Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mitochondrial‐targeted catalase is good for the old mouse proteome, but not for the young: ‘reverse’ antagonistic pleiotropy?

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are highly reactive oxygen‐containing molecules associated with aging and a broad spectrum of pathologies. We have previously shown that transgenic expression of the antioxidant enzyme catalase targeted to the mitochondria (mCAT) in mice reduces ROS, attenuates age‐related disease, and increases lifespan. However, it has been increasingly recognized that ROS also has beneficial roles in signaling, hormesis, stress response, and immunity. We therefore hypothesized that mCAT might be beneficial only when ROS approaches pathological levels in older age and might not be advantageous at a younger age when basal ROS is low. We analyzed abundance and turnover of the global proteome in hearts and livers of young (4 month) and old (20 month) mCAT and wild‐type (WT) mice. In old hearts and livers of WT mice, protein half‐lives were reduced compared to young, while in mCAT mice the reverse was observed; the longest half‐lives were seen in old mCAT mice and the shortest in young mCAT. Protein abundance of old mCAT hearts recapitulated a more youthful proteomic expression profile (P‐value < 0.01). However, young mCAT mice partially phenocopied the older wild‐type proteome (P‐value < 0.01). Age strongly interacts with mCAT, consistent with antagonistic pleiotropy in the reverse of the typical direction. These findings underscore the contrasting roles of ROS in young vs. old mice and indicate the need for better understanding of the interaction between dose and age in assessing the efficacy of therapeutic interventions in aging, including mitochondrial antioxidants.
Cognitive impairment in multiple sclerosis – a review of current knowledge and recent research

Abstract Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic, progressive disease of the central nervous system that is characterised by inflammatory damage to the myelin sheath. Though often neglected, cognitive impairment is a common feature of MS that affects 43–70% of patients. It has a sophisticated neuroanatomic and pathophysiologic background and disturbs such vital cognitive domains as speed of information processing, memory, attention, executive functions and visual perceptual functions. In recent years there has been growing interest in neuroimaging findings with regard to cognitive impairment in MS. The possible options of managing cognitive dysfunction in MS are pharmacologic interventions, cognitive rehabilitation and exercise training; however, not enough evidence has been presented in this field. The aim of our article is to provide current knowledge on cognitive impairment in MS based on the most recent scientific results and conclusions with regard to affected cognitive domains, neuropsychological assessment, underlying mechanisms of this disturbance, neuroimaging findings and therapeutic options.
Thermoelectric transport properties of high mobility organic semiconductors

Transport in organic semiconductors has traditionally been investigated using measurements of the temperature and gate voltage dependent mobility of charge carriers within the channel of organic field-effect transistors (OFETs). In such measurements, the behavior of charge carrier mobility with temperature and gate voltage, studied together with carrier activation energies, provide a metric to quantify the extent of disorder within these van der Waals bonded materials. In addition to the mobility and activation energy, another potent but often-overlooked transport coefficient useful in understanding disorder is the Seebeck coefficient (also known as thermoelectric power). Fundamentally, the Seebeck coefficient represents the entropy per charge carrier in the solid state, and thus proves powerful in distinguishing materials in which charge carriers move freely from those where a high degree of disorder causes the induced carriers to remain trapped. This paper briefly covers the recent highlights in the field of organic thermoelectrics, showing how significant strides have been made both from an applied standpoint as well as from a viewpoint of fundamental thermoelectric transport physics. It shall be illustrated how thermoelectric transport parameters in organic semiconductors can be tuned over a significant range, and how this tunability facilitates an enhanced performance for heat-to-electricity conversion as well as quantifies energetic disorder and the nature of the density of states (DOS). The work of the authors shall be spotlighted in this context, illustrating how Seebeck coefficient measurements in the polymer indacenodithiophene-co-benzothiadiazole (IDTBT) known for its ultra-low degree of torsion within the polymer backbone, has a trend consistent with low disorder. 1 Finally, using examples of the small molecules C8-BTBT and C10-DNTT, it shall be discussed how the Seebeck coefficient can aid the estimation of the density and distribution of trap states within these materials. 2, 3
A cost effective multi-channel ultrasound signal acquisition system for cavitation detection in MR-PHIFU

MR-PHIFU (Magnetic Resonance imaging guided Phased High Intensity Focused Ultrasound) is a new noninvasive surgery method. The energy of acoustic cavitation may cause side-effect in thermal therapy. In this paper, a cost effective multi-channel ultrasound signal acquisition system (12-bit) is developed using AD9279 and ZYNQ-7020 as cavitation detection system. The proposed system has the sampling frequency as high as 65 MHz to detect the broadband noises which are associated with the cavitation. The system has the capability to be integrated with MR-PHIFU system. The performance of the system was tested experimentally. The results show that the signal acquisition system is able to collect ultrasonic signals reliably which suggests the occurrence of cavitation while the HIFU output is high enough.
Deep Coupling Autoencoder for Fault Diagnosis With Multimodal Sensory Data

Effective fault diagnosis of rotating machinery has multifarious benefits, such as improved safety, enhanced reliability, and reduced maintenance cost, for complex engineered systems. With many kinds of installed sensors for conducting fault diagnosis, one of the key tasks is to develop data fusion strategies that can effectively handle multimodal sensory signals. Most traditional methods use hand-crafted statistical features and then combine these multimodal features simply by concatenating them into a long vector to achieve data fusion. The present study proposes a deep coupling autoencoder (DCAE) model that handles the multimodal sensory signals not residing in a commensurate space, such as vibration and acoustic data, and integrates feature extraction of multimodal data seamlessly into data fusion for fault diagnosis. Specifically, a coupling autoencoder (CAE) is constructed to capture the joint information between different multimodal sensory data, and then a DCAE model is devised for learning the joint feature at a higher level. The CAE is developed by coupling hidden representations of two single-modal autoencoders, which can capture the joint information from multimodal data. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by two experiments, which shows that the DCAE model succeeds in efficiently utilizing multisource sensory data to perform accurate fault diagnosis. Compared with other methods, the proposed method exhibits better performance.
Influence of atrial contraction dynamics on cardiac function

In recent years, there has been a move from monoventricular or biventricular models of the heart, to more complex models that incorporate the electromechanical function in all 4 chambers. However, the biophysical foundation is still underdeveloped, with most work in atrial cellular models having focused on electrophysiological properties. Here, we present a biophysical model of human atrial contraction at body temperature and use it to study the effects of atrial contraction on whole organ function and a study of the effects of remodelling due to atrial fibrillation on atrial and ventricular function.
Characteristics of regional bone quality in cervical vertebrae considering BMD: Determining a safe trajectory for cervical pedicle screw fixation

This study aimed to report the mechanical strength and characteristics of the lateral mass and pedicle considering BMD for the safe insertion of pedicle screws in the subaxial cervical level. We evaluated BMD and Hounsfield unit (HU) values of cortical bones at the lateral mass and pedicle of C3‐7 from CT images in 99 patients. Patients were divided into three groups (Group A, T‐score ≥ −1; Group B, −2.5 < T‐score < −1.0; Group C, T‐score ≤ −2.5). The HU numbers of cortical bone in the vertebral canal (medial wall of the lateral mass; cHU), posterior wall of the transverse foramen (fHU), and medial wall, lateral wall, and trabecular area of the pedicle (mHU, lHU, and pHU, respectively) were measured on the CT images in the middle of the pedicle. A mechanical study was also performed to measure cortical bone strength using 10 fresh cadavers. The cHU and mHU values in Group C were higher than lHU and fHU in Groups A and B, and there was a wide gap between the pHU value and other areas. The penetrating force also had a close correlation with HU number. The mean penetrating force of the medial wall of the lateral mass and the posterior wall of the transverse foramen were 210.08 ± 110.46 and 50.51 ± 46.09 N, respectively. The cortical bones in the vertebral canal and medial wall of the pedicle were stronger than the lateral wall and the trabecular area. The cHU and mHU in the osteoporotic group were higher than fHU and pHU in the normal group. © 2017 Orthopaedic Research Society. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Orthop Res 36:217–223, 2018.
Neurological Recovery In Traumatic Spinal Cord Injuries After Surgical Intervention.

BACKGROUND Spinal injuries are the most devastating injuries and affect every aspect of patients' lives. This may cause lifelong disability due to spinal cord injury. Recovery of neurological functions is highly desirable. Early or late surgical intervention is still debatable, but majority recommend early intervention. The result of late surgical intervention in term of neurological recovery is not clear. This study focuses on neurological recovery after late surgical intervention. The objective of this study was to assess neurological recovery in term of ASIA grading in patients with traumatic spinal cord injury. METHODS This descriptive cross-sectional study was performed from June 2013 to June 2016. All patients treated for spinal trauma with spinal cord injury, operated after 24 hrs of injury were included in the study. Neurology was assessed according to ASIA scale preoperative and at 6 months. Data was analysed with the help of SPSS. RESULTS Total of 149 patients, 32 (21.5%) were female and 117 (78.5%) male were included. mean age was 32±13.11 years. Ninety-six (64.4%) patients presented with fall while 53 (35.6%) presented with motor vehicular accidents (MVA). according to AO comprehensive classification 76 (51.1%) patients were type C, 47 (31.5) were type B and 26 (17.4%) were type A. preoperative neurology was ASIA A 65 (43.6%), B12 (8.1%), C 59 (39.6%) and D 13 (8.7%). Mean delay in surgery was 3.6±1.8 days with minimum of 1 and maximum 14 days. ASIA grading on 6 months was ASIA "A" 61 (40.9%), B4 (2.7%), C 26 (17.4%), D 33 (22.1%) and E 25 (16.8%). the overall improvement in neurology was in 67 (45%) of patients. improvement by one grade was documented in 49 (32.9%) patients, by two grades in 17 (11.4%) and by three grades in one patient (.7%). CONCLUSIONS fall from height is a major cause of spine injuries in our set up followed by RTA. Preventive measures need to be instituted to lessen the devastating outcome.
Evaluation of factors affecting wind turbine output power

This paper presents the most important factors that influence the energy output of the wind system. Also, a mathematical model is presented for wind power & investigates the influence of such parameters on the electrical power generated by the wind turbine. The considered factors are wind speed, turbine swept area, air density, weather temperature, and height of tower. Power coefficient as a function of pitch angle and blade tip speed is also studied. This study can be used in the selection of wind turbine with optimal parameters, which yield the highest amount of energy can be captured from wind. Simulation MATLAB program is implemented for this study and wind turbine sample parameters have been used in this simulation.
A survey on smart city technologies, initiatives and global technology providers

Many cities are being named or motivated to become "smart" by the leaders, planners and officials. Smart cities infrastructure development involves "smart grids" for energy and water, "smart networks" for information and communications technologies (ICT) and "smart mobility" for transportation and logistics. The "smart" term is striving to be a solid brand in cities planning and management from all aspects. A very common theme in "smart" cities is the high dependency, and application of ICT technologies in city planning and management, which is expected to result-in superior and rational optimization of time and resources with harmonious smart city ecosystem. Nevertheless, the definitions of "smart" cities remain vague, and poor understanding may lead cities planners to possible technological traps such as heavy investments in ICT infrastructure for short-term solutions without reasonably considering the long term. As cities officials deals with rapid development, expansion and goals for creating sustainable development, dealing with climate change mitigation, and rationally manage resources, the precise definition and wisdom about being "smart" will be vital for smart cities leaders and planners. The aim of this study is to survey and assess the conceptual perceptions of smart cities by academicians, researchers, practitioners and policy makers about smart cities and the technology providers who developed smart city solutions. Furthermore, we survey the strategic ICT strategic frameworks used for smart cities.
Microbiota abnormalities and the therapeutic potential of probiotics in the treatment of mood disorders

Abstract Major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder (BD) are among the leading causes of burden and disability worldwide. Despite intensified research efforts to improve the treatment options and remission rates in mood disorders, no disease modifying treatment exists for these disorders. Accumulating evidence implicates the involvement of the gut microbiota in processes relevant to etiopathology of central nervous system-based disorders. The objective of this article was to critically evaluate the evidence supporting the link between gastrointestinal microbiota and mood disorders and to discuss the potential benefits of using probiotics in the treatment of MDD and BD. The concept of psychobiotics, which is bacterial-based interventions with mental health benefit, is emerging in the field. On the other hand, while probiotics might potentially represent a significant advance, specific roles of microbiota in the pathophysiology of mood disorders still need further investigation along with intervention studies.
A Proposal of a Universal Remote Control System Based on Head Movements

Technological developments converge to make people interact with electronic devices in an easy way. For people with disabilities, however, that interaction becomes something more than simple: it becomes possible. The current work presents a proposal of an open-source, low cost universal remote control system that translates user's head poses into commands to electronic devices. In addition, a proximity sensor circuit was combined to radio-frequency modules in order to act as a wireless switch. Among the applications found with respect to alternative remote controls, none of them supports head gestures as input, which would certainly make them a viable option to people whose upper limbs are compromised. A mean opinion score questionnaire was applied to volunteers in order to evaluate the system. The results show great interest of the users in this kind of technology.
LSTD: A Low-Shot Transfer Detector for Object Detection

Recent advances in object detection are mainly driven by deep learning with large-scale detection benchmarks. However, the fully-annotated training set is often limited for a target detection task, which may deteriorate the performance of deep detectors. To address this challenge, we propose a novel low-shot transfer detector (LSTD) in this paper, where we leverage rich source-domain knowledge to construct an effective target-domain detector with very few training examples. The main contributions are described as follows. First, we design a flexible deep architecture of LSTD to alleviate transfer difficulties in low-shot detection. This architecture can integrate the advantages of both SSD and Faster RCNN in a unified deep framework. Second, we introduce a novel regularized transfer learning framework for low-shot detection, where the transfer knowledge (TK) and background depression (BD) regularizations are proposed to leverage object knowledge respectively from source and target domains, in order to further enhance fine-tuning with a few target images. Finally, we examine our LSTD on a number of challenging low-shot detection experiments, where LSTD outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches. The results demonstrate that LSTD is a preferable deep detector for low-shot scenarios.
Unique Microbial Diversity and Metabolic Pathway Features of Fermented Vegetables From Hainan, China

Fermented vegetables are typically traditional foods made of fresh vegetables and their juices, which are fermented by beneficial microorganisms. Herein, we applied high-throughput sequencing and culture-dependent technology to describe the diversities of microbiota and identify core microbiota in fermented vegetables from different areas of Hainan Province, and abundant metabolic pathways in the fermented vegetables were simultaneously predicted. At the genus level, Lactobacillus bacteria were the most abundant. Lactobacillus plantarum was the most abundant species, followed by Lactobacillus fermentum, Lactobacillus pentosaceus, and Weissella cibaria. These species were present in each sample with average absolute content values greater than 1% and were thus defined as core microbiota. Analysis results based on the alpha and beta diversities of the microbial communities showed that the microbial profiles of the fermented vegetables differed significantly based on the regions and raw materials used, and the species of the vegetables had a greater effect on the microbial community structure than the region from where they were harvested. Regarding microbial functional metabolism, we observed an enrichment of metabolic pathways, including membrane transport, replication and repair and translation, which implied that the microbial metabolism in the fermented vegetables tended to be vigorous. In addition, Lactobacillus plantarum and Lactobacillus fermentum were calculated to be major metabolic pathway contributors. Finally, we constructed a network to better explain correlations among the core microbiota and metabolic pathways. This study facilitates an understanding of the differences in microbial profiles and fermentation pathways involved in the production of fermented vegetables, establishes a basis for optimally selecting microorganisms to manufacture high-quality fermented vegetable products, and lays the foundation for better utilizing tropical microbial resources.
Parainfluenza virus 5–vectored vaccines against human and animal infectious diseases

Parainfluenza virus 5 (PIV5), known as canine parainfluenza virus in the veterinary field, is a negative‐sense, nonsegmented, single‐stranded RNA virus belonging to the Paramyxoviridae family. Parainfluenza virus 5 is an excellent viral vector and has been used as a live vaccine for kennel cough for many years in dogs without any safety concern. It can grow to high titers in many cell types, and its genome is stable even in the presence of foreign gene insertions. So far, PIV5 has been used to develop vaccines against influenza virus, respiratory syncytial virus, rabies virus, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis, demonstrating its ability to elicit robust and protective immune responses in preclinical animal models. Parainfluenza virus 5–based vaccines can be administered intranasally, intramuscularly, or orally. Interestingly, prior exposure of PIV5 does not prevent a PIV5‐vectored vaccine from generating robust immunity, indicating that the vector can be used more than once. Here, these encouraging results are reviewed together along with discussion of the desirable advantages of the PIV5 vaccine vector to aid future vaccine design and to accelerate progression of PIV5‐based vaccines into clinical trials.
Translation Model Adaptation for Statistical Machine Translation with Monolingual Topic Information

To adapt a translation model trained from the data in one domain to another, previous works paid more attention to the studies of parallel corpus while ignoring the in-domain monolingual corpora which can be obtained more easily. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for translation model adaptation by utilizing in-domain monolingual topic information instead of the in-domain bilingual corpora, which incorporates the topic information into translation probability estimation. Our method establishes the relationship between the out-of-domain bilingual corpus and the in-domain monolingual corpora via topic mapping and phrase-topic distribution probability estimation from in-domain monolingual corpora. Experimental result on the NIST Chinese-English translation task shows that our approach significantly outperforms the baseline system.
Effects of Rapastinel (Formerly GLYX-13) on Serum Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

To the Editor: Serum brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) may be a treatment efficacy marker in depression1,2 and may be altered in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and anxiety disorders.3,4 Rapastinel is an N-methyl- D -aspartate glutamate receptor modulator shown to affect BDNF levels in vitro.5 It exerts acute therapeutic effects on OCD symptoms without ketamine-like side effects.6 We analyzed exploratory data regarding serum BDNF samples collected from OCD patients before and after rapastinel infusion. Our goal was to determine whether (1) rapastinel alters serum BDNF levels in the interval from 0 to 230 minutes postinfusion and (2) whether changes in BDNF levels correlated with changes in OCD symptoms during this period.
Recent advances in the microbiological diagnosis of bloodstream infections

Abstract Rapid identification (ID) and antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) of the causative agent(s) of bloodstream infections (BSIs) are essential for the prompt administration of an effective antimicrobial therapy, which can result in clinical and financial benefits. Immediately after blood sampling, empirical antimicrobial therapy, chosen on clinical and epidemiological data, is administered. When ID and AST results are available, the clinician decides whether to continue or streamline the antimicrobial therapy, based on the results of the in vitro antimicrobial susceptibility profile of the pathogen. The aim of the present study is to review and discuss the experimental data, advantages, and drawbacks of recently developed technological advances of culture-based and molecular methods for the diagnosis of BSI (including mass spectrometry, magnetic resonance, PCR-based methods, direct inoculation methods, and peptide nucleic acid fluorescence in situ hybridization), the understanding of which could provide new perspectives to improve and fasten the diagnosis and treatment of septic patients. Although blood culture remains the gold standard to diagnose BSIs, newly developed methods can significantly shorten the turnaround time of reliable microbial ID and AST, thus substantially improving the diagnostic yield.