Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Plasticity in Confined Dimensions

This review examines the size effects observed in the mechanical strength of thin metal films and small samples such as single-crystalline pillars, whiskers, and wires. Experimental results from mechanical testing and electron mi- croscopy studies, as well as recent insights from discrete dislocation dynam- ics simulations, are presented. The size dependency of deformation may be separated into three regimes: the nanometer regime of roughly 100 nm and below, an intermediate regime between 100 nm and approximately 1 μm, and a bulk-like regime. We argue that there is no scaling law with one uni- versal power-law exponent encompassing the entire range. Instead, there are a number of different mechanisms and underlying effects, e.g., the initial dislocation microstructure or loading conditions. The complex interaction of these mechanisms leads to the typically observed scaling behavior.
The Application of Clinical Genetics Dovepress the Genetic Basis of Lynch Syndrome and Its Implications for Clinical Practice and Risk Management

Lynch syndrome is the most common cause of hereditary colon cancer, and accounts for as much as 3% of all colon and endometrial cancers. The identification and management of individuals with Lynch syndrome have evolved over the past 20 years, yet the syndrome remains vastly underdiagnosed. It is important for clinicians to recognize individuals and families who are at risk in order to be able to manage them appropriately and reduce their morbidity and mortality from this condition. This review will touch on the history of Lynch syndrome, the current knowledge of genotype–phenotype correlations, the cancers associated with Lynch syndrome, and management of individuals who are gene carriers. Overview and genetic basis Lynch syndrome is a dominantly inherited cancer syndrome in which predisposition to colorectal, endometrial, and other cancers occurs due to an underlying defect in the cellular mismatch repair (MMR) system. MMR proteins form a complex that detects and corrects replication errors. A compromised MMR system leads to accelerated accumulation of somatic mutations, often resulting in carcinogenesis. MLH1, MSH2, MSH6, and PMS2 are among the genes that produce MMR proteins. Lynch syndrome is caused by a heritable mutation in one copy of an MMR gene. At a phenotypic level, Lynch syndrome is dominant with variable expressivity. Secondary, somatic loss of the corresponding normal allele compromises the function of the entire MMR complex; Lynch syndrome is therefore recessive at the cellular level. An estimated 70%–90% of Lynch syndrome is attributable to deleterious mutations in MLH1 and MSH2, with the remaining 10%–30% distributed approximately equally between MSH6 and PMS2. Up to 3% of Lynch syndrome is due to mutations in the EPCAM gene, which is involved in epithelial cell adhesion, cell signaling, and proliferation. EPCAM is directly upstream of MSH2, and deletions of the 3′ end of EPCAM result in epigenetic hypermethylation of the MSH2 promoter, causing Lynch syndrome. 4 Lynch syndrome exhibits characteristic features of cancer predisposition syndromes, including substantially elevated risks for specific cancers, earlier onset, high rates of multiple primary cancers, and the absence of typical risk factors. Cancers associated with Lynch syndrome include colorectal, endometrial, ovarian, stomach, hepatobiliary, urinary, small bowel, brain/central nervous system, and sebaceous tumors. Cancer risks are strongly influenced by which MMR gene mutation is pres-Video abstract Point your SmartPhone at the code above. If you have a QR code reader the video abstract will appear. Or use:
The Effect of Change in Moisture-Content on the Crepe of Concrete Under a Sustained Load

The amount and rate of plastic flow in concrete under load has been found to depend upon the rate of drying. This paper shows by mathematical analysis that this is a natural consequence of non-uniform shrinkage and a non-linear stress-creep relationship. It further shows that shrinkage cannot account for additional creep unless inelastic strain not proportional to stress is produced. Results from experiments designed to test the applicability of the theory to concrete are reported.
Analysis of the social community based on the network growing model in open source software community

The social community in open source software developers has a complex network structure. The network structure represents the relations between the project and the engineer in the software developer's community. A project forms some teams which consist of engineers categorized into some task group. Source Forge is well known to be one of open source websites. The node and arc in the network structure means the engineer and their connection among engineers in the Source Forge. In the previous study, we found the growing process of project becomes strong according to the number of developers joining into the project. In the growing phase, we found some characteristic patterns between the number of agents and the produced projects. By such observations, we developed a simulation model of performing the growing process of project. In this paper, we introduced the altruism behavior as shown in the Army Ant model into the software developer's simulation model. The efficiency of the software developing process was investigated by some experimental simulation results.
PAPER Special Section on Formal Approach Probabilistic Model Checking of the One-Dimensional Ising Model

Probabilistic model checking is an emerging verification technology for probabilistic analysis. Its use has been started not only in computer science but also in interdisciplinary fields. In this paper, we show that probabilistic model checking allows one to analyze the magnetic behaviors of the one-dimensional Ising model, which describes physical phenomena of magnets. The Ising model consists of elementary objects called spins and its dynamics is often represented as the Metropolis method. To analyze the Ising model with probabilistic model checking, we build Discrete Time Markov Chain (DTMC) models that represent the behavior of the Ising model. Two representative physical quantities, i.e., energy and magnetization, are focused on. To assess these quantities using model checking, we devise formulas in Probabilistic real time Computation Tree Logic (PCTL) that represent the quantities. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, we show the results of an experiment using the PRISM model checker. key words: verification, probabilistic model checking, the Ising model, Discrete Time Markov Chain
Modeling and Simulation of Elementary Processes in Ideal Sintering

Three-dimensional numerical simulation of sintering was performed to illustrate the interplay between shapes and forces in particle scale. Elementary rules for topological transition of triple lines were derived from the analysis of micromechanical models of sintering: bond formation, pore channel closure, and pore disappearance. The particle motion was driven by the force acting on a particle, i.e., a vector sum of sintering forces. The non-equilibrium sintering stress was defined to analyze the pore shrinkage. A particle changed its own shape through interaction with neighbor particles; then, the coordination number affected particle motion, pore shrinkage, coarsening, and grain growth.
Oral Health in Down Syndrome

Oral health in Down Syndrome (DS) individuals has some peculiar aspects that must be considered in the follow up of these patients. In this chapter, we will focus on the oral and maxillofacial morphological alteration, the most prevalent oral pathologies as well as preventive measures and strategies for pathologies management in this population. Also, future research on oral health of DS will be discussed. allow an early detection of caries with a simple clinical examination and without a radiological examination); salivary composition and differences in the composition of the microbiota selected cases, a palatal plate is an excellent complement to traditional speech therapy and the most dominant factor for succeeding is motivation. [57-61] After 12 months of therapy, the mean duration of the factor "closed mouth” was significantly longer (p < 0.001) and "inactive protrusion of the tongue” significantly shorter (p < 0.001) in the test group than in the control group. The results indicate that in children with Down syndrome, palatal plate therapy may be a valuable complement to a training program for improving orofacial muscle function. It may be used as a prophylactic measure of the tongue protrusion.
A Robust Adaptive Unscented Kalman Filter for Nonlinear Estimation with Uncertain Noise Covariance

The Unscented Kalman filter (UKF) may suffer from performance degradation and even divergence while mismatch between the noise distribution assumed as a priori by users and the actual ones in a real nonlinear system. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes a robust adaptive UKF (RAUKF) to improve the accuracy and robustness of state estimation with uncertain noise covariance. More specifically, at each timestep, a standard UKF will be implemented first to obtain the state estimations using the new acquired measurement data. Then an online fault-detection mechanism is adopted to judge if it is necessary to update current noise covariance. If necessary, innovation-based method and residual-based method are used to calculate the estimations of current noise covariance of process and measurement, respectively. By utilizing a weighting factor, the filter will combine the last noise covariance matrices with the estimations as the new noise covariance matrices. Finally, the state estimations will be corrected according to the new noise covariance matrices and previous state estimations. Compared with the standard UKF and other adaptive UKF algorithms, RAUKF converges faster to the actual noise covariance and thus achieves a better performance in terms of robustness, accuracy, and computation for nonlinear estimation with uncertain noise covariance, which is demonstrated by the simulation results.
Look back in anger - what clinical studies tell us about preclinical work.

UNLABELLED Misled by animal studies and basic research? Whenever we take a closer look at the outcome of clinical trials in a field such as, most recently, stroke or septic shock, we see how limited the value of our preclinical models was. For all indications, 95% of drugs that enter clinical trials do not make it to the market, despite all promise of the (animal) models used to develop them. Drug development has started already to decrease its reliance on animal models: In Europe, for example, despite increasing R&D expenditure, animal use by pharmaceutical companies dropped by more than 25% from 2005 to 2008. In vitro studies are likewise limited: questionable cell authenticity, over-passaging, mycoplasma infections, and lack of differentiation as well as non-homeostatic and non-physiologic culture conditions endanger the relevance of these models. The standards of statistics and reporting often are poor, further impairing reliability. Alarming studies from industry show miserable reproducibility of landmark studies. This paper discusses factors contributing to the lack of reproducibility and relevance of pre-clinical research. THE CONCLUSION Publish less but of better quality and do not rely on the face value of animal studies.
Femoral Access and Delivery of Continuous Renal Replacement Therapy Dose

Aims: The study aims to describe the use of dialysis catheters in critically ill patients treated with continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) and to study the impact of femoral versus non-femoral access on CRRT dose. Methods: Statistical analysis and predictive modelling of data from the Randomized Evaluation of Normal vs. Augmented Level renal replacement therapy trial. Results: The femoral vein was the first access site in 937 (67%) of 1,399 patients. These patients had higher Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation and Sequential Organ Failure Assessment scores (p = 0.009) and lower pH (p < 0.001) but similar mortality to patients with non-femoral access (44 vs. 45%; p = 0.63). Lower body weight was independently associated with femoral access placement (OR 0.97, 95% CI 0.96-0.98). Femoral access was associated with a 1.03% lower CRRT dose (p = 0.05), but a 4.20% higher dose was achieved with 13.5 Fr catheters (p = 0.03). Conclusions: Femoral access was preferred in lighter and sicker patients. Catheter gauge had greater impact than catheter site in CRRT dose delivery. Video Journal Club “Cappuccino with Claudio Ronco” at http://www.karger. com/? doi=439581.
Dynamic simulation of protein complex formation on a genomic scale

MOTIVATION One of the central questions in the post-genomic era is the understanding of protein-protein interactions and of protein complex formation. It has been observed that protein complex size distributions of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae decay exponentially. The shape of these size distributions reflects mechanisms of protein complex association and dissociation. RESULTS We present the most simple dynamic model that is able to reproduce the observed protein complex size distribution for yeast. This protein association-dissociation model (PAD-model) simulates the dynamics of protein complex formation on a genomic scale for about 50 million protein molecules. By ruling out different model variants it is possible to elucidate fundamental features of the protein complex dynamics, e.g. complex association is independent of complex size. In addition, the PAD-model provides information about the complexity of the yeast proteome and it gives an idea of how many complexes could not be identified during the measurements. AVAILABILITY All programs used for this publication are available on request from the authors. CONTACT beyer@imb-jena.de SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary information about the model and its interpretation can be downloaded from http://www.imb-jena.de/tsb/pad.
Improvement of template-based protein structure prediction by using chimera alignment

The determination of a protein's structure provides important information that can be used for various practical applications in the biological sciences, such as virtual screening, function prediction, etc. Protein structures can be precisely predicted using template-based modeling if we can find good template structures from a database. However, such predictions sometimes fail even if a template with sufficient quality is found because the sequence alignment used for the modeling is incorrect. In this paper, we propose a new method for improving sequence alignment in single-template-based modeling. The sequence alignments used as an input of template-based modeling are normally generated by homology search tools, and the alignments vary depending on the search algorithm used. Each single alignment is often imperfect, but most of them have suitable parts for template-based modeling at different positions. Thus, a profile of multiple alignments is typically constructed to obtain a consensus among the alignments by multiple template search tools. Integrated alignments are generated by random sampling, and the final prediction model is selected based on model quality assessment scores and the joint probability of the profile. We performed evaluation tests using template-based modeling targets in CASP11 and compared the proposed method to several existing major alignment algorithms. The results showed that the proposed method could improve the model accuracy of single-template modeling.
A Machine Learning Approach to Prevent Malicious Calls over Telephony Networks

Malicious calls, i.e., telephony spams and scams, have been a long-standing challenging issue that causes billions of dollars of annual financial loss worldwide. This work presents the first machine learning-based solution without relying on any particular assumptions on the underlying telephony network infrastructures. The main challenge of this decade-long problem is that it is unclear how to construct effective features without the access to the telephony networks' infrastructures. We solve this problem by combining several innovations. We first develop a TouchPal user interface on top of a mobile App to allow users tagging malicious calls. This allows us to maintain a large-scale call log database. We then conduct a measurement study over three months of call logs, including 9 billion records. We design 29 features based on the results, so that machine learning algorithms can be used to predict malicious calls. We extensively evaluate different state-of-the-art machine learning approaches using the proposed features, and the results show that the best approach can reduce up to 90% unblocked malicious calls while maintaining a precision over 99.99% on the benign call traffic. The results also show the models are efficient to implement without incurring a significant latency overhead. We also conduct ablation analysis, which reveals that using 10 out of the 29 features can reach a performance comparable to using all features.
A Compact Microwave Microfluidic Sensor Using a Re-Entrant Cavity

A miniaturized 2.4 GHz re-entrant cavity has been designed, manufactured and tested as a sensor for microfluidic compositional analysis. It has been fully evaluated experimentally with water and common solvents, namely methanol, ethanol, and chloroform, with excellent agreement with the expected behaviour predicted by the Debye model. The sensor’s performance has also been assessed for analysis of segmented flow using water and oil. The samples’ interaction with the electric field in the gap region has been maximized by aligning the sample tube parallel to the electric field in this region, and the small width of the gap (typically 1 mm) result in a highly localised complex permittivity measurement. The re-entrant cavity has simple mechanical geometry, small size, high quality factor, and due to the high concentration of electric field in the gap region, a very small mode volume. These factors combine to result in a highly sensitive, compact sensor for both pure liquids and liquid mixtures in capillary or microfluidic environments.
PHP-Based Model and Analysis of Millimeter Wave Heterogeneous Cellular Network

In this paper, a novel Poisson hole process (PHP) modeling of wireless networks is proposed. We consider a more general hole shape, i.e. circular sector holes in a random direction, to capture the spatial separation between tiers in a millimeter wave (mmWave) heterogeneous cellular network (HCN). In this case, small cell BSs (SBSs) and macrocell BSs (MBSs) are distributed as a PHP and Poisson point process (PPP). Due to fundamental propagation differences between mmWave and microwave frequencies, we incorporate blockage and directional beamforming in the network model. Using tools from stochastic geometry, the evaluation of the coverage performance in a two-tier mmWave HCN is provided. Since the exact formulation of distance distribution, association probability and coverage probability based on PHP modeling of SBSs is not known, fairly accurate expressions for them are derived and validated by simulation results. Moreover, some interesting facts about the effect of holes on coverage probability and the relation between proposed hole configuration and prior models with circular holes is discovered. It turns out that the analysis based on the proposed PHP model can provide a more general study than prior works and the proposed approaches are more accurate for two-tier HCNs than independent PPP-based analysis.
The Smallest Form Factor UWB Antenna with Quintuple Rejection Bands for IoT Applications Utilizing RSRR and RCSRR

In this paper, we present the smallest form factor microstrip-fed ultra-wideband antenna with quintuple rejection bands for use in wireless sensor networks, mobile handsets, and Internet of things (IoT). Five rejection bands have been achieved at the frequencies of 3.5, 4.5, 5.25, 5.7, and 8.2 GHz, inseminating four rectangular complementary split ring resonators (RCSRRs) on the radiating patch and placing two rectangular split-ring resonators (RSRR) near the feedline-patch junction of the conventional ultra-wideband (UWB) antenna. The design guidelines of the implemented notched bands are provided at the desired frequency bands and analyzed. The measured results demonstrate that the proposed antenna delivers a wide impedance bandwidth from 3 to 11 GHz with a nearly omnidirectional radiation pattern, high rejection in the multiple notched-bands, and good radiation efficiency over the entire frequency band except at the notched frequencies. Simulated and measured response match well specifically at the stop-bands.
An approach based on matrix polynomials for linear systems of partial differential equations

Abstract In this paper, an approach based on matrix polynomials is introduced for solving linear systems of partial differential equations. The main feature of the proposed method is the computation of the Smith canonical form of the assigned matrix polynomial to the linear system of PDEs, which leads to a reduced system. It will be shown that the reduced one is an independent system of PDEs having only one unknown in each equation. A comparison of the results for several test problems reveals that the method is very effective and convenient. The basic idea described in this paper can be employed to solve other linear functional systems.
A feasibility study of dignity therapy in patients with stage IV colorectal cancer actively receiving second-line chemotherapy.

BACKGROUND Randomized controlled trials support the use of dignity therapy (DT) in palliative care patients late in the course of their disease, but little is known about the feasibility of DT earlier in the course in patients with incurable malignant disease who are still receiving chemotherapy. OBJECTIVES To assess the feasibility of DT relatively early in the disease trajectory (primary endpoint) and the effect on death acceptance, distress, symptoms, quality of life, peacefulness, and advanced care planning (secondary outcome endpoint). METHODS Stage IV colorectal cancer patients who progressed on first-line chemotherapy were enrolled. Patients received DT over 2 visits and had outcome measures assessed pre-DT, immediately post-DT and 1 month post-DT. RESULTS 15 of 17 patients (88%) who were approached enrolled in the study. Most of the patients who completed DT reported being satisfied and felt it was helpful, that it increased their sense of meaning, that it would be helpful to their family, and that it increased their sense of dignity, their sense of purpose, and their will to live. LIMITATIONS This is a small study that lacks power for statistical significance of findings. There is no control group for comparison. CONCLUSIONS DT is a highly feasible, satisfying, and meaningful intervention for advanced colorectal cancer patients who are receiving chemotherapy earlier in the course of their and may result in an understanding of disease and goals of care at the end of life. Larger feasibility and exploratory studies are warranted in advanced cancer patients.