Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chronic Exposure to Plasmodium falciparum Is Associated with Phenotypic Evidence of B and T Cell Exhaustion

Naturally acquired immunity to malaria develops slowly, requiring several years of repeated exposure to be effective. The cellular and molecular factors underlying this observation are only partially understood. Recent studies suggest that chronic Plasmodium falciparum exposure may induce functional exhaustion of lymphocytes, potentially impeding optimal control of infection. However, it remains unclear whether the “atypical” memory B cells (MBCs) and “exhausted” CD4 T cells described in humans exposed to endemic malaria are driven by P. falciparum per se or by other factors commonly associated with malaria, such as coinfections and malnutrition. To address this critical question we took advantage of a “natural” experiment near Kilifi, Kenya, and compared profiles of B and T cells of children living in a rural community where P. falciparum transmission is ongoing to the profiles of age-matched children living under similar conditions in a nearby community where P. falciparum transmission ceased 5 y prior to this study. We found that continuous exposure to P. falciparum drives the expansion of atypical MBCs. Persistent P. falciparum exposure was associated with an increased frequency of CD4 T cells expressing phenotypic markers of exhaustion, both programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) alone and PD-1 in combination with lymphocyte-activation gene-3 (LAG-3). This expansion of PD-1–expressing and PD-1/LAG-3–coexpressing CD4 T cells was largely confined to CD45RA+ CD4 T cells. The percentage of CD45RA+CD27+ CD4 T cells coexpressing PD-1 and LAG-3 was inversely correlated with frequencies of activated and classical MBCs. Taken together, these results suggest that P. falciparum infection per se drives the expansion of atypical MBCs and phenotypically exhausted CD4 T cells, which has been reported in other endemic areas.
Multiwavelength Study of the Starburst Galaxy NGC 7714. II. The Balance between Young, Intermediate-Age, and Old Stars

We combine existing multiwavelength data (including an HST/GHRS UV spectrum and a ground-based optical spectrum) with unpublished HST/WFPC2 images, near-IR photometry, and K-band spectroscopy. We use these data to constrain the young, the intermediate-age, and the old stellar populations in the central regions of the starburst galaxy NGC 7714. In a previous paper the stellar features in the HST/GHRS ultraviolet (UV) spectrum and the optical emission lines were used to identify an ~5 Myr old, very little reddened stellar population as the main source of UV light in the central ~330 pc. The optical data indicated the existence of an older population. The nature of the latter is investigated here. Stellar absorption features in the optical and the near-IR are used to break partly the strong degeneracy between the effects of aging and those of the inhomogeneous dust distribution on the UV-optical-IR colors. Consistency with far-IR, X-ray, and radio data is also addressed. The successful models have essential features in common. We find that the young burst responsible for the UV light represents only a small part of an extended episode of enhanced star formation, initiated a few times 108 yr ago. The star formation rate is likely to have varied on this timescale, averaging about 1 M☉ yr-1. The mass of young and intermediate-age stars thus formed equals at least 10% of the mass locked in preexisting stars of the underlying spiral galaxy nucleus, and fractions around 25% are favored. The spectrophotometric star formation timescale is long compared to the ~110 Myr elapsed since closest contact with the neighboring NGC 7715, according to the 1992 dynamical models of Smith & Wallin. The initial trigger of the starburst thus remains elusive. NGC 7714 owes its brightness in the UV to a few low extinction lines of sight toward young stars. Our results based on the integrated spectrophotometry of the central ~330 pc are supported by high-resolution images of this area. The different extinction values obtained when different spectral indicators are used result naturally from the coexistence of populations with various ages and obscurations. The near-IR continuum image looks smoothest, as a consequence of lower sensitivity to extinction and of a larger contribution of old stars. We compare the nuclear properties of NGC 7714 with results from studies in larger apertures. We emphasize that the global properties of starburst galaxies are the result of the averaging over many lines of sight with very diverse properties in terms of obscuration and stellar ages. The overall picture is strongly reminiscent of the other nearby "prototypical" starburst, M82.
Mitochondrial dysfunction due to long-chain Acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency causes hepatic steatosis and hepatic insulin resistance

Alterations in mitochondrial function have been implicated in the pathogenesis of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. However, it is unclear whether the reduced mitochondrial function is a primary or acquired defect in this process. To determine whether primary defects in mitochondrial β-oxidation can cause insulin resistance, we studied mice with a deficiency of long-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase (LCAD), a key enzyme in mitochondrial fatty acid oxidation. Here, we show that LCAD knockout mice develop hepatic steatosis, which is associated with hepatic insulin resistance, as reflected by reduced insulin suppression of hepatic glucose production during a hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp. The defects in insulin action were associated with an ≈40% reduction in insulin-stimulated insulin receptor substrate-2-associated phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase activity and an ≈50% decrease in Akt2 activation. These changes were associated with increased PKCε activity and an aberrant 4-fold increase in diacylglycerol content after insulin stimulation. The increase in diacylglycerol concentration was found to be caused by de novo synthesis of diacylglycerol from medium-chain acyl-CoA after insulin stimulation. These data demonstrate that primary defects in mitochondrial fatty acid oxidation capacity can lead to diacylglycerol accumulation, PKCε activation, and hepatic insulin resistance.
Malicious Advertising and Music Piracy: A New Zealand Case Study

Recent studies have investigated the link between online advertising and rogue websites promoting film piracy, in several different countries around Asia-Pacific. The key findings are that high risk advertising dominates sites which are geared towards Hollywood TV and movies in English, yet mainstream advertising tends to be more prevalent on sites in local languages with local content. In this first systematic analysis of music piracy, the prevalence of high risk and mainstream advertising on music rogue sites was estimated. Advertising was measured from 3,210 web pages identified as infringing by Google, according to the DMCA, and advertisements were downloaded with a New Zealand IP address, to replicate what New Zealand users would have seen. New Zealand was selected because the founder of the Megaupload file hosting website - previously among the Top 100 websites worldwide - has recently been the subject of a police investigation into criminal copyright infringement. The results show that 93% of advertisements were high risk, and only 7% were mainstream. Disturbingly, 97.24% of the high risk ads were for malware - much higher than for movie websites - suggesting that Kiwis are at extreme risk for malware infection if they visit these sites. Further research on the malware samples downloaded needs to be undertaken to determine if rogue music websites are a vector for banking malware.
FRET-Based Detection of M1 Muscarinic Acetylcholine Receptor Activation by Orthosteric and Allosteric Agonists

Background and Objective Muscarinic acetylcholine receptors (mAChRs) are 7-transmembrane, G protein-coupled receptors that regulate a variety of physiological processes and represent potentially important targets for therapeutic intervention. mAChRs can be stimulated by full and partial orthosteric and allosteric agonists, however the relative abilities of such ligands to induce conformational changes in the receptor remain unclear. To gain further insight into the actions of mAChR agonists, we have developed a fluorescently tagged M1 mAChR that reports ligand-induced conformational changes in real-time by changes in Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET). Methods Variants of CFP and YFP were inserted into the third intracellular loop and at the end of the C-terminus of the mouse M1 mAChR, respectively. The optimized FRET receptor construct (M1-cam5) was expressed stably in HEK293 cells. Results The variant CFP/YFP-receptor chimera expressed predominantly at the plasma membrane of HEK293 cells and displayed ligand-binding affinities comparable with those of the wild-type receptor. It also retained an ability to interact with Gαq/11 proteins and to stimulate phosphoinositide turnover, ERK1/2 phosphorylation and undergo agonist-dependent internalization. Addition of the full agonist methacholine caused a reversible decrease in M1 FRET (FEYFP/FECFP) that was prevented by atropine pre-addition and showed concentration-dependent amplitude and kinetics. Partial orthosteric agonists, arecoline and pilocarpine, as well as allosteric agonists, AC-42 and 77-LH-28-1, also caused atropine-sensitive decreases in the FRET signal, which were smaller in amplitude and significantly slower in onset compared to those evoked by methacholine. Conclusion The M1 FRET-based receptor chimera reports that allosteric and orthosteric agonists induce similar conformational changes in the third intracellular loop and/or C-terminus, and should prove to be a valuable molecular reagent for pharmacological and structural investigations of M1 mAChR activation.
A Framework for Providing Quality of Service in Chip Multi-Processors

The trends in enterprise IT toward service-oriented computing, server consolidation, and virtual computing point to a future in which workloads are becoming increasingly diverse in terms of performance, reliability, and availability requirements. It can be expected that more and more applications with diverse requirements will run on a CMP and share platform resources such as the lowest level cache and off-chip bandwidth. In this environment, it is desirable to have microarchitecture and software support that can provide a guarantee of a certain level of performance, which we refer to as performance Quality of Service. In this paper, we investigate a framework that would be needed for a CMP to fully provide QoS. We found that the ability of a CMP to partition platform resources alone is not sufficient for fully providing QoS. We also need an appropriate way to specify a QoS target, and an admission control policy that accepts jobs only when their QoS targets can be satisfied. We also found that providing strict QoS often leads to a significant reduction in throughput due to resource fragmentation. We propose novel throughput optimization techniques that include: (1) exploiting various QoS execution modes, and (2) a microarchitecture technique that steals excess resources from a job while still meeting its QoS target. We evaluated our QoS framework with a full system simulation of a 4-core CMP and a recent version of the Linux Operating System. We found that compared to an unoptimized scheme, the throughput can be improved by up to 47%, making the throughput significantly closer to a non-QoS CMP.
An information theoretic point of view to MIMO channel modelling

The tutorial presents an in-depth introduction to recent results on MIMO channel modelling. A unifying approach, based on the principle of Maximum Entropy, is provided to construct consistent models: the consistency argument is at the heart of scientific inference and gives an explicit answer to the problem posed by the striking number of papers dedicated to MIMO channel models'. Indeed, nearly all the models proposed are different and moreover validated by measurement campaigns! Who should we trust?
Thermodynamic behavior of the Friedmann equation at the apparent horizon of the FRW universe

It is shown that the differential form of Friedmann equation of a FRW universe can be rewritten as the first law of thermodynamics dE=TdS+WdV at apparent horizon, where E={rho}V is the total energy of matter inside the apparent horizon, V is the volume inside the apparent horizon, W=({rho}-P)/2 is the work density, {rho} and P are energy density and pressure of matter in the universe, respectively. From the thermodynamic identity one can derive that the apparent horizon r-tilde{sub A} has associated entropy S=A/4G and temperature T={kappa}/2{pi} in Einstein general relativity, where A is the area of apparent horizon and {kappa} is the surface gravity at apparent horizon of FRW universe. We extend our procedure to the Gauss-Bonnet gravity and more general Lovelock gravity and show that the differential form of Friedmann equations in these gravities can also be written as dE=TdS+WdV at the apparent horizon of FRW universe with entropy S being given by expression previously known via black hole thermodynamics.
Optimum Fusion of Possibly Corrupted Reports for Distributed Detection in Multi-Sensor Networks

The most common approach to mitigate the impact that the presence of malicious nodes has on the accuracy of decision fusion schemes consists in observing the behavior of the nodes over a time interval T and then removing the reports of suspect nodes from the fusion process. By assuming that some a-priori information about the presence of malicious nodes and their behavior is available, we show that the information stemming from the suspect nodes can be exploited to further improve the decision fusion accuracy. Specifically, we derive the optimum fusion rule and analyze the achievable performance for two specific cases. In the first case, the states of the nodes (corrupted or honest) are independent of each other and the fusion center knows only the probability that a node is malicious. In the second case, the exact number of corrupted nodes is fixed and known to the fusion center. We also investigate the optimum corruption strategy for the malicious nodes, showing that always reverting the local decision does not necessarily maximize the loss of performance at the fusion center.
Genome Sequence of Lactobacillus suebicus KCTC 3549

ABSTRACT Lactobacillus suebicus is important in the generation of particular flavors and in other ripening processes associated with apple mash. Here, we present the draft genome sequence of the type strain Lactobacillus suebicus KCTC 3549 (2,656,936 bp, with a G+C content of 39.0%), which consists of 143 large contigs (>100 bp).
Sporadic Server Scheduling in Linux Theory vs. Practice

Real-time aperiodic server algorithms were originally devised to schedule the execution of threads that serve a stream of jobs whose arrival and execution times are not known a priori, in a way that supports schedulability analysis. Well-known examples of such algorithms include the periodic polling server, deferrable server, sporadic server, and constant bandwidth server. The primary goal of an aperiodic-server scheduling algorithm is to enforce a demand bound for each thread that is, an upper bound on the amount of CPU time a thread may compete for in a given time interval. Bounding the demand of a given thread limits the interference that thread can inflict on other threads in the system experience in the competition for CPU time. Isolating the CPU-time demands of threads, known as temporal isolation, is an essential requirement for guaranteed resource reservations and compositional schedulability analysis in open real-time systems. A secondary goal of an aperiodic server is to minimize the worst-case and/or average response time while enforcing the demand bound. The theoretical aperiodic server algorithms meet both goals to varying degrees. An implementation of an aperiodic server can yield performance significantly worse than its theoretical counterpart. Average response time is often higher, and even temporal isolation may not be enforced due to factors not found or considered in the theoretical algorithm. These factors include context-switching overheads, imprecise clocks and timers, preemption delays (e.g., overruns), and limits on storage available
Cycles Embedding of Twisted Cubes

The twisted cube TQn is an alternative to the popular hypercube network and some interesting properties of TQn were investigated recently. The problem of how to embed cycles into a host graph has attracted a great attention in recent years. However, there are few systematic methods proposed to generate the desired cycles in TQn. In this paper, we provide two kinds of systematic methods of embedding cycles into TQn.
Nutritional Support for Chronic Myelagenous Leukemia , A Review of the Scientific Literature

Chronic myelagenous leukemia (CML) is a slowly progressive disease characterized by the overproduction of granulocytes (neutrophils, eosinophils and basophils). A blood smear shows moderate elevations in white blood cell counts that may persist for years and be benign. Platelets are increased in number although their function is impaired, resulting in symptoms of easy bleeding (purpura, swollen gums). Conventional medical treatment is a marrow transplant and ankylating agents, which are usually prescribed only during crisis. Several nutritional supplements have been studied for use in CML. These include vitamin A and all-trans retinoic acid (Retin-A), vitamin D3, vitamin E, vitamin B12, Indirubin (from the Chinese herb from Indigofera tinctoria or Isatis tinctoria), and Curcuma longa (from the spice Turmeric). This article briefly reviews the scientific literature for the therapeutic use of these nutrients for CML.
Cognitive initiation and depression as predictors of future instrumental activities of daily living among older medical rehabilitation patients

This study investigated relationships among depressive symptoms, cognitive initiation, and instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) in 128 older African American medical rehabilitation patients. Participants were administered the Geriatric Depression Scale and measures of cognitive initiation—Initiation/Perseveration subtest of the Dementia Rating Scale and verbal fluency (Controlled Oral Word Association Test letter C and Animal Naming)—at hospital discharge. Cognitive initiation predicted IADL 3 and 6 months after hospital discharge, independently of baseline IADL. While depression was related to current IADL, it did not independently predict future IADL. Results suggest that executive dysfunction, specifically cognitive initiation, is a key predictor of future IADL.
Upregulation and Identification of Antibiotic Activity of a Marine-Derived Streptomyces sp. via Co-Cultures with Human Pathogens

Marine natural product drug discovery has begun to play an important role in the treatment of disease, with several recently approved drugs. In addition, numerous microbial natural products have been discovered from members of the order Actinomycetales, particularly in the genus Streptomyces, due to their metabolic diversity for production of biologically active secondary metabolites. However, many secondary metabolites cannot be produced under laboratory conditions because growth conditions in flask culture differ from conditions in the natural environment. Various experimental conditions (e.g., mixed fermentation) have been attempted to increase yields of previously described metabolites, cause production of previously undetected metabolites, and increase antibiotic activity. Adult ascidians—also known as tunicates—are sessile marine invertebrates, making them vulnerable to predation and therefore are hypothesized to use host-associated bacteria that produce biologically active secondary metabolites for chemical defense. A marine-derived Streptomyces sp. strain PTY087I2 was isolated from a Panamanian tunicate and subsequently co-cultured with human pathogens including Bacillus subtilis, methicillin-sensitive Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, followed by extraction. Co-culture of Streptomyces sp. PTY087I2 with each of these human pathogens resulted in increased production of three antibiotics: granaticin, granatomycin D, and dihydrogranaticin B, as well as several analogues seen via molecular networking. In addition, co-cultures resulted in strongly enhanced biological activity against the Gram positive human pathogens used in these experiments. Expanded utilization of co-culture experiments to allow for competitive interactions may enhance metabolite production and further our understanding of these microbial interactions.
Performance evaluation of hash joins on chip multiprocessors

The join operation is computationally the most expensive operation the relational model supports. It has therefore received significant research attention and various algorithms have been proposed. Joining via hashing was introduced over two decades ago and has been shown to possess interesting properties which allow it to parallelize efficiently in parallel database systems. With the advent of chip multiprocessors, which feature multiple cores per chip, there has been significant research interest in making databases run faster by exploiting the parallelism in common database operations. Surprisingly, proposals to enhance database performance on modern CPUs have focused on minimizing instruction and level-2 cache misses, typically via prefetching. The scalability of existing algorithms on multiple cores has been largely overlooked. To answer this imporant question and get additional insight into the factors limiting scalability, I evaluate the performance of three hash join algorithms on three radically different architectures: an 8-core, 4-way multithreaded Sun UltraSPARC T1, a dual quad-core Intel Xeon system and a commodity HyperThreaded Intel Pentium4.
Signature verification based on fusion of on-line and off-line kernels

The problem of signature verification is considered within the bounds of the kernel-based methodology of pattern recognition, more specifically, SVM principle of machine learning. A kernel in the set of signatures can be defined in different ways and it is impossible to choose the most appropriate kernel a priori. We propose a principle of fusing several on-line and off-line kernels into an entire training and verification technique. Experiments with signature database SVC2004 have shown that the multi-kernel approach essentially decreases the error rate in comparison with verification based on single kernels.
How Meaning Shapes Seeing

Inattentional blindness refers to the failure to see an unexpected object that one may be looking at directly when one's attention is elsewhere. We studied whether a stimulus whose meaning is relevant to the attentional goals of the observer will capture attention and escape inattentional blindness. The results showed that an unexpected stimulus belonging to the attended semantic category but not sharing physical features with the attended stimuli was detected more often than a semantically unrelated stimulus. This effect was larger when the unexpected stimuli were words than when they were pictures. The results imply that the semantic relation between the observer's attentional set and the unexpected stimulus plays a crucial role in inattentional blindness: An unexpected stimulus semantically related to the observer's current interests is likely to be seen, whereas unrelated unexpected stimuli are unseen. Attentional selection may thus be driven by purely semantic features: Meaning may determine whether or not one sees a stimulus.