Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
VISUALIZATION OF THE TOPOLOGY OF THE LARGE-SCALE STRUCTURE IN THE PLANAR TURBULENT JET.

Visualization of the large-scale coherent structure in fully turbulent flows is notoriously difficult owing to the presence of fine-scale fluctuations and inability to inject markers at the appropriate phase speed. In this study, the proper orthogonal decomposition and wavelet analysis are used in combination to reveal instantaneous streamlines associated with the large-scale structure in the turbulent planar jet. Visualization of the large-scale vortical structures in any fully turbulent flow is a challenging problem. The presence of small-scale incoherent fluctuations characteristic of turbulent flows makes it difficult to visually extract any information regarding the flow topology of the underlying largescale organized motions. In addition, these structures convect downstream and the introduction of a flow marker like smoke or dye at stationary point(s) does not necessarily reveal any flow pattern because of a mismatch in phase speeds. Thus, the development of sophisticated experimental data extraction combined with proper data acquisition is necessary, if the dynamics and topology of the large-scale structures in the turbulent flow are to be visualized. In this paper, the fully turbulent planar jet is chosen as a candidate flow for visualization of the topology of the underlying large-scale structures. One of the first indications of large-scale structure in the planar turbulent jet was reported by Goldschmidt and Bradshaw [1] and later by Everitt and Robins [2] and Cervantes and Goldschmidt [3] who observed negative time-averaged correlation between streamwise velocity fluctuations on opposite sides of the jet centerline. Oler and Goldschmidt [4] suggested that such correlation measurements are consistent with the presence of large-scale coherent structures in the similarity region of the planar jet. Detailed iso-correlation contour maps based on both streamwise and lateral velocity fluctuations as obtained in different jet facilities by Mumford [5], Antonia et al [6] and Thomas and Brehob [7] exhibit a remarkable likeness and appear consistent with the existence of a large-scale structural array in the planar jet similarity region. The study by Antonia et al [6] was performed in a heated jet and the existence of laterally coherent temperature fronts was used as the basis for a conditional sampling
X-linked retinoschisis: an update

X-linked retinoschisis is the leading cause of macular degeneration in males and leads to splitting within the inner retinal layers leading to visual deterioration. Many missense and protein truncating mutations have now been identified in the causative retinoschisis gene (RS1) which encodes a 224 amino acid secreting retinal protein, retinoschisin. Retinoschisin octamerises is implicated in cell–cell interactions and cell adhesion perhaps by interacting with β2 laminin. Mutations cause loss of retinoschisin function by one of the three mechanisms: by interfering with protein secretion, by preventing its octamerisation or by reducing function in the secreted octamerised protein. The development of retinoschisis mouse models have provided a model system that closely resembles the human disease. Recent reports of RS1 gene transfer to these models and the sustained restoration of some retinal function and morphology suggest gene replacement may be a possible future therapy for patients.
The effect of graphite sources on preparation of Photoluminescent graphene nano-sheets for biomedical imaging

Objective(s): Graphene as two-dimensional (2D) materials have attracted wide attention in different fields such as biomedical imaging. Ultra-small graphene nano-sheets (UGNSs) have been designated as low dimensional graphene sheets with lateral dimensions less than few nanometres (≤ 500 nm) in one, two or few layers. Several studies have proven that the process of acidic exfoliation and oxidation is one of the most effective methods to synthesize low dimensional graphene sheets. The band gap of graphene can be changed through changing the reaction temperature resulting in different photoluminescent colors. The aim of our study is synthesis of multi-color photoluminescent UGNSs for biomedical imaging.Materials and Methods: Two different UGNSs were synthesized from two different graphite sources via acidic treatment with a mixture of sulfuric and nitric acids. The prepared UGNSs were characterized by UV-Vis, photoluminescent, Raman spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The photoluminescence colors of the prepared UGNSs were detected under excitation wavelength of 470 nm using optical filters.Results: The results showed that the graphite primary source is a determinant factor in the synthesis of different UGNSs. While altering reaction temperature didn't significantly change the emission wavelengths; however it affected their photoluminescent emission intensity.Conclusion: Overall, nontoxic UGNSs synthesized by simple acidic treatment of graphite with different photoluminescent colors (green, yellow and red) can be a promising fluorescent probe for bioimaging.
Mice Long-Term High-Fat Diet Feeding Recapitulates Human Cardiovascular Alterations: An Animal Model to Study the Early Phases of Diabetic Cardiomyopathy

Background/Aim Hypercaloric diet ingestion and sedentary lifestyle result in obesity. Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of clinical features secondary to obesity, considered as a pre-diabetic condition and recognized as an independent risk factor for cardiovascular diseases. To better understand the relationship between obesity, metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease as well as for the development of novel therapeutic strategies, animal models that reproduce the etiology, course and outcomes of these pathologies are required. The aim of this work was to characterize the long-term effects of high-fat diet-induced obesity on the mice cardiovascular system, in order to make available a new animal model for diabetic cardiomyopathy. Methods/Results Male C57BL/6 mice were fed with a standardized high-fat diet (obese) or regular diet (normal) for 16 months. Metabolic syndrome was evaluated testing plasma glucose, triglycerides, cholesterol, insulin, and glucose tolerance. Arterial pressure was measured using a sphygmomanometer (non invasive method) and by hemodynamic parameters (invasive method). Cardiac anatomy was described based on echocardiography and histological studies. Cardiac function was assessed by cardiac catheterization under a stress test. Cardiac remodelling and metabolic biomarkers were assessed by RT-qPCR and immunoblotting. As of month eight, the obese mice were overweight, hyperglycaemic, insulin resistant, hyperinsulinemic and hypercholesterolemic. At month 16, they also presented normal arterial pressure but altered vascular reactivity (vasoconstriction), and cardiac contractility reserve reduction, heart mass increase, cardiomyocyte hypertrophy, cardiac fibrosis, and heart metabolic compensations. By contrast, the normal mice remained healthy throughout the study. Conclusions Mice fed with a high-fat diet for prolonged time recapitulates the etiology, course and outcomes of the early phases of human diabetic cardiomyopathy.
R3D-BLAST: a search tool for similar RNA 3D substructures

R3D-BLAST is a BLAST-like search tool that allows the user to quickly and accurately search against the PDB for RNA structures sharing similar substructures with a specified query RNA structure. The basic idea behind R3D-BLAST is that all the RNA 3D structures deposited in the PDB are first encoded as 1D structural sequences using a structural alphabet of 23 distinct nucleotide conformations, and BLAST is then applied to these 1D structural sequences to search for those RNA substructures whose 1D structural sequences are similar to that of the query RNA substructure. R3D-BLAST takes as input an RNA 3D structure in the PDB format and outputs all substructures of the hits similar to that of the query with a graphical display to show their structural superposition. In addition, each RNA substructure hit found by R3D-BLAST has an associated E-value to measure its statistical significance. R3D-BLAST is now available online at http://genome.cs. nthu.edu. tw/R3D-BLAST/ for public access.
Cortical Plasticity during Motor Learning and Recovery after Ischemic Stroke

The motor system has the ability to adapt to environmental constraints and injury to itself. This adaptation is often referred to as a form of plasticity allowing for livelong acquisition of new movements and for recovery after stroke. We are not sure whether learning and recovery work via same or similar neural mechanisms. But, all these processes require widespread changes within the matrix of the brain. Here, basic mechanisms of these adaptations on the level of cortical circuitry and networks are reviewed. We focus on the motor cortices because their role in learning and recovery has been investigated more thoroughly than other brain regions.
Bridging Knowledge Boundaries in Cross-Functional Groups: The Role of a Transactive Memory System

One of the key challenges that organizations face when trying to integrate knowledge across different functions is the need to overcome knowledge boundaries between team members. Such boundaries are associated with the different knowledge backgrounds of people from various disciplines and the various contexts and circumstances in which different organizational departments operate. In this research we investigate the role of a Transactive Memory (TM) theory which deals with knowledge coordination in groups - in bridging syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge boundaries in cross-functional groups. The TM theory has been applied recently by Information Systems (IS) researchers to investigate various aspects related to the development and use of IS in different organizational contexts. Our findings, based on a survey conducted in a large Dutch governmental organization, extend the TM theory by showing that a Transactive Memory System negatively influences syntactic, semantic and pragmatic boundaries. Furthermore, our results show that a pragmatic boundary has a positive influence on the existence of the syntactic and semantic boundaries. The paper discusses implications of our findings for the design, maintenance and use of IT-based systems in organizations.
An estimation technique of style expressiveness for emotional speech using model adaptation based on multiple-regression HSMM

This paper describes a technique of estimating style expressiveness for an arbitrary speaker’s emotional speech. In the proposed technique, the style expressiveness, representing how much the emotions and/or speaking styles affect the acoustic features, is estimated based on multiple-regression hidden semi-Markov model (MRHSMM). In the model training, we ﬁrst train average voice model using multiple speakers’ neutral style speech. Then, the speaker-and style-adapted HSMMs are obtained based on linear transformation from the average voice model with a small amount of the target speaker’s data. Finally, MRHSMM of the target speaker is obtained using the adapted models. For given input emotional speech, the style expressiveness is estimated based on maximum likelihood criterion. From the experimental results, we show that the estimated value gives good correspondence to the perceptual rating.
Instantons of M(atrix) theory in PP-wave background

M(atrix) theory in PP-wave background possesses a discrete set of classical vacua, all of which preserves 16 supersymmetry and interpretable as collection of giant gravitons. We find euclidean instanton solutions that interpolate between them, and analyze their properties. Supersymmetry prevents direct mixing between different vacua but still allows effect of instanton to show up in higher order effective interactions, such as analog of v4 interaction of flat space M(atrix) theory. An explicit construction of zero modes is performed, and Goldstone zero modes, bosonic and fermionic, are identified. We further generalize this to massive M(atrix) theory that includes fundamental hypermultiplets, corresponding to insertion of longitudinal fivebranes in the background. After a brief comparison to their counterpart in AdS × S, we close with a summary.
Stenotrophomonas maltophilia CSF infection in infants after neurosurgery.

Introduction Two infants with recently treated hydrocephalus (by ventriculoperitoneal shunt) re-presented with meningitis. CSF culture confirmed Stenotrophomonas maltophilia infection in both cases. They were successfully treated with removal of the shunt, insertion of an external ventricular drain and completion of a course of trimethoprim and sulfamethoxazole antibiotic therapy (also known as co-trimoxazole).
Speech Signal and Facial Image Processing for Obstructive Sleep Apnea Assessment

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a common sleep disorder characterized by recurring breathing pauses during sleep caused by a blockage of the upper airway (UA). OSA is generally diagnosed through a costly procedure requiring an overnight stay of the patient at the hospital. This has led to proposing less costly procedures based on the analysis of patients' facial images and voice recordings to help in OSA detection and severity assessment. In this paper we investigate the use of both image and speech processing to estimate the apnea-hypopnea index, AHI (which describes the severity of the condition), over a population of 285 male Spanish subjects suspected to suffer from OSA and referred to a Sleep Disorders Unit. Photographs and voice recordings were collected in a supervised but not highly controlled way trying to test a scenario close to an OSA assessment application running on a mobile device (i.e., smartphones or tablets). Spectral information in speech utterances is modeled by a state-of-the-art low-dimensional acoustic representation, called i-vector. A set of local craniofacial features related to OSA are extracted from images after detecting facial landmarks using Active Appearance Models (AAMs). Support vector regression (SVR) is applied on facial features and i-vectors to estimate the AHI.
Novel titanium foam for bone tissue engineering

Titanium foams fabricated by a new powder metallurgical process have bimodal pore distribution architecture (i.e., macropores and micropores), mimicking natural bone. The mechanical properties of the titanium foam with low relative densities of approximately 0.20–0.30 are close to those of human cancellous bone. Also, mechanical properties of the titanium foams with high relative densities of approximately 0.50–0.65 are close to those of human cortical bone. Furthermore, titanium foams exhibit good ability to form a bonelike apatite layer throughout the foams after pretreatment with a simple thermochemical process and then immersion in a simulated body fluid. The present study illustrates the feasibility of using the titanium foams as implant materials in bone tissue engineering applications, highlighting their excellent biomechanical properties and bioactivity.
Measurement and Analysis of Mobile Web Cache Performance

The Web browser is a killer app on mobile devices such as smartphones. However, the user experience of mobile Web browsing is undesirable because of the slow resource loading. To improve the performance of Web resource loading, caching has been adopted as a key mechanism. However, the existing passive measurement studies cannot comprehensively characterize the performance of mobile Web caching. For example, most of these studies mainly focus on client-side implementations but not server-side configurations, suffer from biased user behaviors, and fail to study "miscached" resources. To address these issues, in this paper, we present a proactive approach for a comprehensive measurement study on mobile Web cache performance. The key idea of our approach is to proactively crawl resources from hundreds of websites periodically with a fine-grained time interval. Thus, we are able to uncover the resource update history and cache configurations at the server side, and analyze the cache performance in various time granularities. Based on our collected data, we build a new cache analysis model and study the upper bound of how high percentage of resources could potentially be cached and how effective the caching works in practice. We report detailed analysis results of different websites and various types of Web resources, and identify the problems caused by unsatisfactory cache performance. In particular, we identify two major problems -- Redundant Transfer and Miscached Resource, which lead to unsatisfactory cache performance. We investigate three main root causes: Same Content, Heuristic Expiration, and Conservative Expiration Time, and discuss what mobile Web developers can do to mitigate those problems.
Influence of Protein Electromagnetic Field on Hydrogen Bonding

The quantum-mechanical mechanisms by which the enzymes catalyze the hydrogen transfer in biochemical reactions are considered. Up to date it was established both experimentally and theoretically that in many cases the proton tunnelling through the intermolecular potential barrier is essential. We argue that in this case the enzyme excitation and internal motion facilitate proton transfer between reactants by squeezing the potential barrier which otherwise is practically impenetrable. In the similar fashion, the enzymes can facilitate the formation of hydrogen (H) bonds between the molecules. By means of barrier squeezing, the enzymes not only facilitate such reactions but also can control their rate and their final outcome, depending of enzyme excitation. In particular, such effects can play the major role in DNA polymerization reactions where preliminary DNTP selection is quite important.
Inflammasome Activation of Cardiac Fibroblasts Is Essential for Myocardial Ischemia/Reperfusion Injury

Background— Inflammation plays a key role in the pathophysiology of myocardial ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury; however, the mechanism by which myocardial I/R induces inflammation remains unclear. Recent evidence indicates that a sterile inflammatory response triggered by tissue damage is mediated through a multiple-protein complex called the inflammasome. Therefore, we hypothesized that the inflammasome is an initial sensor for danger signal(s) in myocardial I/R injury. Methods and Results— We demonstrate that inflammasome activation in cardiac fibroblasts, but not in cardiomyocytes, is crucially involved in the initial inflammatory response after myocardial I/R injury. We found that inflammasomes are formed by I/R and that its subsequent activation of inflammasomes leads to interleukin-1&bgr; production, resulting in inflammatory responses such as inflammatory cell infiltration and cytokine expression in the heart. In mice deficient for apoptosis-associated speck-like adaptor protein and caspase-1, these inflammatory responses and subsequent injuries, including infarct development and myocardial fibrosis and dysfunction, were markedly diminished. Bone marrow transplantation experiments with apoptosis-associated speck-like adaptor protein–deficient mice revealed that inflammasome activation in bone marrow cells and myocardial resident cells such as cardiomyocytes or cardiac fibroblasts plays an important role in myocardial I/R injury. In vitro experiments revealed that hypoxia/reoxygenation stimulated inflammasome activation in cardiac fibroblasts, but not in cardiomyocytes, and that hypoxia/reoxygenation–induced activation was mediated through reactive oxygen species production and potassium efflux. Conclusions— Our results demonstrate the molecular basis for the initial inflammatory response after I/R and suggest that the inflammasome is a potential novel therapeutic target for preventing myocardial I/R injury.
E-MSD: improving data deposition and structure quality

The Macromolecular Structure Database (MSD) () [H. Boutselakis, D. Dimitropoulos, J. Fillon, A. Golovin, K. Henrick, A. Hussain, J. Ionides, M. John, P. A. Keller, E. Krissinel et al. (2003) E-MSD: the European Bioinformatics Institute Macromolecular Structure Database. Nucleic Acids Res., 31, 458–462. ] group is one of the three partners in the worldwide Protein DataBank (wwPDB), the consortium entrusted with the collation, maintenance and distribution of the global repository of macromolecular structure data [H. Berman, K. Henrick and H. Nakamura (2003) Announcing the worldwide Protein Data Bank. Nature Struct. Biol., 10, 980. ]. Since its inception, the MSD group has worked with partners around the world to improve the quality of PDB data, through a clean up programme that addresses inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the legacy archive. The improvements in data quality in the legacy archive have been achieved largely through the creation of a unified data archive, in the form of a relational database that stores all of the data in the wwPDB. The three partners are working towards improving the tools and methods for the deposition of new data by the community at large. The implementation of the MSD database, together with the parallel development of improved tools and methodologies for data harvesting, validation and archival, has lead to significant improvements in the quality of data that enters the archive. Through this and related projects in the NMR and EM realms the MSD continues to improve the quality of publicly available structural data.
MICROSTRUCTURE AND THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY OF POLYMER COMPOSITES WITH NANO AND MICRO FILLERS

Thermally conductive polymer composites offer new possibilities for replacing metal parts in electric systems. The advantages of polymer composites as compared to metals include improved corrosion resistance, lighter weight, and the ability to adapt the conductivity properties to suit the application needs. Applications of conductive composites as heat sinks in electric systems require new composites with a thermal conductivity from approximately 1 to 30W/mK[1]. An approach of current interest to improve the thermal conductivity of polymers is the selective addition of nano fillers with high thermal conductivity. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have exceptionally high mechanical properties and thermal conductivity [2]. One promising application of CNTs is as fillers in polymer composites to provide enhanced thermal properties. The effects of type, shape and size of fillers on thermal performance of composites has been addressed by many researchers. Recently, Sanada et al.[3] fabricated the composites with the random close-packed structure of spherical micro particles and nano fillers, and investigated the potential of nano fillers to enhance thermal conductivity of the composites. The objective of this paper is to study the effective thermal conductivity of the composites with nano and micro fillers focusing on the shape and size of micro fillers. Packing simulation and finite element analysis were performed to predict the composite thermal conductivity. In addition, experimental measurements of the thermal conductivity of the manufactured polymer composites were carried out by using a steady-state method.
Planar graphs as minimal resolutions of trivariate monomial ideals

We introduce the notion of rigid embedding in a grid surface, a new kind of plane drawing for simple triconnected planar graphs. Rigid embeddings provide methods to (1) flnd well-structured (cellular, here) minimal free resolutions for arbitrary monomial ideals in three variables; (2) strengthen the Brightwell{Trotter bound on the order dimension of triconnected planar maps by giving a geometric reformulation; and (3) generalize Schnyder's angle coloring of planar triangulations to arbitrary triconnected planar maps via geometry. The notion of rigid embedding is stable under duality for planar maps, and has certain uniqueness properties.