Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Specific unresponsiveness in rats with prolonged cardiac allograft survival after treatment with cyclosporine. III. Further characterization of the CD4+ suppressor cell and its mechanisms of action

The cellular basis of the specific unresponsiveness that develops in DA rats treated with cyclosporine (CSA) for 10 d after grafting a PVG heart was examined using an adoptive transfer assay. CD4+ cells from rats with long survival grafts specifically lack the capacity to restore PVG heart graft rejection, and can also inhibit the capacity of naive T cells to restore rejection, while in the first few weeks post- transplant, both CD4+ and CD8+ T cells from CSA-treated hosts have the capacity to effect PVG graft rejection. In this study, we demonstrated the CD4+ suppressor cells also had the capacity to inhibit restoration of rejection by CD4+ cells from CSA-treated DA rats recently transplanted with PVG hearts, and from rats sensitized to third party, but not from those specifically sensitized to PVG. They also inhibited the capacity of both naive CD8+ and sensitized CD8+ cells to effect rejection. These results showed that the CD4+ suppressor cell was capable of overriding the capacity to effect rejection of the CD4+ cell and activated CD8+ cells that were present in the CSA-treated host shortly after transplantation. The failure of naive CD8+ cells to augment suppression and the capacity of CD4+ suppressor cells to transfer unresponsiveness to irradiated hosts in which regeneration of CD8+ cells was abolished by thymectomy suggested that it was the CD4+ cell alone that mediated suppression. However, the failure of CD4+ suppressor cells to reinduce unresponsiveness in irradiated hosts whose CD8+ cells had been depleted by therapy with the mAb MRC Ox8 showed that a radioresistant CD8+ cell was required to reestablish the state of specific unresponsiveness. The induction of CD4+ suppressor cells in thymectomized hosts suggested that these cells were derived from long- lived CD4+ lymphocytes. However, their sensitivity to cyclophosphamide and their loss of suppressor function both after removal of the graft and after 3 d in culture demonstrated that the suppressor cell itself had a short lifespan. The CD4+ suppressor was shown to be MRC Ox22+ (CD45R+), MRC Ox17+ (MHC class II), and MRC Ox39+ (CD25, IL-2-R). These studies demonstrated the CD4+ suppressive cell identified in rats with specific unresponsiveness induced by CSA therapy had many features of the suppressor inducer cell identified in in vitro studies of the alloimmune response. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Diversity of odor-active compounds from local cultivars and wild accessions of Iwateyamanashi (Pyrus ussuriensis var. aromatica) revealed by Aroma Extract Dilution Analysis (AEDA)

Some local cultivars and wilds of Iwateyamanashi (Pyrus ussuriensis var. aromatica) that grows wild in Northern Tohoku, Japan have good aromatic fruit. Iwateyamanashi may be valuable germplasms as a donor of odor compounds in breeding of Japanese pear (Pyrus pyrifolia), because almost all Japanese pear cultivars have faint odor. Fruits odors from a local cultivar ‘Sanenashi’, a wild accession (i0830) in Iwateyamanashi, cultivars of ‘Kosui’ and ‘La France’ were characterized at first with comparative Aroma Extract Dilution Analysis (AEDA). Application of AEDA, based on Gas chromatography/Olfactometry analysis (GC/O), on the odor concentration prepared from ‘Sanenashi’ indicated the presence of 33 odor-active compounds including methyl and ethyl esters, aldehydes and alcohol. The eleven odor compounds from 16 accessions of Iwateyamanashi showed various combinations and wide range of odor concentrations by Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Especially 2 accessions of local cultivar ‘Natsunashi’ plotted in the highly ethyl ester group might be useful for Japanese pear breeding.
GaAs/AIAs-oxide omnidirectional reflector

We introduce a compound semiconductor based omnidirectional reflector. A four layer pair stack of GaAs/AlAs was grown epitaxially using molecular beam epitaxy, which was then converted to a GaAs/Al2O3 multilayer stack by selective oxidation of the AlAs layers. The resultant one-dimensional photonic crystal exhibited omnidirectional reflection properties in near infrared wavelength range below 1μm. Reflectance spectra measured at various incidence angles and polarizations were observed to be in good agreements with theoretically simulated results.
Lifting the lid on GPCRs: the role of extracellular loops

GPCRs exhibit a common architecture of seven transmembrane helices (TMs) linked by intracellular loops and extracellular loops (ECLs). Given their peripheral location to the site of G‐protein interaction, it might be assumed that ECL segments merely link the important TMs within the helical bundle of the receptor. However, compelling evidence has emerged in recent years revealing a critical role for ECLs in many fundamental aspects of GPCR function, which supported by recent GPCR crystal structures has provided mechanistic insights. This review will present current understanding of the key roles of ECLs in ligand binding, activation and regulation of both family A and family B GPCRs.
End User Development: Approaches Towards a Flexible Software Design

Acknowledging the competition in today’s global markets demands enterprises to be resilient in order to survive. Therefore product life cycles shorten and new customer segments have to be addressed permanently. Obviously, such environments require flexible information systems, which can be adapted quickly to the enterprises’ changing needs, without spending vast amounts of resources. Using End User Development (EUD) approaches can help to solve this dilemma by enabling software developers to create information systems that can even be adapted by technically inexperienced end users. This reduces time and costs needed for adaptations and increases their quality by avoiding potential misunderstandings between business users and IT experts. This paper presents a broad overview of existing EUD approaches. Based on this, it provides recommendations, how EUD design principles can be used conjointly, to develop embedded design environments for end users. We describe and classify EUD approaches taken from the literature, which are suitable approaches for different groups of end users. Implementing the right mixture of EUD approaches leads to embedded design environments, having a gentle slope of complexity. Such environments enable differently skilled end users to perform system adaptations on their own.
When Europe Hits Home: Europeanization and Domestic Change

We argue in this paper in favor of a rather parsimonious theoretical approach to the study of the domestic impact of Europeanization. Whether we study policies, politics, or polities, a misfit between European-level and domestic processes, policies, or institutions constitutes the necessary condition for expecting any change. However, adaptational pressures alone are insufficient. There must be mediating factors enabling or prohibiting domestic change and accounting for the empiri-cally observable differential impact of Europe. We have then introduced two pathways leading to domestic changes which are theoretically grounded in rationalist and sociological institutionalisms, respectively. On the one hand, rationalist institutionalism follows a logic of resource redistribution emphasizing the absence of multiple veto points and the presence of supporting institutions as the main factors facilitating change. On the other hand, sociological institutionalism exhibits a sociali-zation and learning account focussing on norm entrepreneurs as "change agents" and the presence of a cooperative political culture as the main mediating factors. We claim that Europeanization might lead to convergence in policy outcomes, but at best to "clustered convergence" and continu-ing divergence with regard to policy processes and instruments, politics, and polities.
Improving Coverage of Simulation-Based Verification by Dedicated Stimuli Generation

Simulation-based verification is still the most frequently used technique when complex designs are to be verified. Stimuli are thereby generated and applied in order to sufficiently trigger and, by this, verify a set of considered scenarios. In general, a scenario can be triggered in various fashions. To ensure a high verification quality, each of these fashions should adequately be covered. However, to the best of our knowledge, this has not appropriately been addressed thus far, i.e. existing stimuli generation is mainly performed without an explicit consideration of the possible fashions in which a scenario might be triggered. To improve this, three approaches are proposed in this work. While examples illustrate their advantages, a case study confirms that, using the proposed approaches, very compact sets of stimuli satisfying this coverage requirement can efficiently be generated.
Cost-efficient CMOS RF tunable bandpass filter with active inductor-less biquads

This paper presents a CMOS RF tunable 4th-order active bandpass filter with the proposed inductor-less biquads. The NMOS cross-coupled pair is utilized in the biquad for the positive-feedback to form the complex pole, which enables the filter working at high frequency of 5GHz with low power of only 4.8mW from 1.2V power supply. Due to the inductor-less topology, the proposed filter only occupies 0.011mm2 silicon area, which is cost-efficient and suitable for integration on chip. The center frequency can be tuned from 2GHz to 5GHz, and the Q factor is tuned from 2 to 8 to cover different bandwidth from 250MHz to 2.5GHz, which makes it suitable for the multi-band/multi-mode and SDR applications. The filer is demonstrated in a standard 65nm CMOS process. As for the center frequency of 5GHz and Q of 2, the simulated P1dB is -6.7dBm, and the simulated input referred noise (IRN) density is 14.2nV/sqrt(Hz).
Lucid dreaming: a state of consciousness with features of both waking and non-lucid dreaming.

STUDY OBJECTIVES The goal of the study was to seek physiological correlates of lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is a dissociated state with aspects of waking and dreaming combined in a way so as to suggest a specific alteration in brain physiology for which we now present preliminary but intriguing evidence. We show that the unusual combination of hallucinatory dream activity and wake-like reflective awareness and agentive control experienced in lucid dreams is paralleled by significant changes in electrophysiology. DESIGN 19-channel EEG was recorded on up to 5 nights for each participant. Lucid episodes occurred as a result of pre-sleep autosuggestion. SETTING Sleep laboratory of the Neurological Clinic, Frankfurt University. PARTICIPANTS Six student volunteers who had been trained to become lucid and to signal lucidity through a pattern of horizontal eye movements. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS Results show lucid dreaming to have REM-like power in frequency bands delta and theta, and higher-than-REM activity in the gamma band, the between-states-difference peaking around 40 Hz. Power in the 40 Hz band is strongest in the frontal and frontolateral region. Overall coherence levels are similar in waking and lucid dreaming and significantly higher than in REM sleep, throughout the entire frequency spectrum analyzed. Regarding specific frequency bands, waking is characterized by high coherence in alpha, and lucid dreaming by increased delta and theta band coherence. In lucid dreaming, coherence is largest in frontolateral and frontal areas. CONCLUSIONS Our data show that lucid dreaming constitutes a hybrid state of consciousness with definable and measurable differences from waking and from REM sleep, particularly in frontal areas.
Ventral aspect of the visual form pathway is not critical for the perception of biological motion

Significance Perceiving the movements of people around us is critical for many daily skills (from detecting threats to social interactions) and involves both form and motion perception. Even though the “form” visual pathway is standardly activated by biological motion stimuli, it is unknown whether this pathway’s integrity is critical for the perception of biological motion. Here, we examined whether damage to different aspects of the form pathway affects biological motion perception. Individuals with lesions to the ventral aspects of this pathway evinced normal biological motion perception despite their impairments in form perception. Our counterintuitive findings indicate that biological motion can be perceived and processed normally even when the ability to perceive the form or the actor executing the movements is impaired. Identifying the movements of those around us is fundamental for many daily activities, such as recognizing actions, detecting predators, and interacting with others socially. A key question concerns the neurobiological substrates underlying biological motion perception. Although the ventral “form” visual cortex is standardly activated by biologically moving stimuli, whether these activations are functionally critical for biological motion perception or are epiphenomenal remains unknown. To address this question, we examined whether focal damage to regions of the ventral visual cortex, resulting in significant deficits in form perception, adversely affects biological motion perception. Six patients with damage to the ventral cortex were tested with sensitive point-light display paradigms. All patients were able to recognize unmasked point-light displays and their perceptual thresholds were not significantly different from those of three different control groups, one of which comprised brain-damaged patients with spared ventral cortex (n > 50). Importantly, these six patients performed significantly better than patients with damage to regions critical for biological motion perception. To assess the necessary contribution of different regions in the ventral pathway to biological motion perception, we complement the behavioral findings with a fine-grained comparison between the lesion location and extent, and the cortical regions standardly implicated in biological motion processing. This analysis revealed that the ventral aspects of the form pathway (e.g., fusiform regions, ventral extrastriate body area) are not critical for biological motion perception. We hypothesize that the role of these ventral regions is to provide enhanced multiview/posture representations of the moving person rather than to represent biological motion perception per se.
Effect of [NO3] on atrial action potentials and contraction as modified by [Na] and [Ca].

Transmembrane potentials and contractility were measured in driven guinea pig atria according to conventional methods. The effects of nitrate were studied by substituting 40, 60, 80, and 100% of the chlorides with nitrates, and the influence of Ca and Na was determined by varying their ratio in the presence of 40% nitrate. The magnitudes of the resting potential, action potential, and overshoot were reversibly reduced; the rate of depolarization slowed; and the amplitude of contraction decreased as the proportion of nitrate to chloride was increased in the nutrient medium. In general, the initial phase of the repolarization was shortened, but the terminal phase was slowed. The duration of irresponsiveness was prolonged, and the maximum following frequency was reduced by nitrate. Calcium appeared to antagonize the deleterious effects of nitrate on all of the parameters except the resting potential, the negative afterpotential, and the irresponsive period.
Bag-of-Words Forced Decoding for Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval

Current approaches to cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) rely on standard retrieval models into which query translations by statistical machine translation (SMT) are integrated at varying degree. In this paper, we present an attempt to turn this situation on its head: Instead of the retrieval aspect, we emphasize the translation component in CLIR. We perform search by using an SMT decoder in forced decoding mode to produce a bag-ofwords representation of the target documents to be ranked. The SMT model is extended by retrieval-specific features that are optimized jointly with standard translation features for a ranking objective. We find significant gains over the state-of-the-art in a large-scale evaluation on cross-lingual search in the domains patents and Wikipedia.
Prioritized Goal Decomposition of Markov Decision Processes: Toward a Synthesis of Classical and Decision Theoretic Planning

We describe an approach to goal decomposition for a certain class of Markov decision processes (MDPs). An abstraction mechanism is used to generate abstract MDPs associated with different objectives, and several methods for merging the policies for these different objectives are considered. In one t echnique, causal (least-commitment) structures are generated for
Tyrosinase-Expressing Neuronal Cell Line as in Vitro Model of Parkinson’s Disease

Oxidized metabolites of dopamine known as dopamine quinone derivatives are thought to play a pivotal role in the degeneration of nigrostriatal dopaminergic neurons in Parkinson’s disease. Although such quinone derivatives are usually produced via the autoxidation of catecholamines, tyrosinase, which is a key enzyme in melanin biosynthesis via the production of DOPA and subsequent molecules, can potentially accelerate the induction of catecholamine quinone derivatives by its oxidase activity. We have developed neuronal cell lines in which the expression of human tyrosinase was inducible. Overexpression of tyrosinase resulted in increased intracellular dopamine content in association with the formation of melanin pigments in neuronal somata, which eventually causes apoptotic cell death. This cellular model will provide a useful tool for detailed analyses of the neurotoxicity of oxidized catechol metabolites.
A low cost positioning and visualization system using smartphones for emergency ambulance service

An ambulance is the type of emergency vehicle that, in order, to accomplish its mission of transporting patients in critical condition to hospitals, they must run as fast as they can through a city streets' maze. Hence, it is necessary a real-time system that could obtain anytime ambulance location. Moreover, it should advice on the best routes based on speed and time for achieve the target, given that the survival of the patients depends on the efficiency of this service. In a city like Sao Paulo in Brazil, for example, during the night, there may be hundreds or even thousands of ambulances running in the city, thus knowing the precise location of these vehicles is quite important. Despite these needs, the process of acquire and identifying the position of every ambulance can be costly if it is based on a GPS on every ambulance and a dedicated communication system. Therefore, we address these challenges in this paper with a low-cost solution based on the Android® Smartphone platform. Thus, we developed: (1) a low-cost integrated GSM antenna probing module that perform continuous wireless "war-driving" and triangulation to estimate the ambulance position accurately, (2) another module to send encrypted messages through SMS service containing the position information to a central (3) a visualization module allowing real-time analysis of ambulances mobility on the city map.
Electrokinetic properties of metal-dielectric interfaces

Using an optical interferometric method capable of determining mechanical displacements in the nm to pm range, measurements are reported of displacements resulting from electrically induced strains in a variety of metal-dielectric interfaces. The dielectrics include aqueous electrolytes, glycol, glycerol, silicone oil and polyethylene. The displacements are shown to conform to the predictions of the Lippmann equation. The implications of these measurements are discussed and are believed to be particularly important in the initiation of failure in polymeric insulation at high voltage. The results also suggest possible device applications based on the electromechanical, piezoelectric properties of these interfaces.
Module connection analysis: a tool for scheduling software debugging activities

The largest challenge facing software engineers today is to find ways to deliver large systems on schedule. Past experience obviously indicates that this is not a well-understood problem. The development costs and schedules for many large systems have exceeded the most conservative, contingency-laden estimates that anyone dared to make. Why has this happened? There must be a plethora of explanations and excuses, but I think H. R. J. Grosch identified the common denominator in his article, "Why MAC, MIS and ABM will never fly. " Grosch's observation is essentially that for some large systems the problem to be solved and the system designed to solve it are in such constant flux that stability is never achieved. Even for some systems that are flying today, it is obvious that they came precariously close to this unstable, "critical mass" state.
Photochemical properties of porphyrin films covering surfaces of tapered optical fibers

We report the fabrication and characterization of tapered fibers covered with porphyrin monolayer films prepared by Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) deposition method. The studied molecule was 10 mol-% 5,10,15,20- tetrakis(pentafluorophenyl)porphyrin (PFP) entrapped in an octadecylamine (ODA) matrix. PFP molecules, deposited on plane glass surfaces, have relatively long fluorescence lifetime (~ 4 ns) together with high fluorescence efficiency. Therefore, such photoactive materials, example of which are PFP molecules, hold much promise for the development of chemical sensors and efficient light harvesting devices.
Irreversible Activation and Stabilization of Soluble Guanylate Cyclase by the Protoporphyrin IX Mimetic CinaciguatS

Belonging to the class of so-called soluble guanylate cyclase (sGC) activators, cinaciguat and BAY 60-2770 are interesting therapeutic tools for the treatment of various cardiovascular pathologies. The drugs are supposed to preferentially stimulate oxidized or heme-depleted, but not native sGC. Since this concept has been challenged by studies demonstrating complete relaxation of nondiseased vessels, this study was designed to reinvestigate the mode of action in greater detail. To this purpose, the effect of cinaciguat was studied on vessel tone of porcine coronary arteries and rat thoracic aortas. Organ bath studies showed that the compound caused time- and concentration-dependent relaxation of precontracted vessels with a maximal effect observed at 90 minutes. The dilatory response was not affected by extensive washout of the drug. Cinaciguat-induced vasodilation was associated with a time- and concentration-dependent increase of cGMP levels. Experiments with purified sGC in the presence of Tween 20 showed that cinaciguat activates the heme-free enzyme in a concentration-dependent manner with an EC50 value of ∼0.2 µM and maximal cGMP formation at 10 µM. By contrast, the effect of cinaciguat on 1H-[1,2,4]oxadiazolo-[4,3-a]quinoxalin-1-one–oxidized (ferric) sGC was moderate, reaching ∼10%–15% of maximal activity. Dilution experiments of cinaciguat/Tween 20–preincubated sGC revealed the irreversible character of the drug. Assuming a sensitive balance between heme-free, ferric, and nitric oxide–sensitive ferrous sGC in cells and tissues, we propose that cinaciguat by virtue of its irreversible mode of action is capable of shifting this equilibrium toward the heme-free apo-sGC species.