Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Softening of Jumbo Squid Dosidicus gigas via Enzyme Injection

We developed a new softening technology applicable to the main body of the jumbo squid Dosidicus gigas; this will aid in squid consumption by elderly individuals and those who have masticatory and dysphagia problems. Protease solutions were injected into jumbo squid and hardness was measured using a texture analyzer. Seven enzymes were tested. Jumbo squid became progressively softer during bromelain and collupulin treatment; the hardness attained 5.6 × 10 3 N/m 2 at bromelain concentrations of 1.00% (w/v) and 6.7 × 10 3 N/m 2 at collupullin concentrations of 1.00% (w/v). The extents of tissue softening after bromelain and collupulin injection to 0.1%, 0.25%, 0.50%, and 1.00% (all w/v) were evaluated; the squid retained its shape after steaming for 10 min at 100°C to inactivate the enzymes. Thus, the results of this research indicate that enzyme injection softens the texture of jumbo squid.
Experimental Investigation On The SeismicDamage Behaviour Of Reinforced ConcreteColumns And Beams

The enormous loss of lives and property during the recent, strong earthquake in Sichuan, China reminds the public again of the extreme importance of seismic performance of engineering structures. As generally accepted as a promising direction, the performance-based seismic design (PBSD) method requires deeper insight into structural damage behaviours during strong earthquakes. The research in this paper was aimed at assessing the seismic performance of reinforced concrete columns and beams with varying design parameters. The main variables of the tested specimens included axial load ratio, shear-span ratio, lateral reinforcement ratio and longitudinal reinforcement ratio. It was found that the progression of damage was generally similar, and the flexural behaviour was dominant in all specimens with only one exception, which was designed according to early non-seismic design code. The influence of design parameters on ductility and damage behaviour are investigated, and it turns out that the axial load ratio and shear-span ratio affect ductility and cracking progress remarkably. The longitudinal reinforcement ratio has only a limited effect on the ductility of columns, but evidently affects the ductility of beams. The lateral reinforcement ratio seems to be a less important factor affecting column cracking behaviour, and it has drift-related effect on the cracking of beams. It is expected that these relationships can be utilized for the purpose of direct damage control in seismic design processes.
Blood pressure management in older people: balancing the risks

Guidelines of arterial hypertension treatment based on individualised expected outcomes are not available for frail older persons. In this paper, we review the evidence, concerning management of arterial blood pressure (BP) in frail older patients. We focused on the best affordable methods for BP measurement; the age-related optimum BP; specific BP goals in agreement with the patients’ general heath, frailty status, orthostatic and postprandial hypotension; balancing the benefits against risks of antihypertensive treatment. Lenient BP goals are generally recommended for older persons with moderate or severe frailty, multimorbidity and limited life expectancy. To this aim, there may be a need for deintensification of antihypertensive treatment.
Diabetes 60-Inferring Bread Units From Food Images Using Fully Convolutional Neural Networks

In this paper we propose a challenging new computer vision task of inferring Bread Units (BUs) from food images. Assessing nutritional information and nutrient volume from a meal is an important task for diabetes patients. At the moment, diabetes patients learn the assessment of BUs on a scale of one to ten, by learning correspondence of BU and meals from textbooks. We introduce a large scale data set of around 9k different RGB-D images of 60 western dishes acquired using a Microsoft Kinect v2 sensor. We recruited 20 diabetes patients to give expert assessments of BU values to each dish based on several images. For this task, we set a challenging baseline using state-of-the-art CNNs and evaluated it against the performance of human annotators. In our work we present a CNN architecture to infer the depth from RGB-only food images to be used in BU regression such that the pipeline can operate on RGB data only and compare its performance to RGB-D input data. We show that our inferred depth maps from RGB images can replace RGB-D input data at high significance for the BU regression task. In its best configuration, our proposed method achieves a RMSE of 1.53 BUs using RGB and inferred depth. Considering the variability among the raters themselves of RMSE = 0.89, we can show that our baseline method with depth prediction can extract reasonable nutritional information from RGB image data only. Authors contributed equally Corresponding address: patrick.christ@tum.de
Pediatric Cytochrome P450 Activity Alterations in Nonalcoholic Steatohepatitis

Variable drug responses depend on individual variation in the activity of drug-metabolizing enzymes, including cytochrome P450 enzymes (CYP). As the most common chronic liver disease in children and adults, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) has been identified as a source of significant interindividual variation in hepatic drug metabolism. Compared with adults, children present age-related differences in pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of fatty liver disease severity on the activity of a variety of CYP enzymes in children and adolescents. Healthy and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease pediatric subjects aged 12–21 years inclusive received an oral cocktail of four probe drugs: caffeine (CYP1A2, 100 mg), omeprazole (CYP2C19, 20 mg), losartan (CYP2C9, 25 mg), and midazolam (CYP3A4, 2 mg). Venous blood and urine were collected before administration and 1, 2, 4, and 6 hours after administration. Concentrations of the parent drugs and CYP-specific metabolites were quantified in plasma and urine using liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry. In plasma, the decreased metabolic area under the curve (AUC) ratio, defined as the metabolite AUC to parent AUC, of omeprazole indicated significant decreases of CYP2C19 (P = 0.002) enzymatic activities in NASH adolescents, while the urine analyses did not show significant differences and were highly variable. A comparison between the present in vivo pediatric studies and a previous ex vivo study in adults indicates distinct differences in the activities of CYP1A2 and CYP2C9. These data demonstrate that pediatric NASH presents an altered pattern of CYP activity and NASH should be considered as a confounder of drug metabolism for certain CYP enzymes. These differences could lead to future investigations that may reveal unexpected variable drug responses that should be considered in pediatric dosage recommendations.
Distractor Probability Changes the Shape of the Attentional Template

Theories of attention commonly refer to the “attentional template” as the collection of features in working memory that represent the target of visual search. Many models of attention assume that the template contains a veridical representation of target features, but recent studies have shown that the target representation is “shifted” away from distractor features in order to optimize their distinctiveness and facilitate visual search. Here, we manipulated the probability of target-similar distractors during a visual search task in 2 groups, and separately measured the contents of the attentional template. We hypothesized that having a high probability of target-similar distractors would increase pressure to shift and/or sharpen the target representation in order to increase the distinctiveness of targets from distractors. We found that the high-similarity group experienced less distractor interference during visual search, but only for highly target-similar distractors. Additionally, while both groups shifted the target representation away from the actual target color, the high-similarity group also had a sharper representation of the target color. We conclude that the contents of the attentional template in working memory can be flexibly adjusted with multiple mechanisms to increase target-to-distractor distinctiveness and optimize attentional selection.
Loss of Competition in the Outside Host Environment Generates Outbreaks of Environmental Opportunist Pathogens

Environmentally transmitted pathogens face ecological interactions (e.g., competition, predation, parasitism) in the outside-host environment and host immune system during infection. Despite the ubiquitousness of environmental opportunist pathogens, traditional epidemiology focuses on obligatory pathogens incapable of environmental growth. Here we ask how competitive interactions in the outside-host environment affect the dynamics of an opportunist pathogen. We present a model coupling the classical SI and Lotka–Volterra competition models. In this model we compare a linear infectivity response and a sigmoidal infectivity response. An important assumption is that pathogen virulence is traded off with competitive ability in the environment. Removing this trade-off easily results in host extinction. The sigmoidal response is associated with catastrophic appearances of disease outbreaks when outside-host species richness, or overall competition pressure, decreases. This indicates that alleviating outside-host competition with antibacterial substances that also target the competitors can have unexpected outcomes by providing benefits for opportunist pathogens. These findings may help in developing alternative ways of controlling environmental opportunist pathogens.
Scientific Culture

AbstractTHIS is altogether an admirable address, characterised by real eloquence and by clearness and decision of view as to the place which science ought to occupy in any system of education. Most of Prof. Cooke's audience were teachers by profession, attending Harvard University mainly to become acquainted with the experimental methods of teaching physical science. We commend the address not only to scientific students and teachers of science, but to all who take an interest in education, and to all students who desire a clear statement as to what, in the not distant future, will be regarded as the only liberal education, an education in which science will be allotted a place of at least equal importance with that of literature. What Mr. Cooke's views are on certain matters which have for long been discussed in this journal, may be learned from the following extracts. On the place which Science ought to occupy in education, he says:—Scientific Culture. By Josiah P. Cooke Jun., Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy in Harvard College (U.S.). (London: H. S. King and Co., 1876.)
Point-of-Care Ultrasound in Internal Medicine: Challenges and Opportunities for Expanding Use

The physical examination taught to medical students has not changed significantly in decades and the methods currently used would be as familiar to a physician training in the 1940s as they are to my students today. A major exception to this continuity is the introduction of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS)—a US examination performed and interpreted in real time at the bedside by the treating physician to answer specific questions related to the patient’s presentation. POCUS is recognized by students as new and exciting and our medical schools are reacting: one survey found that 27% of schools have an integrated US curriculum for preclinical students. Another study indicated that 62% had integrated US training into the clinical teaching years. My own decade-long journey in practicing and teaching POCUS as an internal medicine (IM) physician has shown me that the main challenge to widespread adoption of POCUS in my specialty is not the lack of real clinical benefit or evidence of value, but the obstacles in educating trainees, faculty, and practicing physicians. So, what are the benefits, and are there specific obstacles to more widespread teaching?
On Temporally Sensitive Word Embeddings for News Information Retrieval

Word embedding is one of the hot issues in recent natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR) research because it has a potential to represent text at a semantic level. Current word embedding methods take advantage of term proximity relationships in a large corpus to generate a vector representation of a word in a semantic space. We argue that the semantic relationships among terms should change as time goes by, especially for news IR. With unusual and unprecedented events reported in news articles, for example, the word co-occurrence statistics in the time period covering the events would change non-trivially, affecting the semantic relationships of some words in the embedding space and hence news IR. With a hypothesis that news IR would benefit from changing word embeddings over time, this paper reports our initial investigation along the line. We constructed a news retrieval collection based on mobile search and conducted a retrieval experiment to compare the embeddings constructed Copyright c © 2018 for the individual papers by the papers’ authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors. In: D. Albakour, D. Corney, J. Gonzalo, M. Martinez, B. Poblete, A. Vlachos (eds.): Proceedings of the NewsIR’18 Workshop at ECIR, Grenoble, France, 26-March-2018, published at http://ceur-ws.org from two sets of news articles covering two disjoint time spans. The collection is comprised of 500 most frequent queries and their clicked news articles in July, 2017, provided by Naver Corp. The experimental result shows there is a need for word embeddings to be built in a temporally sensitive way for news IR.
Soluble Epoxide Hydrolase in Hydrocephalus, Cerebral Edema, and Vascular Inflammation After Subarachnoid Hemorrhage

Background and Purpose— Acute communicating hydrocephalus and cerebral edema are common and serious complications of subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), whose causes are poorly understood. Using a mouse model of SAH, we determined whether soluble epoxide hydrolase (sEH) gene deletion protects against SAH-induced hydrocephalus and edema by increasing levels of vasoprotective eicosanoids and suppressing vascular inflammation. Methods— SAH was induced via endovascular puncture in wild-type and sEH knockout mice. Hydrocephalus and tissue edema were assessed by T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging. Endothelial activation was assessed in vivo using T2*-weighted magnetic resonance imaging after intravenous administration of iron oxide particles linked to anti–vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 antibody 24 hours after SAH. Behavioral outcome was assessed at 96 hours after SAH with the open field and accelerated rotarod tests. Results— SAH induced an acute sustained communicating hydrocephalus within 6 hours of endovascular puncture in both wild-type and sEH knockout mice. This was followed by tissue edema, which peaked at 24 hours after SAH and was limited to white matter fiber tracts. sEH knockout mice had reduced edema, less vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 uptake, and improved outcome compared with wild-type mice. Conclusions— Genetic deletion of sEH reduces vascular inflammation and edema and improves outcome after SAH. sEH inhibition may serve as a novel therapy for SAH.
Query Optimization in Arabic Plagiarism Detection: An Empirical Study

This article describes an ongoing research which intends to develop a plagiarism detection system for Arabic documents. We developed different heuristics to generate effective queries for document retrieval from the Web. The performance of those heuristics was empirically evaluated against a sizeable corpus in terms of precision, recall and f- measure. We found that a systematic combination of different heuristics greatly improves the performance of the document retrieval system.
The Effect of Additional Virtual Reality Training on Balance in Children with Cerebral Palsy after Lower Limb Surgery: A Feasibility Study.

OBJECTIVE Impaired balance is disabling for children with cerebral palsy (CPc), especially for CPc who recently underwent lower limb surgery. Positive results of using virtual reality (VR) in balance rehabilitation have been published in several outpatient populations. We investigated the feasibility of applying additional VR training focused on sitting balance in CP inpatients of a rehabilitation center after lower limb surgery. Additionally, we investigated the rate of enjoyment of VR training compared with conventional physiotherapy. MATERIALS AND METHODS Eleven spastic CPc (4/7 males/females) following rehabilitation after lower limb orthopedic surgery were included (5-18 years). The control group received conventional physiotherapy. The intervention group received additional VR training. Balance was measured using the Trunk Control Measurement Scale every 3 weeks of the rehabilitation period. Enjoyment was analyzed using a 10-point Visual Analog Scale. RESULTS Providing additional VR training was feasible in terms of recruitment, treatment adherence, and assessment adherence. Both groups improved sitting balance after therapy. The current games were not perceived as more enjoyable than conventional physiotherapy. CONCLUSION Including additional VR training to conventional physiotherapy is feasible and might be promising to train sitting balance in CPc after lower limb surgery. Future research should take equal patient allocation and training duration between groups into consideration.
A Methodology for Optimal Distributed Storage Planning in Smart Distribution Grids

This paper proposes a methodology for optimal planning of distributed storage systems (DSS) in smart grids with high penetration of renewable sources. The DSS can provide distribution systems with various benefits, including arbitrage gain, reduction in the system losses, system resilience enhancement, reduction in nondispatchable energy curtailment, and peak load shaving. In particular, by alleviating the peak load, the system upgrade time can be deferred to future years, resulting in noticeable financial gains for the system operator. In this paper, the problem of DSS planning for optimizing the discounted economic gain of the system operator is formulated and solved as a mixed-integer convex program. Various economic gains are taken into account and the stochasticity of the loads and renewable generations is accounted for by evaluating the total expected gain. Numerical results for DSS planning on a 69-node, 11-kV smart grid and using real data of smart meters and renewable energy sources are presented and discussed.
Learning-Based Model Predictive Control for Safe Exploration

Learning-based methods have been successful in solving complex control tasks without significant prior knowledge about the system. However, these methods typically do not provide any safety guarantees, which prevents their use in safety-critical, real-world applications. In this paper, we present a learning-based model predictive control scheme that can provide provable high-probability safety guarantees. To this end, we exploit regularity assumptions on the dynamics in terms of a Gaussian process prior to construct provably accurate confidence intervals on predicted trajectories. Unlike previous approaches, we do not assume that model uncertainties are independent. Based on these predictions, we guarantee that trajectories satisfy safety constraints. Moreover, we use a terminal set constraint to recursively guarantee the existence of safe control actions at every iteration. In our experiments, we show that the resulting algorithm can be used to safely and efficiently explore and learn about dynamic systems.
Physics in the 20th Century

Documenting one of the most remarkable flowerings of knowledge in human history, this work describes the experiments and achievements of innovative physicists such as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrodinger, Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman. The illustrations focus mainly on the dramatic images, from the atomic to the cosmic scale, made possible by the instruments of advanced physics. Also included are photographs of experimental equipment (massive particle colliders are beautiful in their own right) and pioneering inventions.
Acute inhibitory effect of alpha‐mangostin on sarcoplasmic reticulum calcium‐ATPase and myocardial relaxation

The benefits of α‐mangostin for various tissues have been reported, but its effect on the heart has not been clarified. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of α‐mangostin on cardiac function. Using a cardiac sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) membrane preparation, α‐mangostin inhibited SR Ca2+‐ATPase activity in a dose‐dependent manner (IC50 of 6.47 ± 0.7 μM). Its suppressive effect was specific to SR Ca2+‐ATPase but not to myofibrillar Ca2+‐ATPase. Using isolated cardiomyocytes, 50 μM of α‐mangostin significantly increased the duration of cell relengthening and increased the duration of Ca2+ transient decay, suggesting altered myocyte relaxation. The relaxation effect of α‐mangostin was also supported in vivo after intravenous infusion. A significant suppression of both peak pressure and rate of ventricular relaxation (–dP/dt) relative to DMSO infusion was observed. The results from the present study demonstrated that α‐mangostin exerts specific inhibitory action on SR Ca2+‐ATPase activity, leading to myocardial relaxation dysfunction.
Non-Random Sibling Cannibalism in the Marine Gastropod Crepidula coquimbensis

Sibling cannibalism is commonly observed in marine species. For instance, intrabrood cannibalism has been documented in marine gastropods with direct development, suggesting a relationship between embryo behavior and the evolution of life history strategies. However, there has been little effort to document the factors driving sibling cannibalism in marine species. The kin selection theory suggests that the level of relatedness plays an important role in cannibalism patterns. We examined Crepidula coquimbensis, a marine gastropod that broods and encloses its brooded offspring in capsules. Encapsulated embryos show sibling cannibalism and high levels of intracapsular multiple paternity. Given these features, cannibalistic behavior may be driven by kin-relatedness. To test this hypothesis, we constructed artificial aggregations of embryos to mimic three levels of relatedness: high, medium and low. For each category of aggregation, the cannibalism rate and benefits (i.e. size at hatching of surviving offspring) were estimated. In addition, at the end of embryo development, we performed parentage analyses to determine if cannibalism was associated with the relatedness between cannibal and victim embryos. Our results show that the intensity of sibling cannibalism increased in aggregations characterized by the lowest level of relatedness. There were important benefits of cannibalism in terms of hatching cannibal size. In addition, cannibalism between embryos was not random: the variation in reproductive success between males increased over the course of the experiment and the effective number of fathers decreased. Altogether, these results suggest that polyandry may play an important role in the evolution of sibling cannibalism in C. coquimbensis and that kin selection may operate during early embryonic stages in this species.