailing atmospheric conditions and a wind map of SO2 variation concluded a prompt SO2 reduction of 70 % in ambient air after fuel switching. Given the high humidity at the study site, this SO2 reduction will abate the concentration of secondary aerosols and improve the acidity of particulate matter. Based on the enrichment factors of elements in PM2.5, vanadium was identified as a marker of residual fuel ship emissions, decreasing significantly by 97.1 % from 309.9 ng m−3 before fuel switching to 9.1 ng m−3 after regulation, which indicated a crucial improvement due to the implementation of low-sulfur fuels. Ship emissions were proven to be significantly influential both directly and indirectly on the port environment and the coastal areas around Bohai Bay, where the population density reaches over 650 people per square kilometer. The results from this study report the positive impact of fuel switching on the air quality in the study region and indicate a new method for identifying the ship fuel type used by vessels in the area.
STUDY OF LOW TEMPERATURE INFLUENCE ON THE OPERATION OF CURRENT MIRRORS USING GRADED-CHANNEL SOI MOSFET

This work presents a study of the use of a transistor with a different configuration in the channel region, named GradedChannel (GC), for analog application in current mirror circuits with different architectures: Common-source, Cascode and Wilson. A comparison will be done between current mirrors implemented with standard (uniformly doped) SOI and GC SOI nMOSFETs by using simulation and experimental data to analyze mirroring precision and output resistance as function of temperature.
Mepolizumab treatment in patients with severe eosinophilic asthma.

BACKGROUND Some patients with severe asthma have frequent exacerbations associated with persistent eosinophilic inflammation despite continuous treatment with high-dose inhaled glucocorticoids with or without oral glucocorticoids. METHODS In this randomized, double-blind, double-dummy study, we assigned 576 patients with recurrent asthma exacerbations and evidence of eosinophilic inflammation despite high doses of inhaled glucocorticoids to one of three study groups. Patients were assigned to receive mepolizumab, a humanized monoclonal antibody against interleukin-5, which was administered as either a 75-mg intravenous dose or a 100-mg subcutaneous dose, or placebo every 4 weeks for 32 weeks. The primary outcome was the rate of exacerbations. Other outcomes included the forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1) and scores on the St. George's Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ) and the 5-item Asthma Control Questionnaire (ACQ-5). Safety was also assessed. RESULTS The rate of exacerbations was reduced by 47% (95% confidence interval [CI], 29 to 61) among patients receiving intravenous mepolizumab and by 53% (95% CI, 37 to 65) among those receiving subcutaneous mepolizumab, as compared with those receiving placebo (P<0.001 for both comparisons). Exacerbations necessitating an emergency department visit or hospitalization were reduced by 32% in the group receiving intravenous mepolizumab and by 61% in the group receiving subcutaneous mepolizumab. At week 32, the mean increase from baseline in FEV1 was 100 ml greater in patients receiving intravenous mepolizumab than in those receiving placebo (P=0.02) and 98 ml greater in patients receiving subcutaneous mepolizumab than in those receiving placebo (P=0.03). The improvement from baseline in the SGRQ score was 6.4 points and 7.0 points greater in the intravenous and subcutaneous mepolizumab groups, respectively, than in the placebo group (minimal clinically important change, 4 points), and the improvement in the ACQ-5 score was 0.42 points and 0.44 points greater in the two mepolizumab groups, respectively, than in the placebo group (minimal clinically important change, 0.5 points) (P<0.001 for all comparisons). The safety profile of mepolizumab was similar to that of placebo. CONCLUSIONS Mepolizumab administered either intravenously or subcutaneously significantly reduced asthma exacerbations and was associated with improvements in markers of asthma control. (Funded by GlaxoSmithKline; MENSA ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01691521.).
Arachidonoyl-Specific Diacylglycerol Kinase ε and the Endoplasmic Reticulum

The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) comprises an interconnected membrane network, which is made up of lipid bilayer and associated proteins. This organelle plays a central role in the protein synthesis and sorting. In addition, it represents the synthetic machinery of phospholipids, the major constituents of the biological membrane. In this process, phosphatidic acid (PA) serves as a precursor of all phospholipids, suggesting that PA synthetic activity is closely associated with the ER function. One enzyme responsible for PA synthesis is diacylglycerol kinase (DGK) that phosphorylates diacylglycerol (DG) to PA. DGK is composed of a family of enzymes with distinct features assigned to each isozyme in terms of structure, enzymology, and subcellular localization. Of DGKs, DGKε uniquely exhibits substrate specificity toward arachidonate-containing DG and is shown to reside in the ER. Arachidonic acid, a precursor of bioactive eicosanoids, is usually acylated at the sn-2 position of phospholipids, being especially enriched in phosphoinositide. In this review, we focus on arachidonoyl-specific DGKε with respect to the historical context, molecular basis of the substrate specificity and ER-targeting, and functional implications in the ER.
OSTEOGENIC SARCOMA: A STUDY OF SIX HUNDRED CASES.

Of 600 patients with pathologically verified osteogenic sarcoma (exclusive of tumors of the jaws and parosteal osteogenic sarcoma), 410 were eligible for five-year follow-up and 408 were traced. Of the 408 patients, eighty-three (20.3 per cent) survived more than five years. The survival rate (17.1 per cent) for patients whose tumors were predominantly osteoblastic was lower, but not to a statistically significant degree, than the rate for those with chondroblastic or fibroblastic tumors. More than 25 per cent of those with tumors in the more readily treatable sites, namely distal to the proximal end of the humerus or femur, survived five years. Sex had little bearing on prognosis. The more anaplastic sarcomata were associated with a poorer prognosis than the average, but again the difference was not statistically significant. Two patients survived long intervals after resection for pulmonary metastasis. Twenty of the 600 patients had osteogenic sarcoma that developed in lesions of Paget's disease, and three of these became long-term survivors. Sixteen had osteogenic sarcoma that arose in bones that had been irradiated previously; none of these survived more than three years. The possibility of multicentric origin of osteogenic sarcoma arose in sixteen patients. It is concluded that vigorous, prompt treatment should be employed for osteogenic sarcoma and a gratifying number of survivors obtained.
Generating Java unit tests with AI planning

Although several efforts have applied search-based approaches to the generation of unit tests, none have demonstrated that these approaches scale beyond small programs. Our experiment compares the ability of three general-purpose AI planners to generate unit tests for Java classes with varying sizes and semantics. Although the GraphPlan planner handled most of our test classes, none of our planners could handle them all. We suggest a number of alternate search-based approaches and conclude that further experiments are needed to evaluate them.
Parameters for two-parabolic Schottky Groups

Our main result is a description of the boundary of the parameter space of classical Schottky groups affording two parabolic generators within the larger parameter space of all Schottky groups with two parabolic generators. This boundary is surprisingly different from that of the larger space. It is analytic while the boundary of the larger space is fractal. Approaching the boundary of the smaller space does not correspond to pinching, circles become tangent but parabolics to not develop. As an application we construct an explicit one parameter family of non-classical Schottky groups. The existence of non-classical Schottky groups was proved by Marden [18], but until now only one example of such a group was known [29]. Other published constructions have turned out to be wrong.
LGICdb: a manually curated sequence database after the genomes

Ligand-gated ion channels form transmembrane ionic pores controlled by the binding of chemicals. The LGICdb aims to be a non-redundant, manually curated resource offering access to the large number of subunits composing extracellularly activated ligand-gated ion channels, such as nicotinic, ATP, GABA and glutamate ionotropic receptors. Composed of more than 500 human curated entries, the XML native database has been relocated in 2004 to the EBI. Its facilities have been enhanced with a new search system, customized multiple sequence alignments and manipulation of protein structures (). Despite the vast improvement of general sequence resources, the LGICdb still provide sequences unavailable elsewhere.
Dynamics of preventive vs post-diagnostic cancer control using low-impact measures

Cancer poses danger because of its unregulated growth, development of resistance, and metastatic spread to vital organs. We currently lack quantitative theory for how preventive measures and post-diagnostic interventions are predicted to affect risks of a life threatening cancer. Here we evaluate how continuous measures, such as life style changes and traditional treatments, affect both neoplastic growth and the frequency of resistant clones. We then compare and contrast preventive and post-diagnostic interventions assuming that only a single lesion progresses to invasive carcinoma during the life of an individual, and resection either leaves residual cells or metastases are undetected. Whereas prevention generally results in more positive therapeutic outcomes than post-diagnostic interventions, this advantage is substantially lowered should prevention initially fail to arrest tumour growth. We discuss these results and other important mitigating factors that should be taken into consideration in a comparative understanding of preventive and post-diagnostic interventions. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.06266. 001
No glycolipid anchors are added to Thy-1 glycoprotein in Thy-1-negative mutant thymoma cells of four different complementation classes

Recent evidence shows that the mature Thy-1 surface glycoprotein lacks the C-terminal amino acids 113 to 143 predicted from the cDNA sequence and is anchored in the plasma membrane by a complex, phosphatidylinositol-containing glycolipid attached to the alpha-carboxyl group of amino acid 112. Here we studied the biosynthesis of Thy-1 in two previously described and two newly isolated Thy-1-deficient mutant cell lines. Somatic cell hybridization indicated that their mutations affected some processing step rather than the Thy-1 structural gene. The Thy-1 made by mutants of classes C, F, and H bound detergent but, in contrast to wild-type Thy-1, their detergent-binding moieties could not be removed by phospholipase C. In addition, tryptophan, which only occurs in position 124, was incorporated into Thy-1 of these mutants but not of wild-type cells. Last, the Thy-1 of wild-type but not mutant cells could be radiolabeled with [3H]palmitic acid. Together, these findings strongly suggest that mutants of classes C, F, and H accumulate a biosynthetic intermediate of Thy-1 which retains at least part of the hydrophobic C-terminal peptide. The Thy-1 of these mutants remained endoglycosidase H sensitive, suggesting that it accumulated in the rough endoplasmic reticulum or the Cis-Golgi. A different Thy-1 intermediate was found in a class B mutant cell line: the Thy-1 of this mutant was 2 kilodaltons smaller than the Thy-1 of other cell lines, did not bind detergent, and was rapidly secreted via a normal secretory pathway.
A method of gender classification by integrating facial, hairstyle, and clothing images

This work presents a method of gender classification by integrating facial, hairstyle, and clothing images. Initially, input images are separated into facial, hairstyle and clothing regions, and independently learned PCAs and GMMs based on thousands of sample images are applied to each region. The classification results are then integrated into a single score using some known priors based on the Bayes rule. Experimental results showed that our integration strategy significantly reduced error rate in gender classification compared with the conventional facial only approach.
Mining Very-Non-Parallel Corpora: Parallel Sentence and Lexicon Extraction via Bootstrapping and E

We present a method capable of extracting parallel sentences from far more disparate “very-non-parallel corpora” than previous “comparable corpora” methods, by exploiting bootstrapping on top of IBM Model 4 EM. Step 1 of our method, like previous methods, uses similarity measures to find matching documents in a corpus first, and then extracts parallel sentences as well as new word translations from these documents. But unlike previous methods, we extend this with an iterative bootstrapping framework based on the principle of “find-one-get-more”, which claims that documents found to contain one pair of parallel sentences must contain others even if the documents are judged to be of low similarity. We re-match documents based on extracted sentence pairs, and refine the mining process iteratively until convergence. This novel “find-one-get-more” principle allows us to add more parallel sentences from dissimilar documents, to the baseline set. Experimental results show that our proposed method is nearly 50% more effective than the baseline method without iteration. We also show that our method is effective in boosting the performance of the IBM Model 4 EM lexical learner as the latter, though stronger than Model 1 used in previous work, does not perform well on data from very-non-parallel corpus. Figure1. Parallel sentence and lexicon extraction via Bootstrapping and EM The most challenging task is to extract bilingual sentences and lexicon from very-non-parallel data. Recent work (Munteanu et al., 2004, Zhao and Vogel, 2002) on extracting parallel sentences from comparable data, and others on extracting paraphrasing sentences from monolingual corpora (Barzilay and Elhadad 2003) are based on the “find-topic-extract-sentence” principle which claims that parallel sentences only exist in document pairs with high similarity. They all use lexical information (e.g. word overlap, cosine similarity) to match documents first, before extracting sentences from these documents.
Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometry

Inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP OES) is a powerful tool for the determination of many elements in a variety of different sample matrices. With this method, liquid samples are injected into a radiofrequency (RF)-induced argon plasma using one of a variety of nebulizers or sample introduction techniques. The sample mist reaching the plasma is quickly dried, vaporized, and energized through collisional excitation at high temperature. The atomic emission emanating from the plasma is viewed in either a radial or axial configuration, collected with a lens or mirror, and imaged onto the entrance slit of a wavelength selection device. Single-element measurements can be performed cost-effectively with a simple monochromator–photomultiplier tube (PMT) combination, and simultaneous multielement determinations are performed for up to 70 elements with the combination of a polychromator and an array detector. The analytical performance of such systems is competitive with most other inorganic analysis techniques, especially with regard to sample throughput and sensitivity. Keywords: atomic spectrometry; instrumental analysis; argon plasma; nebulizers; gratings; charge-coupled device; multielement determination; trace element analysis; internal standard additions; standard dilution analysis
Enhanced Ryanodine‐Mediated Calcium Release in Mutant PS1‐Expressing Alzheimer's Mouse Models

Abstract: Intracellular Ca2+ signaling involves Ca2+ liberation through both inositol triphosphate and ryanodine receptors (IP3R and RyR). However, little is known of the functional interactions between these Ca2+ sources in either neuronal physiology, or during Ca2+ disruptions associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD). By the use of whole‐cell recordings and 2‐photon Ca2+ imaging in cortical slices we distinguished between IP3R‐ and RyR‐mediated Ca2+ components in nontransgenic (non‐Tg) and AD mouse models and demonstrate powerful signaling interactions between these channels. Ca2+‐induced Ca2+ release (CICR) through RyR contributed modestly to Ca2+ signals evoked by photoreleased IP3 in cortical neurons from non‐Tg mice. In contrast, the exaggerated signals in 3×Tg‐AD and PS1KI mice resulted primarily from enhanced CICR through RyR, rather than through IP3R, and were associated with increased RyR expression levels. Moreover, membrane hyperpolarizations evoked by IP3 in neurons from AD mouse models were even greater than expected simply from the exaggerated Ca2+ signals, pointing to an increased coupling efficiency between cytosolic [Ca2+] and K+ channel regulation. Our results highlight the critical roles of RyR‐mediated Ca2+ signaling in both neuronal physiology and pathophysiology, and point to presenilin‐linked disruptions in RyR signaling as an important genetic factor in AD.
Derivation of eigentriphones by weighted principal component analysis

Last year we proposed a new acoustic modeling method called eigentriphones in which all triphones are distinct (with no tied states) so that they may be more discriminative. In our method, frequent triphones are used to derive an eigenbasis using PCA, and the infrequent triphones are then “adapted” as a linear combination of the eigenvectors which are also called eigentriphones. Although the eigentriphones method compares favorably with traditional tied-state triphones, the PCA procedure has two limitations: (1) only the frequent triphones are employed, and (2) they are considered “equal” even though some are more robust than the others. In this paper, weighted PCA is proposed to solve both problems so that all triphones-frequent and infrequent triphones-may contribute to the derivation of the eigentriphones, each at a different extent depending on its sample count. Experimental evaluation on the WSJ 5Kvocabulary speech recognition task shows that weighted PCA produces better models than simple PCA, and its performance is fairly independent of the number of eigentriphones once more than 20% of them are used. As a consequence, all triphones may be represented by fewer eigentriphones, resulting in a more compact model.
Multiple Upsets Tolerance in SRAM Memory

This paper presents a high level method called matrix code to protect SRAM-based memories against multiple bit upsets. The proposed method combines hamming code and parity code to assure the reliability of memory in presence of multiple bit-upsets with low area and performance overhead. The method is evaluated using one million multiple-fault injection experiments; next reliability and MTTF of the protected memories are estimated based on fault injection experiments and several equations. The fault detection/correction coverage are also calculated and compared with previous methods i.e., Reed-Muller and hamming code. The results reveal that the proposed method behaves better than these methods in terms of fault detection and correction of multiple faults regarding to the area overhead.