Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neutral Lipid Metabolism Influences Phospholipid Synthesis and Deacylation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Establishment and maintenance of equilibrium in the fatty acid (FA) composition of phospholipids (PL) requires both regulation of the substrate available for PL synthesis (the acyl-CoA pool) and extensive PL turnover and acyl editing. In the present study, we utilize acyl-CoA synthetase (ACS) deficient cells, unable to recycle FA derived from lipid deacylation, to evaluate the role of several enzymatic activities in FA trafficking and PL homeostasis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The data presented show that phospholipases B are not contributing to constitutive PL deacylation and are therefore unlikely to be involved in PL remodeling. In contrast, the enzymes of neutral lipid (NL) synthesis and mobilization are central mediators of FA trafficking. The phospholipid:DAG acyltransferase (PDAT) Lro1p has a substantial effect on FA release and on PL equilibrium, emerging as an important mediator in PL remodeling. The acyl-CoA dependent biosynthetic activities of NL metabolism are also involved in PL homeostasis through active modulation of the substrate available for PL synthesis. In addition TAG mobilization makes an important contribution, especially in cells from stationary phase, to FA availability. Beyond its well-established role in the formation of a storage pool, NL metabolism could play a crucial role as a mechanism to uncouple the pools of PL and acyl-CoAs from each other and thereby to allow independent regulation of each one.
Interpolated free group factors.

The interpolated free group factors L(F_r), 1 < r <= \infty, are defined and proofs of their properties with respect to compression by projections and taking free products are proved. Hence it follows that all the free group factor are isomorphic to each other or none of them are. These factors were defined and these properties were proved independently by F. Radulescu, and those given in this paper are equivalent, but use different techniques. Specifically, we develop algebraic techniques that allow us to show that R*R = L(F_2), where R is the hyperfinite II_1 factor.
Fusion of LIDAR and video cameras to augment medical training and assessment

The Mobile Medical Lane Trainer (MMLT) is a multi-sensor rapidly deployed After-Action Review (AAR) system for Army medical lane training. Current AAR systems have two main drawbacks: 1) video does not provide a complete view of the medical and tactical situation, and 2) the video is not readily available for effective evaluation. The MMLT program is developing a “smarter” AAR system by using 3D LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging), a camera array, People Tracking software and Medical Training Evaluation and Review (MeTER) software. This system can be brought to the field and deployed in less than an hour to provide hands-off data collection for the exercise. MMLT supplements existing evaluation systems deployed at the Medical Simulation Training Centers (MSTCs) by providing a 3-D perspective of the training event for tactical evaluation with synchronized video technology to capture both tactical and clinical skills and instructor scoring. This capability is used in conjunction with the MeTER system's skill assessment checklists for automated performance review. An immediate synchronized playback capability has been developed, ultimately resulting in a rapid AAR for debriefing. This paper will discuss the technical components of the system, including hardware components, data fusion technique, tracking algorithms, and camera prioritization approaches, and will conclude with operational test results and lessons learned.
Authorship Attribution Based on Feature Set Subspacing Ensembles

Authorship attribution can assist the criminal investigation procedure as well as cybercrime analysis. This task can be viewed as a single-label multi-class text categorization problem. Given that the style of a text can be represented as mere word frequencies selected in a language-independent method, suitable machine learning techniques able to deal with high dimensional feature spaces and sparse data can be directly applied to solve this problem. This paper focuses on classifier ensembles based on feature set subspacing. It is shown that an effective ensemble can be constructed using, exhaustive disjoint subspacing, a simple method producing many poor but diverse base classifiers. The simple model can be enhanced by a variation of the technique of cross-validated committees applied to the feature set. Experiments on two benchmark text corpora demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented method improving previously reported results and compare it to support vector machines, an alternative suitable machine learning approach to authorship attribution.
Tetrandrine Inhibits the Wnt/β-Catenin Signalling Pathway and Alleviates Osteoarthritis: An In Vitro and In Vivo Study

There is currently no effective drug treatment for the early phase of osteoarthritis (OA), one of the most common senile diseases. The goal of this study was to investigate the protective effect of the tetrandrine (Tet) on OA, in vitro and in vivo. In an in vitro experiment, quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) was used to investigate changes in gene expression upon the addition of Tet in chondrocytes processed with IL-1β; changes in protein profiles were assessed by Western blotting. In vivo, to determine whether Tet has the protective effects on articular cartilage, a rabbit anterior cruciate ligament transaction model of OA was established. Expression of matrix metalloproteinase and β-catenin genes increased significantly, while that of tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase-1 decreased significantly in the OA group both in vivo and in chondrocytes. However, the changes of expression were reversed by Tet, and there was less cartilage degradation in vivo compared with the OA group, as assessed by histological and macroscopic observations. Thus, Tet may play a useful role in the treatment of OA through the Wnt/β-catenin signalling pathway and has potential for the treatment of OA.
Temperature Control of Energetic Swarms

In this paper, an M-member continuous-time energetic swarm problem is studied. A new swarm temperature variable is introduced to investigate the internal kinetic energy properties of the swarm. A controller is developed such that the swarm center can follow any desired trajectory with different corresponding swarm temperatures. The proposed control algorithm can be used effectively for multi-agent coverage path planning problem. It is shown that a better coverage can be achieved by increasing the temperature of a swarm. In addition, more insight into the problem of swarm cohesion is provided. Simulation is used to validate the results and to understand the basic properties of energetic swarm such as velocity distribution.
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Our experience from the first two major phases of a software development project suggests that explicit focus on software architecture in these phases was an important key to success. More specifically: Demands for stability, flexibility and proper work organisation in an initial prototyping phase of a project are facilitated by having an explicit architecture, which, however should also allow for certain degrees of freedom for experimentation. Furthermore, in a following evolutionary development phase, architectural redesign is necessary and should be firmly based on experience gained from working within the prototype architecture. Finally, to get it right, the architecture needs to be prototyped, or iterated upon, throughout evolutionary development cycles. In this architectural prototyping process, we address the difficult issue of identifying and evolving functional components in the architecture and point to an architectural strategy: a set of architectures, their context and evolution, which was helpful in this respect.
Ephrins in astrocytes: synaptic erasers on stage

Among glia cells, astrocytes actively regulate the shaping and functions of the “tripartite synapse” [1]. Changes in synapses may influence diverse biological processes including long-term memory or the shift from acute to chronic pain, which can be dysfunctional in neuropsychiatric disorders such as major depressive disorder (MDD) or in neuropathic pain (NP), respectively [2]. Long-term potentiation (LTP) is considered a major cellular component of memory storage and relies on stabilization of synaptic changes dependent on the activation of several signalling pathways such as the Extracellular signal-Regulated Kinase/Mitogen Activated Protein Kinase (ERK/MAPK) pathway [3]. However, regional and cell-type specific localizations of ERK activity after LTP induction had never been characterized. The ERK pathway is also altered in animal models of depression and decreased levels of its downstream effectors ERK1 and ERK2 characterize post-mortem brains of depressive patients [4], indicating the high biomedical relevance of its pharmacological targeting to reverse aberrant behavioral phenotypes. Combining electrophysiology and immunohistochemistry, we showed that ERK signalling was increased in the stratum radiatum, but not in the stratum pyramidale, of the CA1 region of the hippocampus after LTP induction and a short-term administration of the antidepressant desipramine (DMI) to acute brain slices inhibited ERK activation and attenuated LTP. Additionally, ERK activity was peaking exclusively in astrocytes, but not in neurons of neither stratum, and this activation was prevented by DMI administration [2]. Simultaneously, transcription of the activity-dependent immediate early-gene (IEG) Arc/ Arg 3.1 (Activity-regulated cytoskeleton-associated gene/ Activity regulated gene 3.1) was enhanced in neurons of the stratum pyramidale, but its sustained activation was prevented by DMI treatment. As Arc is usually induced by ERK, but ERK was not affected neither by LTP induction nor by DMI in neurons, we investigated whether drug administration might have indirectly influenced neuronal Arc expression and LTP upon modulation of both the astrocytic ERK and the molecular glia/neuron interface in the stratum radiatum. A study by Filosa and colleagues had previously revealed that the ephrinA3/EphA4 receptor system, which acts as an essential bidirectional glia/ neuron communication mechanism, modulates several physiological processes including proper LTP induction and the shaping of neuronal synapses [5]. The EphA —> ephrinA activation is called “reverse signaling”, whereas the ephrinA —> EphA activation is called “forward signaling” (Figure 1). We postulated that its regulation by DMI treatment in the stratum radiatum of the CA1 might have been relevant in our experiments to induce an astrocyte-dependent synaptic remodeling during neuronal activity. Our findings indeed revealed that the administration of DMI to acute brain slices triggered
Epileptic Seizure Prediction: An overview

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder marked by sudden recurrent episodes of sensory disturbance, loss of consciousness, or convulsions, associated with abnormal electrical activity in the brain. The sudden and seemingly unpredictable nature of seizures is one of the most compromising aspects of the disease epilepsy. Most epilepsy patients only spend a marginal part of their time actually having a seizure and show no clinical signs of their disease during the time between seizures, the so-called inter-ictal interval. But the constant fear of the next seizure and the feeling of helplessness associated with it often have a strong impact on the everyday life of a patient (Fisher et al. 2000). A method capable of reliably predicting the occurrence of seizures could significantly improve the quality of life for these patients and open new therapeutic possibilities. Apart from simple warning devices, fully automated closed-loop seizure prevention systems are conceivable. Treatment concepts could move from preventive strategies towards on demand therapy which resets brain dynamics and minimize the risk during epilepsy.
Reduced cortisol metabolism during critical illness.

BACKGROUND Critical illness is often accompanied by hypercortisolemia, which has been attributed to stress-induced activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. However, low corticotropin levels have also been reported in critically ill patients, which may be due to reduced cortisol metabolism. METHODS In a total of 158 patients in the intensive care unit and 64 matched controls, we tested five aspects of cortisol metabolism: daily levels of corticotropin and cortisol; plasma cortisol clearance, metabolism, and production during infusion of deuterium-labeled steroid hormones as tracers; plasma clearance of 100 mg of hydrocortisone; levels of urinary cortisol metabolites; and levels of messenger RNA and protein in liver and adipose tissue, to assess major cortisol-metabolizing enzymes. RESULTS Total and free circulating cortisol levels were consistently higher in the patients than in controls, whereas corticotropin levels were lower (P<0.001 for both comparisons). Cortisol production was 83% higher in the patients (P=0.02). There was a reduction of more than 50% in cortisol clearance during tracer infusion and after the administration of 100 mg of hydrocortisone in the patients (P≤0.03 for both comparisons). All these factors accounted for an increase by a factor of 3.5 in plasma cortisol levels in the patients, as compared with controls (P<0.001). Impaired cortisol clearance also correlated with a lower cortisol response to corticotropin stimulation. Reduced cortisol metabolism was associated with reduced inactivation of cortisol in the liver and kidney, as suggested by urinary steroid ratios, tracer kinetics, and assessment of liver-biopsy samples (P≤0.004 for all comparisons). CONCLUSIONS During critical illness, reduced cortisol breakdown, related to suppressed expression and activity of cortisol-metabolizing enzymes, contributed to hypercortisolemia and hence corticotropin suppression. The diagnostic and therapeutic implications for critically ill patients are unknown. (Funded by the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research and others; ClinicalTrials.gov numbers, NCT00512122 and NCT00115479; and Current Controlled Trials numbers, ISRCTN49433936, ISRCTN49306926, and ISRCTN08083905.).
Space-Efficient Blame Tracking for Gradual Types

Static and dynamic type systems have well-known strengths and weaknesses. Gradual typing provides the benefits of both in a single language by giving the programmer control over which portions of the program are statically typed and which portions are dynamically checked based on the presence or absence of type annotations. A compiler for a gradually typed language infers where the dynamic checks are needed and inserts casts into the intermediate language to perform these checks. Herman, Tomb, and Flanagan noticed that casts in higher-order languages can cause space leaks proportional to the execution time of the program. They developed a solution that merges sequences of casts. On a separate front, Findler and Wadler developed blame tracking for a language similar to the intermediate language of gradual typing. Blame tracking solves the problem of tracing a run-time cast failure back to the source of the error. Findler and Wadler proved that well-typed portions of a program can’t be blamed. Blame tracking requires extra information to be stored in casts and whether this information can be merged to obtain space efficiency is an open question. This paper answers the question in the affirmative by developing a dynamic semantics for gradual types that is both space efficient and tracks blame. This paper also improves the precision of blame tracking by reporting what part of the cast caused the error.
Calling for innovations - infrastructure and sources of growth

This paper analyzes the impact of infrastructure capital on different sources of economic growth. Starting with the contribution of Barro (1990), the literature on infrastructure and growth mainly focuses on the relation between private and public capital investments. In contrast, we demonstrate a link between (telecommunication) infrastructure capital and endogenous technological change in the context of an dynamic panel estimation applying aggregate country- as well as U.S. firm-level data. The main empirical finding is that the increase in telecommunication infrastructure during the last 30 years enhanced R&D investments but did not affect the accumulation of physical or human capital in our sample. Moreover, we provide an extended R&D growth model, which emphasizes a cost-reducing feature of infrastructure capital, to demonstrate a potential link between the level of infrastructure capital and endogenous technological change.
Accumulation at South Pole: Comparison of two 900‐year records

Two 900-year records of annual accumulation at South Pole are compared to evalu- ate the origin and significance of observed variations. Despite difficulties establishing absolute timescales, due to problems identifying annual layer markers, the two records can be correlated with confidence after moderate smoothing. This correlation shows that over the time period considered (1050-1956 A.D.) no climatically significant changes in accumulation occurred. In- stead, fluctuations preserved in the two cores reflect spatial variations in snow accumulation, as- sociated with nonuniform deposition induced by surface relief on the scale of several kilometers.
An effect of trust and attitude in the initial adoption of online shopping: An empirical study

While on-line shopping is considered as a special type of e-service, the adoption rate of this service in Taiwan has been paid attention recently. The initial adoption of on-line shopping is the important driving force to further influence the use and continued use of this service. The model of Trust and technology acceptance model (TAM) in Gefen et al. [1] has been well studied in on-line shopping and showed that understanding both the Internet technology and trust issue is important in determining behavioral intention to use. The model of Trust in Wu and Chen [2] has been well discussed the consumer intention in on-lion tax. An extension of Trust and Attitude with TAM model would be in more comprehensive manner to understand behavioral intention to use on-line shopping. Furthermore, a large sample survey is used to empirically examine this framework.
A Least-Squares Unified View of PCA , LDA , CCA and Spectral Graph Methods

Over the last century Component Analysis (CA) methods such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) and Spectral Clustering (SC) have been extensively used as a feature extraction step for modeling, classification, visualization, and clustering. This paper proposes a unified framework to formulate PCA, LDA, CCA, and SC as a least-squares estimation problem. We show how these methods correspond to a particular instance of a weighted kernel reduced rank regression (WKRRR). The least-squares formulation allows better understanding of normalization factors, and provides an easier generalization of CA techniques. In particular, we derive the matrix expressions for weighted generalizations of PCA, LDA, SC and CCA (including kernel extensions), and show its effectiveness on synthetic and real problems. Finally, we suggest an efficient numerical method to solve WKRRR.
Mitochondrial Dynamics Protein Drp1 Is Overexpressed in Oncocytic Thyroid Tumors and Regulates Cancer Cell Migration

Oncocytic cell tumors are characterized by the accumulation of morphologically abnormal mitochondria in their cells, suggesting a role for abnormal mitochondrial biogenesis in oncocytic cell transformation. Little is known about the reason for the dysmorphology of accumulated mitochondria. The proteins regulating the morphology of mitochondria, the "mitochondria-shaping" proteins, can modulate their size and number; however, nothing is known hitherto about a possible involvement of mitochondrial dynamics in oncocytic cell transformation in tumors. Our aim was to assess the status of the mitochondria morphology and its role in oncocytic cell transformation. We therefore evaluated the expression pattern of the main mitochondrial fusion and fission proteins in a series of thyroid cell tumor samples, as well as in thyroid tumor cell lines, with and without oncocytic cell features. The expression of mitochondrial fusion (Opa1, Mfn1 and Mfn2) and fission (Drp1 and Fis1) proteins were evaluated by immunohistochemistry (IHC) in a series of 88 human thyroid tumors. In vitro studies, for comparative purposes and to deepen the study, were performed using TPC1 - a papillary thyroid carcinoma derived cell line—and XTC.UC1, an oncocytic follicular thyroid carcinoma-derived cell line. Both IHC and in vitro protein analyses showed an overall increase in the levels of "mitochondrial-shaping" proteins in oncocytic thyroid tumors. Furthermore, overexpression of the pro-fission protein Drp1 was found to be associated with malignant oncocytic thyroid tumors. Interestingly, genetic and pharmacological blockage of Drp1 activity was able to influence thyroid cancer cells’ migration/invasion ability, a feature of tumor malignancy. In this study we show that unbalanced mitochondrial dynamics characterize the malignant features of thyroid oncocytic cell tumors, and participate in the acquisition of the migrating phenotype.
The clinical outcomes and predictive factors for in-hospital mortality in non-neutropenic patients with candidemia

AbstractRecent epidemiologic studies have showed that candidemia is an important nosocomial infection in hospitalized patients. The majority of candidemia patients were non-neutropenic rather than neutropenic status. The aim of this study was to determine the clinical outcome of non-neutropenic patients with candidemia and to measure the contributing factors for mortality. A total of 163 non-neutropenic patients with candidemia during January 2010 to December 2013 were retrospectively enrolled. The patients’ risk factors for mortality, clinical outcomes, treatment regimens, and Candida species were analyzed. The overall mortality was 54.6%. Candida albicans was the most frequent Candida species (n = 83; 50.9% of patients). Under multivariate analyses, hemodialysis (OR, 4.554; 95% CI, 1.464–14.164) and the use of amphotericin B deoxycholate (OR, 8.709; 95% CI, 1.587–47.805) were independent factors associated with mortality. In contrast, abdominal surgery (OR, 0.360; 95% CI, 0.158–0.816) was associated with a better outcome. The overall mortality is still high in non-neutropenic patients with candidemia. Hemodialysis and use of amphotericin B deoxycholate were independent factors associated with mortality, whereas prior abdominal surgery was associated with a better outcome.
Accounting Disclosures and Corporate Payout Policy: Special Dividends versus Stock Repurchases

This study examines whether the choice of stock repurchases versus special dividends for one-time cash distributions is related to the level of a firm's accounting disclosures. The results indicate that firms providing more informative accounting disclosures are more likely to announce stock repurchase programs as a means for one-time cash distributions. In contrast, firms that provide less informative accounting disclosures tend to rely on special dividends for one-time cash distributions. These findings are consistent with prior studies that argue that information costs associated with stock repurchases limit their use as a payout method.