Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Energy Efficient Low-Noise Neural Recording Amplifier With Enhanced Noise Efficiency Factor

This paper presents a neural recording amplifier array suitable for large-scale integration with multielectrode arrays in very low-power microelectronic cortical implants. The proposed amplifier is one of the most energy-efficient structures reported to date, which theoretically achieves an effective noise efficiency factor (NEF) smaller than the limit that can be achieved by any existing amplifier topology, which utilizes a differential pair input stage. The proposed architecture, which is referred to as a partial operational transconductance amplifier sharing architecture, results in a significant reduction of power dissipation as well as silicon area, in addition to the very low NEF. The effect of mismatch on crosstalk between channels and the tradeoff between noise and crosstalk are theoretically analyzed. Moreover, a mathematical model of the nonlinearity of the amplifier is derived, and its accuracy is confirmed by simulations and measurements. For an array of four neural amplifiers, measurement results show a midband gain of 39.4 dB and a -3-dB bandwidth ranging from 10 Hz to 7.2 kHz. The input-referred noise integrated from 10 Hz to 100 kHz is measured at 3.5 μVrms and the power consumption is 7.92 μW from a 1.8-V supply, which corresponds to NEF = 3.35. The worst-case crosstalk and common-mode rejection ratio within the desired bandwidth are - 43.5 dB and 70.1 dB, respectively, and the active silicon area of each amplifier is 256 μm × 256 μm in 0.18-μm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor technology.
A balanced semi-implicit discretization on icosahedral C-grids for the linear shallow water equations on the sphere

The linear shallow water equations on the sphere are discretized on a quasi-uniform, geodesic, icosahedral Voronoi-Delaunay grid with a C-grid variable arrangement and semi-implicit time discretization. A finite volume discretization is employed for the continuity equation in conservation law form, using as control volumes either the hexagonal/pentagonal or the dual triangular cells. A geostrophically balanced state is computed as an intermediate step. Results obtained for standard shallow water test cases show that possible spurious geostrophic modes do not affect the quality of the solution and display good inertial gravity wave propagation properties for the linear shallow water equations.
Positive associations between upregulated levels of stress-induced phosphoprotein 1 and matrix metalloproteinase-9 in endometriosis/adenomyosis

Stress-induced phosphoprotein-1 (STIP1), an adaptor protein that coordinates the functions of HSP70 and HSP90 in protein folding, has been implicated in the development of human gynecologic malignancies. This case-control study investigates STIP1 serum levels and tissue expression in relation to endometriosis/adenomyosis in Taiwanese population. Female patients with surgically confirmed endometriosis/adenomyosis were compared with women free of endometriosis/adenomyosis. Serum STIP1 levels were measured using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and surgical tissues were analyzed by immunohistochemistry. Both epithelial and stromal cells in surgical tissues of endometriosis and adenomyosis expressed STIP1 and MMP-9. Notably, MMP-9 expression was significantly decreased when STIP1 expression was knocked-down. In vitro experiments revealed that STIP1 was capable of binding to the MMP-9 promoter and enhanced its transcriptional expression. The preoperative serum STIP1 levels of patients with endometriosis/adenomyosis were significantly higher than those of the controls. In brief, our data suggest an association between STIP1 levels and endometriosis/adenomyosis.
Flow around an autonomous underwater vehicle with bio-inspired coating

Flow separation is a major factor in the form drag experienced by a moving object. In particular, suppressing or reducing flow separation is critical in the reduction of energy expenditure of autonomous underwater vehicles. Previous research suggests that bio-inspired micro-fibrillar structures are capable of reducing the boundary layer separation in a turbulent flow. Here, we present laboratory measurements using particle tracking velocimetry near the wall of two submersible vessel models: one coated with an array of micro-fibers and a second one with smooth walls. The flow around the vessels was enticed by the ordered micro-fibers to retain higher velocities near the wall of the vessel. The experiments suggest that separation of the flow may be reduced by the use of the bio-inspired micro-fibers. Keywords—Bio-inspired, Drag reduction, Flow Separation,
Wound assessment

Most wounds, of whatever aetiology, heal without difficulty. Some wounds, however, are subject to factors that impede healing, although these do not prevent healing if the wounds are managed appropriately. A minority of wounds will become chronic and non-healing. In these cases the ultimate goal is to control the symptoms and prevent complications, rather than healing the wound. ### Causes of ulceration ### Local and systemic factors that impede wound healing View this table: View this table: Some complications of chronic wounds It is important that the normal processes of developing a diagnostic hypothesis are followed before trying to treat the wound. A detailed clinical history should include information on the duration of ulcer, previous ulceration, history of trauma, family history of ulceration, ulcer characteristics (site, pain, odour, and exudate or discharge), limb temperature, underlying medical conditions (for example, diabetes mellitus, peripheral vascular disease, ischaemic heart disease, cerebrovascular accident, neuropathy, connective tissue diseases (such as rheumatoid arthritis), varicose veins, deep venous thrombosis), previous venous or arterial surgery, smoking, medications, and allergies to drugs and dressings. Appropriate investigations should be carried out. ### Size of wound The size of the wound should be assessed at first presentation and regularly thereafter. The outline of the wound margin should be traced onto transparent acetate sheets and the …
Modulation of b-catenin function maintains mouse epiblast stem cell and human embryonic stem cell self-renewal

Wnt/b-catenin signalling has a variety of roles in regulating stem cell fates. Its specific role in mouse epiblast stem cell self-renewal, however, remains poorly understood. Here we show that Wnt/b-catenin functions in both self-renewal and differentiation in mouse epiblast stem cells. Stabilization and nuclear translocation of b-catenin and its subsequent binding to T-cell factors induces differentiation. Conversely, retention of stabilized b-catenin in the cytoplasm maintains self-renewal. Cytoplasmic retention of b-catenin is effected by stabilization of Axin2, a downstream target of b-catenin, or by genetic modifications to b-catenin that prevent its nuclear translocation. We also find that human embryonic stem cell and mouse epiblast stem cell fates are regulated by b-catenin through similar mechanisms. Our results elucidate a new role for b-catenin in stem cell self-renewal that is independent of its transcriptional activity and will have broad implications in understanding the molecular regulation of stem cell fate. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms3403
Air pollution and hospitalization for venous thromboembolic disease in Chile

See also Mannucci PM. Fine particulate: it matters. This issue, pp 659–61; Bonzini M, Tripodi A, Artoni A, Tarantini L, Marinelli B, Bertazzi PA, Apostoli P, Baccarelli A. Effects of inhalable particulate matter on blood coagulation. This issue, pp 662–8.
Sending proteins to dense core secretory granules: still a lot to sort out

The intracellular sorting of peptide hormone precursors to the dense core secretory granules (DCSGs) is essential for their bioactivation. Despite the fundamental importance of this cellular process, the nature of the sorting signals for entry of proteins into DCSGs remains a source of vigorous debate. This review highlights recent discoveries that are consistent with a model in which several protein domains, acting in a cell-specific fashion and at different steps in the sorting process, act in concert to regulate the entry of proteins into DCSGs.
Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor &dgr; Is an Essential Transcriptional Regulator for Mitochondrial Protection and Biogenesis in Adult Heart

Rationale: Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) (&agr;, &ggr;, and &dgr;/&bgr;) are nuclear hormone receptors and ligand-activated transcription factors that serve as key determinants of myocardial fatty acid metabolism. Long-term cardiomyocyte-restricted PPAR&dgr; deficiency in mice leads to depressed myocardial fatty acid oxidation, bioenergetics, and premature death with lipotoxic cardiomyopathy. Objective: To explore the essential role of PPAR&dgr; in the adult heart. Methods and Results: We investigated the consequences of inducible short-term PPAR&dgr; knockout in the adult mouse heart. In addition to a substantial transcriptional downregulation of lipid metabolic proteins, short-term PPAR&dgr; knockout in the adult mouse heart attenuated cardiac expression of both Cu/Zn superoxide dismutase and manganese superoxide dismutase, leading to increased oxidative damage to the heart. Moreover, expression of key mitochondrial biogenesis determinants such as PPAR&ggr; coactivator-1 were substantially decreased in the short-term PPAR&dgr; deficient heart, concomitant with a decreased mitochondrial DNA copy number. Rates of palmitate and glucose oxidation were markedly depressed in cardiomyocytes of PPAR&dgr; knockout hearts. Consequently, PPAR&dgr; deficiency in the adult heart led to depressed cardiac performance and cardiac hypertrophy. Conclusions: PPAR&dgr; is an essential regulator of cardiac mitochondrial protection and biogenesis and PPAR&dgr; activation can be a potential therapeutic target for cardiac disorders.
Experimental Aspects of Holographic Projection with a Liquid-Crystal-on-Silicon Spatial Light Modulator

Dynamic electroholography is a suitable and promising technology of image display for future projection and near-eye displays. Until a new phase modulation technology is introduced, practical research assumes the use of pixelated spatial light modulators based on liquid crystals with electronically controlled birefringence leading to a controllable refractive index. Such an approach allows for university grade development and testing of holographic computation methodol-ogy, but its limitations and drawbacks currently disable the massive application in consumer electronics. This chapter describes the differences between the behavior of the modulator as expected from Fourier optics and that observed in practical optical experiments. Moreover, practical hints and proven techniques of overcom-ing selected hardware issues of the chosen liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCoS) phase modulators are given. The smart combination of the described techniques could allow more precise operation of spatial light modulators with a higher agreement with numerical simulations, especially for holographic projection of colorful images.
Climate change impacts on bumblebees converge across continents

Bucking the trend Responses to climate change have been observed across many species. There is a general trend for species to shift their ranges poleward or up in elevation. Not all species, however, can make such shifts, and these species might experience more rapid declines. Kerr et al. looked at data on bumblebees across North America and Europe over the past 110 years. Bumblebees have not shifted northward and are experiencing shrinking distributions in the southern ends of their range. Such failures to shift may be because of their origins in a cooler climate, and suggest an elevated susceptibility to rapid climate change. Science, this issue p. 177 Cool-adapted bumblebees are failing to shift their ranges in response to climate warming. For many species, geographical ranges are expanding toward the poles in response to climate change, while remaining stable along range edges nearest the equator. Using long-term observations across Europe and North America over 110 years, we tested for climate change–related range shifts in bumblebee species across the full extents of their latitudinal and thermal limits and movements along elevation gradients. We found cross-continentally consistent trends in failures to track warming through time at species’ northern range limits, range losses from southern range limits, and shifts to higher elevations among southern species. These effects are independent of changing land uses or pesticide applications and underscore the need to test for climate impacts at both leading and trailing latitudinal and thermal limits for species.
Clinical guidelines

Clinical guidelines are likely to be an important part of medical practice for the foreseeable future. Guidelines at their best are tools for consistency and effectiveness in patient care. Guideline methodology has evolved such that there are internationally agreed standards with which to develop and assess guidelines. Guideline development groups should ideally be multidisciplinary in composition and if possible have patient representation. Key to the process is the rigour of the systematic review in order to assess the best evidence on which to base recommendations. Guideline recommendations should be explicitly linked to the evidence. In order to safeguard trust, guideline development groups must have editorial independence of government, industry and special interest groups, while at the same time having regard to the implications of their recommendations. Implementation of guidelines by passive dissemination is largely ineffective; effective dissemination requires an imaginative approach tailored to the intended audience.
The effect of different water vapor permeable jackets on moisture management, subjective perceptions and physiological parameters during submaximal exercise in a cool environment

The goal of this study was to investigate the effect of differences in water vapor permeability (WVP) of outdoor jackets on moisture management, subjective perceptions and physiological parameters under conditions typically encountered in outdoor sports. Four outdoor jackets differing only in their WVP were compared in a repeated measures study. A total of 19 subjects (nine females) were tested in a climatic chamber at 10℃ and 40% relative humidity. The protocol consisted of 15 min of rest, 50 min of treadmill running at 60% of the individual maximal running velocity, and 15 min of passive recovery. We found that jackets featuring greater WVP helped to reduce relative humidity underneath the jacket, resulting in less sweat residue in the clothing system and drier skin during exercise and rest. Subjects were also able to perceive the differences in the microclimate and reported feeling more comfortable and drier in the more permeable jackets. However, WVP did not have a significant effect on oxygen consumption, heart rate, tympanic temperature, overall loss of subjects’ body mass or on perceived exertion. It can be concluded that outdoor jackets with higher WVP benefit moisture management during submaximal exercise in cool temperatures by reducing relative humidity in the clothing system mostly during rest periods. This effect leads to a drier skin which favors perceived comfort and might reduce the after-chill effect. However, WVP of outdoor jackets neither significantly affects physiological responses nor perceived exertion during submaximal exercise in a cool environment.
Experimental Study to Optimize Shrinkage Behavior of Semi-Crystalline and Amorphous Thermoplastics

Shrinkage is one of the most important defects of injection molded plastic parts. Injection molding processing parameters have a significant effect on shrinkage of the produced parts. In the present study, the effect of different injection parameters on volumetric shrinkage of two polymers (high-density polyethylene (HDPE) semi-crystalline thermoplastics and polycarbonate (PC) as a representative of amorphous thermoplastics) was studied. Samples under different processing conditions according to a L27 orthogonal array of Taguchi experimental design approach were injected. Effect of material crystallinity on the shrinkage of injected samples was investigated. Obtained results revealed that semi-crystalline thermoplastics have larger shrinkage values in comparison with amorphous thermoplastics. Shrinkages of injected samples were also studied along and across the flow directions. Results showed that the flow path can dramatically affect the shrinkage of semi-crystalline thermoplastics. However for amorphous thermoplastics, results showed an independency of obtained shrinkage to flow direction. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) results illustrated that cooling time was the most effective parameter on shrinkage for both PE and PC injected samples; followed by injection temperature as the second important parameter. The optimum conditions to minimize shrinkage of injection molded samples are also achieved using signal to noise ratio (S/N) analysis.
Planning of research on effectiveness of psychotherapy.

THERE have been few convincing research studies on the effectiveness of the various psychotherapies. The studies of large scope have typically had insufficient or inadequate controls. Other studies, often more adequate in methodology, have been so limited in scope that any generalization of their findings must be very tenuous. Until recently, few studies have built cumulatively on earlier ones to provide comparable rather than conglomerate data. As a consequence, we have little systematic experimental knowledge of psychotherapy, of its effectiveness, and of the factors facilitating its effects. Certainly the practice of psychotherapy has been influenced very little by the research literature. The major problems that must be faced by any attempt to evaluate psychotherapy are that we are dealing with a treatment modality which has not been defined, the effects of which are presumed to require a long period of treatment, and the evaluation of which demands long-term
BicOverlapper 2.0: visual analysis for gene expression

Motivation: Systems biology demands the use of several point of views to get a more comprehensive understanding of biological problems. This usually leads to take into account different data regarding the problem at hand, but it also has to do with using different perspectives of the same data. This multifaceted aspect of systems biology often requires the use of several tools, and it is often hard to get a seamless integration of all of them, which would help the analyst to have an interactive discourse with the data. Results: Focusing on expression profiling, BicOverlapper 2.0 visualizes the most relevant aspects of the analysis, including expression data, profiling analysis results and functional annotation. It also integrates several state-of-the-art numerical methods, such as differential expression analysis, gene set enrichment or biclustering. Availability and implementation: BicOverlapper 2.0 is available at: http://vis.usal.es/bicoverlapper2 Contact: rodri@usal.es
Absorption and lipoprotein transport of sphingomyelin Published, JLR Papers in Press, October 26, 2005.

Dietary sphingomyelin (SM) is hydrolyzed by intestinal alkaline sphingomyelinase and neutral ceramidase to sphingosine, which is absorbed and converted to palmitic acid and acylated into chylomicron triglycerides (TGs). SM digestion is slow and is affected by luminal factors such as bile salt, cholesterol, and other lipids. In the gut, SM and its metabolites may influence TG hydrolysis, cholesterol absorption, lipoprotein formation, and mucosal growth. SM accounts for ∼20% of the phospholipids in human plasma lipoproteins, of which two-thirds are in LDL and VLDL. It is secreted in chylomicrons and VLDL and transferred into HDL via the ABCA1 transporter. Plasma SM increases after periods of large lipid loads, during suckling, and in type II hypercholesterolemia, cholesterol-fed animals, and apolipoprotein E-deficient mice. SM is thus an important amphiphilic component when plasma lipoprotein pools expand in response to large lipid loads or metabolic abnormalities. It inhibits lipoprotein lipase and LCAT as well as the interaction of lipoproteins with receptors and counteracts LDL oxidation. The turnover of plasma SM is greater than can be accounted for by the turnover of LDL and HDL particles. Some SM must be degraded via receptor-mediated catabolism of chylomicron and VLDL remnants and by scavenger receptor class B type I receptor-mediated transfer into cells.
Feature Clustering with Self-organizing Maps and an Application to Financial Time-series for Portfolio Selection

The portfolio selection is an important technique for decreasing the risk in the stock investment. In the portfolio selection, the investor’s property is distributed for a set of stocks in order to minimize the financial risk in market downturns. With this in mind, and aiming to develop a tool to assist the investor in finding balanced portoflios, we achieved a generic method for feature clustering with Self-Organizing Maps (SOM). The ability of neural networks to discover nonlinear relationships in input data makes them ideal for modeling dynamic systems as the stock market. The method proposed makes use the remarkable visualization capabilities of the SOM, namely the Component Planes, to detect non-linear correlations between features. An appropriate metric the improved Rv coefficient is also proposed to compare Component Planes and generate a distance matrix between features, after which an hierarchical clustering method is used to obtain the clusters of features. Results obtained are empirically sound, although at this moment we do not provide mathematical comparisons with other methods. Results also show that feature clustering with the SOM presents itself as a viable method to cluster time-series.
Interference of Cognitive Wireless Networks on Rayleigh and Rice Fading Channels

We propose a mathematical interference model of cognitive wireless networks based on two channels suffering different fading. The primary channel between primary transmitter and primary receiver is under Rayleigh fading. The secondary interference channel between secondary transmitter and primary receiver is under Rice fading. By employing various factors, such as the spectrum sensing scheme and the spatial distribution of the secondary users, the proposed model gives an accurate expression of interference probability compared to the statistical models that just approximate the probability model of the interference or bounds models that aim at finding the bounds of the interference. The proposed probability density function (PDF), cumulative distribution function (CDF), and the mean and variance of interference can be extended to a number of applications including power control, spectrum sensing evaluation, secondary users density analysis, and setting interference toleration threshold. Moreover, the framework developed in this paper can be applied to the interference analysis for the nodes of cognitive networks distributed in irregular geographical shapes like finite or infinite zone. The simulation result verifies our theory and is in agreement with the expectation.