Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An agent or agents produced by virus-transformed cells cause unregulated ruffling in untransformed cells

KNRK cells (a normal rat kidney [NRK] cell line transformed by Kirsten murine sarcoma virus) in sparse culture exhibit a highly ruffled morphology, but the cause of this ruffling is unknown. In this study, we have demonstrated that the continuous, excess ruffling on KNRK cells is caused by one or more soluble agents secreted by the KNRK cells themselves. To do this study, an assay for ruffling responses in live cell cultures was defined, and its reproducibility was demonstrated. This assay permitted observation of the kinetics of ruffling responses (percentage of cells ruffled as a function of time after stimulation). This method was used to compare the kinetics of ruffling induced by insulin, epidermal growth factor, fibroblast growth factor, glucose, and KNRK cell conditioned medium (CM). Ruffling was elicited on NRK cells by each of the polypeptide mitogens and nutrients, but, in each case, this ruffling subsided spontaneously within an hour. CM from KNRK cells also caused ruffling movements on untransformed NRK cells, but this ruffling continued for at least 20 h. This response was largely blocked by premixing the KNRK cell CM with rabbit IgG against rat transforming growth factor, type alpha, (TGF-alpha). KNRK cells made quiescent (ruffle free) by a pH shift (from 7.4 to 8.4) responded to insulin, glucose, and KNRK cell CM with kinetics similar to those observed for each of these factors in NRK cells. The unusual feature for the ruffle-inducing agent(s) produced by KNRK cells was that this activity was not subject, in either NRK or KNRK cells, to the cellular off-regulation that limits the responses to insulin or glucose. Thus, the continuous ruffling of KNRK cells is caused by their own unregulated ruffle-inducing agent or agents, which appear to include TGF-alpha. This work also demonstrates that kinetic analysis of cellular responses to exogenous factors can provide new insights into the regulatory mechanisms involved in the normal limitation of these responses.
Circus movement in rabbit atrial muscle as a mechanism of tachycardia. III. The "leading circle" concept: a new model of circus movement in cardiac tissue without the involvement of an anatomical obstacle.

SUMMARY In small pieces of rabbit atrial myocardium, sustained periods of circus movement tachycardia were produced by the induction of a single properly timed premature impulse. By use of multiple intracellular and extracellular electrodes the spread of activation during the tachycardia could be analyzed accurately. Because in the present experiments there was no gross anatomical obstacle for the impulse to circulate around, we paid special attention to phenomena occurring in the center of the circus movement. We found that in the absence of an inexcitable central obstacle the center of a circus movement was invaded by multiple centripetal wavelets which converged in the very center of the circuit. On the basis of these observations we developed a new model of circulating excitation in cardiac tissue. The properties of this model (referred to as the "leading circle concept") were compared with the behavior of circus movement around the anatomical obstacle. It turned out that both types of circus movement tachycardia responded differently to changes in basic electrophysiological properties such as conduction velocity and refractory period. For example, addition of carbamylcholine to the tissue bath caused a marked acceleration of the leading circle tachycardia, whereas circus movement in a ring of atrial tissue was hardly affected. On the other hand, depression of conduction velocity by exposure to moderate concentrations of tetrodotoxin had a more pronounced effect on circus movement in the ring preparations than on tachycardias based on a leading circle mechanism. Finally we suggest the use of the strength-interval curve —after some modification —to describe and predict the behavior of a leading circle tachycardia. IN OUR SERIES of papers on circus movement in rabbit atrial muscle 1 ' 2 we were able to show that in a small piece of atrial myocardium the induction of a properly timed premature beat can force the impulse to conduct in a circuitous route and thus set the stage for a period of tachycardia. We gathered evidence that the naturally existing nonuniform recovery of excitability in the atrium was of major importance for the occurrence of unidirectional block of the premature impulse, which, of course, is a prerequisite for the onset of circus movement. Furthermore, by use of a technique for synchronous multiple microelectrode recordings we obtained detailed information about the cellular responses during the initiation of the circus movement. 2 However, thus far no conclusive model of circus movement in the absence of an anatomical obstacle could be derived. This was due mainly to a lack of information about what happens in the center of a circulating impulse. In most studies on circus movement and reentry, the model introduced by Mines 3 in 1913 has been used. This model is based on observations in ring-shaped strips of cardiac tissue and implicitly supposes the presence of some kind of gross anatomical obstacle. However, in
Molecular Dynamics Simulation on Terahertz Spectra of Methamphetamine Hydrochloride

Methamphetamine hydrochloride crystal (trade name Methedrine) that is one of the illegal drugs used as a stimulant to the nervous system has been considered to be detected by T-ray via the terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS). In this research, we simulated the THz spectra of Methedrine by molecular dynamics methods for the first time. The terahertz spectra at temperatures 78.4K, 200K, 294K and 400K in the frequency range of 10-100cm-1 were investigated, which exhibited the variation of spectra position and intensity with increasing temperature. Firstly, we used DL_POLY simulation package to obtain the instantaneous values of the dipole moment. Subsequently, the intensities of THz vibrational modes were obtained by the Fourier transform of the autocorrelation function of the dipole moment. The results showed our theoretical calculation by molecular dynamics simulations got a good consistency with available experimental spectroscopy. These are useful to determine the best conditions of temperature at which the terahertz time-domain spectroscopy of Methedrine results a highly informative spectrum.
An adaptive frame interpolation algorithm using statistic analysis of motions and residual energy

In this paper, a new motion-compensated frame interpolation (MCFI) algorithm using adaptive criterions to correct the motion vector field is proposed. First, an effective pre-processing scheme is done to the transmitted motion vectors. Then, unlike the conventional MCFI algorithms using fixed criterion to analyse the reliability of motion vectors, we proposed to select the parameters and thresholds by analysing the statistical characterization of motion vectors and residual energy, thus thresholds can be changed adaptively during the decoding process. Meanwhile, our new criterions consider both reliability of motion vectors and the smoothness of the region, which avoid the unnecessary motion estimation and reduce the complexity. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has 1.4~5.5 dB increase comparing with vector median filter algorithm in average PSNR, and greatly improves the subjective visual quality.
p190B RhoGAP regulates endothelial-cell-associated proteolysis through MT1-MMP and MMP2

The two isoforms of p190 RhoGAP (p190A and p190B) are important regulators of RhoGTPase activity in mammalian cells. Both proteins are ubiquitously expressed, are involved in the same signalling pathways and interact with the same identified binding partners. In search of isoform functional specificity, we knocked down the expression of each p190 protein using siRNA and examined the resulting phenotypic changes in human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs). We provide evidence that p190B plays a crucial role in the regulation of MT1-MMP expression and cell-surface presentation, as well as subsequent MMP2 activation. p190B is involved in both local extracellular matrix degradation at podosomes and endothelial cell assembly into tube-like structures in Matrigel. In addition, whereas p190B knockdown does not affect podosome formation, p190A knockdown increases the number of cells showing podosome structures in HUVECs. We conclude that the two p190 RhoGAP isoforms play distinct roles in endothelial cells. In addition, our data reveal an unsuspected role for p190B in the expression of the two collaborative proteases MT1-MMP and MMP2, thereby affecting matrix remodelling and angiogenesis.
A Finite Element Model for 2-Dimensional Slice of Cast Strand

A two-dimensional thermo-elasto-plastic finite element model for the analysis of thermo-mechanical behavior of strand in continuous casting process has been developed. The model incorporates the effect of microsegregation of solute elements on hot tears using a thermo-mechanical model of mushy zone and δ and γ phases. A finite element technique for the liquid region of the slice of strand, which can take the ferrostatic pressure due to gravity force into account, was proposed. The model successfully analyzed the thermo-mechanical behavior of the solidifying shell of slab in the mold during the solidification. The calculated results, such as the deformed geometries, the temperature history, the stress distribution and the formation of air gap between solidifying shell and mold in the continuous casting process of slab, were obtained. These were compared with the reported observations.
Is more information better? The effect of traders' irrational behavior on an artificial stock market

This paper presents a computer simulated artificial stock market to examine market rationality issues. We construct economic agents with different degrees of irrationality to participate in the stock market. The agents replicate the irrational behaviors described in the psychology and finance literatures and determine the outcome of the market. The main focus of this study is to examine the two contradicting (efficient market versus noise trading) finance hypotheses in the presence of rational and irrational traders.
TreadMarks: Distributed Shared Memory on Standard Workstations and Operating Systems

TreadMarks is a distributed shared memory (DSM) system for standard Unix systems such as SunOS and Ultrix. This paper presents a performance evaluation of TreadMarks running on Ultrix using DECstation-5000/240's that are connected by a 100-Mbps switch-based ATM LAN and a 10-Mbps Ethernet. Our objective is to determine the efficiency of a user-level DSM implementation on commercially available workstations and operating systems. We achieved good speedups on the 8-processor ATM network for Jacobi (7.4), TSP (7.2), Quicksort (6.3), and ILINK (5.7). For a slightly modified version of Water from the SPLASH benchmark suite, we achieved only moderate speedups (4.0) due to the high communication and synchronization rate. Speedups decline on the 10-Mbps Ethernet (5.5 for Jacobi, 6.5 for TSP, 4.2 for Quicksort, 5.1 for ILINK, and 2.1 for Water), reflecting the bandwidth limitations of the Ethernet. These results support the contention that, with suitable networking technology, DSM is a viable technique for parallel computation on clusters of workstations. To achieve these speedups, TreadMarks goes to great lengths to reduce the amount of communication performed to maintain memory consistency. It uses a lazy implementation of release consistency, and it allows multiple concurrent writers to modify a page, reducing the impact of false sharing. Great care was taken to minimize communication overhead. In particular, on the ATM network, we used a standard low-level protocol, AAL3/4, bypassing the TCP/IP protocol stack. Unix communication overhead, however, remains the main obstacle in the way of better performance for programs like Water. Compared to the Unix communication overhead, memory management cost (both kernel and user level) is small and wire time is negligible. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants CCR-9116343, CCR-9211004, CDA-9222911, and CDA-9310073, by the Texas Advanced Technology Program under Grant 003604014, and by a NASA Graduate Fellowship.
Which Spatial Partition Trees are Adaptive to Intrinsic Dimension?

Recent theory work has found that a special type of spatial partition tree -- called a random projection tree -- is adaptive to the intrinsic dimension of the data from which it is built. Here we examine this same question, with a combination of theory and experiments, for a broader class of trees that includes k-d trees, dyadic trees, and PCA trees. Our motivation is to get a feel for (i) the kind of intrinsic low dimensional structure that can be empirically verified, (ii) the extent to which a spatial partition can exploit such structure, and (iii) the implications for standard statistical tasks such as regression, vector quantization, and nearest neighbor search.
Chapter 3 : Working Notes on Exploring Parsing Resources from Bilingual Texts

We conducted a preliminary survey of the prospects of using bilingual corpus to generate a grammar for monolingual parsing. The purpose of the survey was primarily educational. We wanted to learn about the current state of the art in parsing as applied to large-scale corpora. We examined the Czech Readers Digest corpus, which consists of around 2 million words of aligned Czech and English sentences and has been preprocessed in Prague. Since we had parsers available for both languages, we parsed both sides of the corpus and surveyed the parse structures. Although we did not have time over the summer for a large-scale project to automatically generate one grammar from the other, we felt that there were enough systematic structural correspondences to warrant further work in this direction. The purpose of this report is to describe some details about this very valuable bilingual corpus and to comment on the tools we used for our survey.
Parsing entire discourses as very long strings: Capturing topic continuity in grounded language learning

Grounded language learning, the task of mapping from natural language to a representation of meaning, has attracted more and more interest in recent years. In most work on this topic, however, utterances in a conversation are treated independently and discourse structure information is largely ignored. In the context of language acquisition, this independence assumption discards cues that are important to the learner, e.g., the fact that consecutive utterances are likely to share the same referent (Frank et al., 2013). The current paper describes an approach to the problem of simultaneously modeling grounded language at the sentence and discourse levels. We combine ideas from parsing and grammar induction to produce a parser that can handle long input strings with thousands of tokens, creating parse trees that represent full discourses. By casting grounded language learning as a grammatical inference task, we use our parser to extend the work of Johnson et al. (2012), investigating the importance of discourse continuity in children’s language acquisition and its interaction with social cues. Our model boosts performance in a language acquisition task and yields good discourse segmentations compared with human annotators.
Strategic Co-Location in a Hybrid Process Involving Desalination and Pressure Retarded Osmosis (PRO)

This paper focuses on a Hybrid Process that uses feed salinity dilution and osmotic power recovery from Pressure Retarded Osmosis (PRO) to achieve higher overall water recovery. This reduces the energy consumption and capital costs of conventional seawater desalination and water reuse processes. The Hybrid Process increases the amount of water recovered from the current 66.7% for conventional seawater desalination and water reuse processes to a potential 80% through the use of reclaimed water brine as an impaired water source. A reduction of up to 23% in energy consumption is projected via the Hybrid Process. The attractiveness is amplified by potential capital cost savings ranging from 8.7%–20% compared to conventional designs of seawater desalination plants. A decision matrix in the form of a customizable scorecard is introduced for evaluating a Hybrid Process based on the importance of land space, capital costs, energy consumption and membrane fouling. This study provides a new perspective, looking at processes not as individual systems but as a whole utilizing strategic co-location to unlock the synergies available in the water-energy nexus for more sustainable desalination.
Computation in a distributed information market

According to economic theory supported by empirical and laboratory evidence, the equilibrium price of a financial security reflects all of the information regarding the security's value. We investigate the computational process on the path toward equilibrium, where information distributed among traders is revealed step-by-step over time and incorporated into the market price. We develop a simplified model of an information market, along with trading strategies, in order to formalize the computational properties of the process. We show that securities whose payoffs cannot be expressed as weighted threshold functions of distributed input bits are not guaranteed to converge to the proper equilibrium predicted by economic theory. On the other hand, securities whose payoffs are threshold functions are guaranteed to converge, for all prior probability distributions. Moreover, these threshold securities converge in at most $n$ rounds, where $n$ is the number of bits of distributed information. We also prove a lower bound, showing a type of threshold security that requires at least $n/2$ rounds to converge in the worst case.
Integration of a planar inverted F antenna on a cavity-down ceramic ball grid array package

This paper presents the integration of an antenna in a chip package for the single-chip solutions of wireless transceivers in CMOS. The antenna that takes the basic form of a planar inverted F is integrated on a thin 15 mm /spl times/15 mm cavity-down ceramic ball grid array package. The planar patch size is 10.8 mm /spl times/ 9.9 mm. The prototype antenna has achieved an impedance bandwidth of 4.12% and a gain of -9 dBi at 2.43 GHz.
A New Model and Method for Understanding Wolbachia-Induced Cytoplasmic Incompatibility

Wolbachia are intracellular bacteria transmitted almost exclusively vertically through eggs. In response to this mode of transmission, Wolbachia strategically manipulate their insect hosts' reproduction. In the most common manipulation type, cytoplasmic incompatibility, infected males can only mate with infected females, but infected females can mate with all males. The mechanism of cytoplasmic incompatibility is unknown; theoretical and empirical findings need to converge to broaden our understanding of this phenomenon. For this purpose, two prominent models have been proposed: the mistiming-model and the lock-key-model. The former states that Wolbachia manipulate sperm of infected males to induce a fatal delay of the male pronucleus during the first embryonic division, but that the bacteria can compensate the delay by slowing down mitosis in fertilized eggs. The latter states that Wolbachia deposit damaging “locks” on sperm DNA of infected males, but can also provide matching “keys” in infected eggs to undo the damage. The lock-key-model, however, needs to assume a large number of locks and keys to explain all existing incompatibility patterns. The mistiming-model requires fewer assumptions but has been contradicted by empirical results. We therefore expand the mistiming-model by one quantitative dimension to create the new, so-called goalkeeper-model. Using a method based on formal logic, we show that both lock-key- and goalkeeper-model are consistent with existing data. Compared to the lock-key-model, however, the goalkeeper-model assumes only two factors and provides an idea of the evolutionary emergence of cytoplasmic incompatibility. Available cytological evidence suggests that the hypothesized second factor of the goalkeeper-model may indeed exist. Finally, we suggest empirical tests that would allow to distinguish between the models. Generalizing our results might prove interesting for the study of the mechanism and evolution of other host-parasite interactions.
Acute retinal necrosis: a national population-based study to assess the incidence, methods of diagnosis, treatment strategies and outcomes in the UK

Aim: To determine the incidence, methods of diagnosis, treatment strategies and outcomes for acute retinal necrosis (ARN) in the UK. Methods: A 12-month active case ascertainment study was carried out between March 2001 and March 2002 to record cases of ARN presenting to ophthalmologists via the British Ophthalmological Surveillance Unit (BOSU) reporting system. Questionnaires were sent to the reporting consultants, requesting data on patient characteristics, presentation, clinical findings, investigations and treatment. Diagnosis was made using the American Uveitis Society diagnostic criteria. Further questionnaires were sent at 2 weeks and 6 months to assess outcome and therapies. Results: 74 cases of ARN were reported by 58 consultants between March 2001 and March 2002. Questionnaires were returned for 49 cases (66.2%), of which 18 (36.7%) were excluded. Of the 31 cases included, 22 (71.0%) were male and 9 (29.0%) were female. The age range was 13 to 85 years (mean 54.3 years). 28 cases (90.3%) were unilateral, with 3 patients (9.7%) presenting with bilateral ARN. An aqueous or vitreous biopsy was performed in only 18 patients, with one patient having both. Herpes viral DNA analysis was performed on all 19 biopsies, with identification of the viral DNA in 16; results from 3 biopsies were not documented. Varicella zoster virus (VZV) was the commonest cause identified in 10 patients (56%). Of the 31 subjects, 27 (87.1%) were treated for ARN with systemic antiviral treatment: with intravenous antiviral in 23 cases (85.2%) and oral antiviral in 4 cases (14.8%). 21 of these patients went on to receive oral antiviral maintenance therapy. In addition to antiviral treatment, systemic steroids were given to 16 subjects (51.6%). Surgical intervention for retinal detachment was performed on 5 patients. Conclusions: During the 12-month study period, 31 cases of ARN met the diagnostic criteria set by the American Uveitis Society. The incidence in the UK based on this study is approximately 1 case per 1.6 to 2.0 million population per year. We have ascertained that the management of ARN throughout the UK is variable, suggesting that national guidelines would be of benefit.
Corrosion behaviour of Ti DLC deposition on prenitrided 316L stainless steel and Ti–6Al–4V alloy

316L and Ti–6Al–4V are widely used as biomaterials and materials of various mechanical components. In biomedical applications, they are used to manufacture coronary and pulmonary stents, hip prosthesis, screws and external fixations. However, Cr, Al and V are released from the alloys to the body environment and these ions mix into the blood stream. Release of even small amounts of these ions may cause local irritation of the tissues surrounding the implant. This situation may be prevented by applying suitable surface treatments to the biomaterials. The overall objective of the present paper is to examine the corrosion properties of duplex treated (nitrided and with a diamond-like carbon coating) 316L stainless steel and Ti–6Al–4V alloy. Diamond-like carbon films were deposited on nitrided samples using closed field unbalanced magnetron sputtering system. The corrosion behaviour of duplex treated samples was tested using the potentiodynamic method in ringer's solution at 37°C. The corrosion resistance of duplex treated samples was significantly improved in comparison with the uncoated and single treated samples. In addition, the corroded surfaces were investigated by SEM where small pits were observed on all samples.