Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Monarch larvae sensitivity to Bacillus thuringiensis- purified proteins and pollen

Laboratory tests were conducted to establish the relative toxicity of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxins and pollen from Bt corn to monarch larvae. Toxins tested included Cry1Ab, Cry1Ac, Cry9C, and Cry1F. Three methods were used: (i) purified toxins incorporated into artificial diet, (ii) pollen collected from Bt corn hybrids applied directly to milkweed leaf discs, and (iii) Bt pollen contaminated with corn tassel material applied directly to milkweed leaf discs. Bioassays of purified Bt toxins indicate that Cry9C and Cry1F proteins are relatively nontoxic to monarch first instars, whereas first instars are sensitive to Cry1Ab and Cry1Ac proteins. Older instars were 12 to 23 times less susceptible to Cry1Ab toxin compared with first instars. Pollen bioassays suggest that pollen contaminants, an artifact of pollen processing, can dramatically influence larval survival and weight gains and produce spurious results. The only transgenic corn pollen that consistently affected monarch larvae was from Cry1Ab event 176 hybrids, currently <2% corn planted and for which re-registration has not been applied. Results from the other types of Bt corn suggest that pollen from the Cry1Ab (events Bt11 and Mon810) and Cry1F, and experimental Cry9C hybrids, will have no acute effects on monarch butterfly larvae in field settings.
A joint recovery algorithm for distributed compressed sensing

Distributed compressed sensing exploits the correlation among multiple signals to reduce the number of measurements required for recovery. In this paper, we propose a recovery algorithm for a type of joint sparsity model, where all signals share a common sparse component and each individual signal contains a sparse innovation component. Our approach iteratively removes the information of each component from the measurements and then performs sparse recovery. We provide analytical analysis to verify the advantage of the proposed algorithm over separate recovery, which is also confirmed by simulation results. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks for Better Image Understanding

Although deep convolutional neural networks have brought basic computer vision tasks to unprecedented accuracy, the best models still struggle to produce higher level image understanding. Indeed, current models for tasks such as visual question answering, often based on recurrent neural networks, have difficulties surpassing baseline methods. We suspect that this is due in part to spatial information in the image not being properly leveraged. We attempt to solve these difficulties by introducing a recurrent unit able to keep and process spatial information throughout the network. On a simple task, we show that our method is significantly more accurate than alternative baselines which discard spatial information. We also demonstrate that higher resolution input performs better than lower resolution input to a surprising degree, even when the input features are less discriminative. Notably, we show that our approach based on higher resolution input is better able to detect details of the images such as the precise number of objects, and the presence of smaller objects, while being less sensitive to biases in the label distribution of the training set.
A New Approach to Protect the OS from Off-line Attacks Using the Smart Card

Since the present computer systems use layered and modular architectures and execute the instructions in a number of different phases, therefore it has become an imperative to establish a trusted chain between various layers. It usually is integrity checking by hashing of executable codes. With guarantee of software integrity, the web servers and other network entities can trust to client systems or workstations. Several methods have been proposed for this purpose, each of them have their own advantages and weakness. Recently a group of big software and hardware companies working in Information Technology field known as Trusted Computing Group (TCG) are engaged in designing and making standards of various aspects of trusted computer systems including applications, PCs, networks, cryptography modules and so on. These standards can make the system trusted, but they need some hardware changes such as BIOS and Trusted Platform Module (TPM). These changes are not applicable for present systems and we have to purchase new hardware. This paper is an attempt at propose a new method that can make the present systems trusted. This method uses are movable trusted storage that is compatible with TCG storage standard.
Normal‐ and High‐Strength Fiber‐Reinforced Concrete under Compression

TO use steel fiber‐reinforced concrete in structural applications, the complete stress‐strain behavior of the material in compression is needed. This paper presents the experimental stress‐strain behavior of fiber‐reinforced concrete with compressive strength ranging from 5 ksi to 12 ksi (35 MPa to 85 MPa). Three fiber volume fractions of 50 lb/cu yd, 75 lb/cu yd, and 100 lb/cu yd (30kg/m3, 45kg/m3, and 60kg/m3) and three aspect ratios of 60, 75, and 100 are investigated. The influence of the fiber‐reinforcing parameters on the peak stress, corresponding strain, the secant modulus of elasticity, the toughness of concrete, and the curve shape are reported. A simple equation is proposed to predict the complete stress‐strain curve. Addition of steel fibers to concrete with or without silica fume effectively increases the toughness of such concrete. A marginal increase in the compressive strength, the strain corresponding to peak stress, and the secant modulus of elasticity is also obtained. The increase of s.
Human dental pulp stem cells transplantation combined with treadmill training in rats after traumatic spinal cord injury

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a disabling condition resulting in deficits of sensory and motor functions, and has no effective treatment. Considering that protocols with stem cell transplantation and treadmill training have shown promising results, the present study evaluated the effectiveness of stem cells from human exfoliated deciduous teeth (SHEDs) transplantation combined with treadmill training in rats with experimental spinal cord injury. Fifty-four Wistar rats were spinalized using NYU impactor. The rats were randomly distributed into 5 groups: Sham (laminectomy with no SCI, n=10); SCI (laminectomy followed by SCI, n=12); SHEDs (SCI treated with SHEDs, n=11); TT (SCI treated with treadmill training, n=11); SHEDs+TT (SCI treated with SHEDs and treadmill training; n=10). Treatment with SHEDs alone or in combination with treadmill training promoted functional recovery, reaching scores of 15 and 14, respectively, in the BBB scale, being different from the SCI group, which reached 11. SHEDs treatment was able to reduce the cystic cavity area and glial scar, increase neurofilament. Treadmill training alone had no functional effectiveness or tissue effects. In a second experiment, the SHEDs transplantation reduced the TNF-α levels in the cord tissue measured 6 h after the injury. Contrary to our hypothesis, treadmill training either alone or in combination, caused no functional improvement. However, SHEDs showed to be neuroprotective, by the reduction of TNF-α levels, the cystic cavity and the glial scar associated with the improvement of motor function after SCI. These results provide evidence that grafted SHEDs might be an effective therapy to spinal cord lesions, with possible anti-inflammatory action.
Analysis of the thylakoid outer surface. Coupling factor is limited to unstacked membrane regions

The structure of the spinach thylakoid outer surface has been examined by deepetching, a technique which exposes the true surfaces of biological membranes by sublimination of frozen dilute buffer. The membrane surface is covered with large (150 A average diameter) and small (90 A average diameter) particles. Approximately 30% of the large particles can be removed under conditions reported to selectively remove carboxydismutase from the membrane surface. The remaining large particles can be removed only under conditions which cause a loss of coupling factor activity. When purified coupling factor is readded to membranes from which all coupling factor activity has been removed, large particles reappear, indicating that they represent coupling factor molecules. Since the number of particles and the amount of ATPase activity in the reconstituted and control membranes were the same, coupling factor molecules may be attached to specific binding sites. Analysis of antibody labeling experiments, enzyme assays, and experiments involving the unstacking and restacking of thylakoid membranes indicate that coupling factor is excluded from regions of membrane stacking (grana) and is present only in unstacked membrane regions. The exclusion of coupling factor from grana, which are known to be centers of intense photosynthetic activity, strongly suggests that the mechanism coupling electron transport to photophosphorylation is indirect. In addition to the large and small particles, in some cases regularly spaced ridges are visible on the outer surface after unstacking. Coupling factor binding sites seem to be excluded from regions where these structures occur.
Walnut: a unified cloud object store

Walnut is an object-store being developed at Yahoo! with the goal of serving as a common low-level storage layer for a variety of cloud data management systems including Hadoop (a MapReduce system), MObStor (a multimedia serving system), and PNUTS (an extended key-value serving system). Thus, a key performance challenge is to meet the latency and throughput requirements of the wide range of workloads commonly observed across these diverse systems. The motivation for Walnut is to leverage a carefully optimized low-level storage system, with support for elasticity and high-availability, across all of Yahoo! 's data clouds. This would enable sharing of hardware resources across hitherto siloed clouds of different types, offering greater potential for intelligent load balancing and efficient elastic operation, and simplify the operational tasks related to data storage. In this paper, we discuss the motivation for unifying different storage clouds, describe the requirements of a common storage layer, and present the Walnut design, which uses a quorum-based replication protocol and one-hop direct client access to the data in most regular operations. A unique contribution of Walnut is its hybrid object strategy, which efficiently supports both small and large objects. We present experiments based on both synthetic and real data traces, showing that Walnut works well over a wide range of workloads, and can indeed serve as a common low-level storage layer across a range of cloud systems.
Low concentrations of formaldehyde induce DNA damage and delay DNA repair after UV irradiation in human skin cells

Abstract: Long‐term occupational exposure to formaldehyde (FA) increases the risk for nasopharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma. As the skin is also in contact with FA by environmental exposure, we tested the genotoxic properties of appropriate low concentrations (<100 µM) of FA on cultured keratinocytes and fibroblasts of human skin. The initial DNA damage was assessed by comet assay. The induction of DNA protein crosslinks was measured by the ability of FA to reduce DNA migration induced by methyl‐methane‐sulfonate. Upon 4 h of exposure to FA, significant (P < 0.05) crosslink formations were observed in fibroblasts (50 µM FA) and in keratinocytes (25 µM FA). Upon 8 h of exposure to FA (25 µM FA), significant crosslink formations were observed in both the cell types. FA is known to inhibit different DNA repair pathways. Therefore, we studied the effect of FA on UV‐induced repair. Human keratinocytes and fibroblasts exposed to 10 µM FA prior to UV irradiation showed disturbed repair kinetics after UVC and UVB, but not after UVA irradiation. Single‐strand breaks (SSBs) derived from nucleotide excision repair disappeared 6 h after solely UVC (3 mJ/cm2) or 3 h solely UVB (30 mJ/cm2) exposure in both the cell types. In the presence of FA, SSBs were still present at these time points containing a reference to a delay in DNA resynthesis/ligation. FA at a concentration not inducing micronuclei (12.5 µM) caused significant increase of UVC‐induced (4 mJ/cm2) chromosomal damage. Proliferation of keratinocytes and fibroblasts was in parallel to observed DNA damages. In conclusion, our data suggest that environmental exposure to FA may contribute to UV‐induced skin carcinogenesis.
Making every contact count for physical activity—for tomorrow's patients: the launch of the interdisciplinary, undergraduate, resources on exercise medicine and health in the UK

In 2014, we reported a game-changing initiative to provide all UK, undergraduate medical schools, with a curricula and free resources on exercise medicine in the prevention and treatment of non-communicable diseases.1 The second phase of this philanthropic project, sees the September 2015 launch of: an interdisciplinary, undergraduate, curricula and resources. This now raises the game for all healthcare professionals. These latest, completely revised resources, now include: pregnancy, osteoarthritis/rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis/sarcopenia, falls prevention and motivational interviewing, in addition to 14 presentations and a textual module, covering chronic diseases, surgery and exercise. These new teaching materials supersede all previous versions. They are valid for 3 years, and will be updated annually, by the international team of contributors and, when the national and international physical activity guidelines are revised. This global, interdisciplinary resource has been evaluated by 29 national and international, multidisciplinary, expert reviewers whose median rating was 8/10: excellent. The University of Nottingham, School of Health Sciences, led the evaluation (P Callaghan. The University of Nottingham, School of Medicine and Health Sciences, UK; personal communication). The resources are available, free, only to undergraduate schools of medicine and health sciences, in the UK and worldwide. All student: doctors, nurses, midwives and all allied health professionals should be able to access the content via their University (contact ann@exercise-works.org for access details). A series of questions on the role of exercise medicine in the prevention and treatment of ill health is undergoing a quality assurance process by the Medical Schools Council Assessment Alliance for inclusion into the national multiple choice question (MCQ) question bank, for finals examination, for the undergraduate medical degree. This means that all UK medical schools, will be able to access finals’ examination questions on exercise medicine and health. To the best of our knowledge, this is a world first! The success …
An Evidential Spam-Filtering Framework

ABSTRACT Spam, also known as unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE), has recently become a serious threat that negatively impacts the usability of legitimate mails. In this article, an evidential spam-filtering framework is proposed. As a useful tool to handle uncertainty, the Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence (D–S theory) is integrated into the proposed approach. Five representative features from an e-mail header are analyzed. With a machine-learning algorithm, e-mail headers with known classifications are used to train the framework. When using the framework for a given e-mail header, its representative features are quantified. Although in classical probability theory, possibilities are forcedly assigned even when information is not adequate, in our approach, for every word in an e-mail subject, basic probability assignments (BPA) are assigned in a more flexible way, thus providing a more reasonable result. Finally, BPAs are combined and transformed into pignistic probabilities for decision-making. Empirical trials on real-world datasets show the efficiency of the proposed framework.
Diastolic heart failure: diagnosis and therapy

Purpose of review This article focuses on the recent findings in the diagnosis and treatment of diastolic heart failure (DHF) or heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. Recent findings DHF has become the most common form of heart failure in the population. Although diastolic dysfunction still plays a central role, it is now understood that DHF is a very complex clinical entity with heterogeneous pathophysiology and significant contribution from extracardiac comorbidities. Alterations in ventricular-arterial coupling play a significant role in the impaired hemodynamic response to exercise seen in these patients. The absence of diastolic dysfunction at rest does not exclude the diagnosis of DHF. There has been little to no progress made in identifying evidence-based, effective, and specific treatments for patients with DHF. This may be because of the pathophysiological heterogeneity, incomplete understanding of DHF, and heterogeneity of patients included in clinical trials with variable inclusion criteria. Summary The understanding of the phenotypic heterogeneity and multifactorial pathophysiology of DHF may lead to novel therapeutic targets in the future. Currently, the key to the treatment of DHF is aggressive management of contributing factors.
Review: Taurine: A “very essential” amino acid

Taurine is an organic osmolyte involved in cell volume regulation, and provides a substrate for the formation of bile salts. It plays a role in the modulation of intracellular free calcium concentration, and although it is one of the few amino acids not incorporated into proteins, taurine is one of the most abundant amino acids in the brain, retina, muscle tissue, and organs throughout the body. Taurine serves a wide variety of functions in the central nervous system, from development to cytoprotection, and taurine deficiency is associated with cardiomyopathy, renal dysfunction, developmental abnormalities, and severe damage to retinal neurons. All ocular tissues contain taurine, and quantitative analysis of ocular tissue extracts of the rat eye revealed that taurine was the most abundant amino acid in the retina, vitreous, lens, cornea, iris, and ciliary body. In the retina, taurine is critical for photoreceptor development and acts as a cytoprotectant against stress-related neuronal damage and other pathological conditions. Despite its many functional properties, however, the cellular and biochemical mechanisms mediating the actions of taurine are not fully known. Nevertheless, considering its broad distribution, its many cytoprotective attributes, and its functional significance in cell development, nutrition, and survival, taurine is undoubtedly one of the most essential substances in the body. Interestingly, taurine satisfies many of the criteria considered essential for inclusion in the inventory of neurotransmitters, but evidence of a taurine-specific receptor has yet to be identified in the vertebrate nervous system. In this report, we present a broad overview of the functional properties of taurine, some of the consequences of taurine deficiency, and the results of studies in animal models suggesting that taurine may play a therapeutic role in the management of epilepsy and diabetes.
Elevated serum CA 125 levels prior to diagnosis of ovarian neoplasia: Relevance for early detection of ovarian cancer

To investigate the sensitivity of the CA 125 immunoradiometric assay for occult ovarian neoplasia, serum CA 125 levels were retrospectively determined “blind” in specimens collected from 105 women who subsequently developed ovarian neoplasia, and from 323 matched controls. The distribution of CA 125 levels was very different between the case and control populations (p = 0.0001) over the entire collection‐to‐diagnosis interval (range 1–143 months). Median CA 125 levels for all cases, and for those collected more than 24, 36 or even 60 months prior to diagnosis, were always 18 U/ml or greater, compared with a median of 10.9 U/ml for controls. Half of the cases collected within the 18 months preceding diagnosis had CA 125 levels of more than 30 U/ml and one‐third had levels greater than 65 U/ml. About one‐fourth of those collected prior to 60 months before diagnosis had levels above 30 U/ml. In contrast, approximately 7% and 0.9% of controls had levels in excess of 30 or 65 U/ml, respectively. Elevations occurred in cases eventually diagnosed with localized or advanced cancer, and with borderline or obviously malignant disease. These results provide an insight into the preclinical biology of ovarian neoplasia that may help in designing methods for early detection of this disease, and demonstrate the usefulness of the JANUS serum bank as a resource in evaluating serum tests.
A Wideband Multilayer Substrate Integrated Waveguide Cavity-Backed Slot Antenna Array

In this paper, a wideband <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2 \times 2$ </tex-math></inline-formula> multilayer substrate integrated waveguide (SIW)-based cavity-backed slot array is proposed. The array element is constructed by stacking five layers of SIW cavity-backed slots and has a wide impedance bandwidth from 18 to 30 GHz. Two different feed networks based on probe coupling and slot coupling are introduced to maintain the wideband characteristic of the proposed element when employed in an array. Two <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2 \times 2$ </tex-math></inline-formula> arrays fed by the proposed feed networks are designed, fabricated, and tested. The measured results show that both the arrays employing probe coupling and slot coupling feed networks have a wide impedance bandwidth over 30%. Within the obtained operation bands, good radiation performance is achieved. Moreover, advantages and disadvantages of the proposed two feed networks are discussed.
Undetected boundary slopes and roots of unity for the character variety of a 3-manifold

Acknowledgments I would like to thank my advisor, Alan Reid, for teaching me what I know about mathematics and for directing me towards the problems in this thesis. I thank him especially for his great generosity in sharing his time, his ideas, and his enthusiasm for the subject. I would also like to thank Stephan Tillmann for his important contributions to Chapter 3. Finally, I thank my friends, my fellow graduate students, and the postdocs and faculty at the University of Texas for making Austin such an inspiring and fertile place for studying topology,. v Undetected boundary slopes and roots of unity for the character variety of a 3-manifold Publication No. This dissertation is concerned with the Culler-Shalen techniques for using the SL 2 (C)-character variety for the fundamental group of a 3-manifold to find embedded essential surfaces in the manifold. It is known that when a boundary slope is strongly detected by the character variety the limiting eigenvalue of the slope is a root of unity. In Chapter 2, we show that every root of unity arises in this manner. Given any root of unity, we construct infinitely many hyperbolic 3-manifolds whose character varieties all detect this root. In Chapter 3, we give infinitely many hyperbolic knots whose exteriors have strict boundary slopes which are not strongly detected by the character variety. Abstract vi List of Figures ix Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1.