Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Influence of Rhombohedral Graphite Phase on the Diamond Nucleation

The high pressure and temperature, synthesis of diamond from carbonaceous materials, is a complex process highly dependent on variables such as the catalyst/solvent, the crystalline structure of the precursor material, the processing conditions and the type of compressive chamber. The optimum susceptible precursors to be transformed into diamond are those possessing the perfect hexagonal graphite structure, which is the thermodynamically most stable form of carbon at atmospheric pressure and ambient temperature. However, the majority of both industrial and natural graphites, presents a mixture of different atomic structural arrangements that greatly influence the process of diamond synthesis. In this works the influence of rhombohedral and hexagonal phases existing in the graphite was performed by means of a software refinement of the crystal structures using the Rietveld method. The thermobaric treatment, which determine the structural parameters, was conducted in a high pressure anvil type device with a central concavity. All experiments were carried out at 1200°C and pressures varying from 4.3 to 5.0 GPa. It was determined that the degree of graphite to diamond transformation is directly associated with the content of rhombohedral phase.
Voluntary activation of human knee extensors measured using transcranial magnetic stimulation

The aim of this study was to determine the applicability and reliability of a transcranial magnetic stimulation twitch interpolation technique for measuring voluntary activation of a lower limb muscle group. Cortical voluntary activation of the knee extensors was determined in nine healthy men on two separate visits by measuring superimposed twitch torques evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation during isometric knee extensions of varying intensity. Superimposed twitch amplitude decreased linearly with increasing voluntary torque between 50 and 100% of mean maximal torque, allowing estimation of resting twitch amplitude and subsequent calculation of voluntary activation. There were no systematic differences for maximal voluntary activation within day (mean ±s.d. 90.9 ± 6.2 versus 90.7 ± 5.9%; P= 0.98) or between days (90.8 ± 6.0 versus 91.2 ± 5.7%; P= 0.92). Systematic bias and random error components of the 95% limits of agreement were 0.23 and 9.3% within day versus−0.38 and 7.5% between days. Voluntary activation was also determined immediately after a 2 min maximal voluntary isometric contraction; in four of these subjects, voluntary activation was determined 30 min after the sustained contraction. Immediately after the sustained isometric contraction, maximal voluntary activation was reduced from 91.2 ± 5.7 to 74.2 ± 12.0% (P < 0.001), indicating supraspinal fatigue. After 30 min, voluntary activation had recovered to 85.4 ± 8.8% (P= 0.39 versus baseline). These results demonstrate that transcranial magnetic stimulation enables reliable measurement of maximal voluntary activation and assessment of supraspinal fatigue of the knee extensors.
Bilberries reduce low-grade inflammation in individuals with features of metabolic syndrome.

SCOPE Low-grade inflammation is a hallmark of cardiometabolic risk. Bilberries (Vaccinium myrtillus) are rich in polyphenols with potential anti-inflammatory properties. We studied the impact of bilberries on inflammation and gene expression profile in peripheral blood mononuclear cells in subjects with metabolic syndrome. METHODS AND RESULTS In randomized, controlled dietary intervention, the participants consumed either a diet rich in bilberries (n = 15) or a control diet (n = 12). The bilberry group consumed daily an equivalent dose of 400 g fresh bilberries, while the control group maintained their habitual diet. No differences were found between the groups in body weight, glucose, or lipid metabolism, but bilberry supplementation tended to decrease serum high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, IL-6, IL-12, and LPS concentrations. An inflammation score was significantly different between the groups (p = 0.024). In transcriptomics analyses (three participants with improved oral glucose tolerance test in the bilberry group), Toll-like receptor signaling, cytoplasmic ribosomal proteins, and B-cell receptor signaling pathways were differently regulated. QPCR analyses (n = 13 and 11 in the bilberry and control groups, respectively) showed decreased expression of MMD and CCR2 transcripts associated with monocyte and macrophage function associated genes. CONCLUSION Regular bilberry consumption may reduce low-grade inflammation indicating decreased cardiometabolic risk in the long term.
Insulin signaling regulates neurite growth during metamorphic neuronal remodeling

Summary Although the growth capacity of mature neurons is often limited, some neurons can shift through largely unknown mechanisms from stable maintenance growth to dynamic, organizational growth (e.g. to repair injury, or during development transitions). During insect metamorphosis, many terminally differentiated larval neurons undergo extensive remodeling, involving elimination of larval neurites and outgrowth and elaboration of adult-specific projections. Here, we show in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster (Meigen), that a metamorphosis-specific increase in insulin signaling promotes neuronal growth and axon branching after prolonged stability during the larval stages. FOXO, a negative effector in the insulin signaling pathway, blocked metamorphic growth of peptidergic neurons that secrete the neuropeptides CCAP and bursicon. RNA interference and CCAP/bursicon cell-targeted expression of dominant-negative constructs for other components of the insulin signaling pathway (InR, Pi3K92E, Akt1, S6K) also partially suppressed the growth of the CCAP/bursicon neuron somata and neurite arbor. In contrast, expression of wild-type or constitutively active forms of InR, Pi3K92E, Akt1, Rheb, and TOR, as well as RNA interference for negative regulators of insulin signaling (PTEN, FOXO), stimulated overgrowth. Interestingly, InR displayed little effect on larval CCAP/bursicon neuron growth, in contrast to its strong effects during metamorphosis. Manipulations of insulin signaling in many other peptidergic neurons revealed generalized growth stimulation during metamorphosis, but not during larval development. These findings reveal a fundamental shift in growth control mechanisms when mature, differentiated neurons enter a new phase of organizational growth. Moreover, they highlight strong evolutionarily conservation of insulin signaling in neuronal growth regulation.
On the Accuracy of Statistical Estimations of SAT Partitionings Effectiveness in Application to Discrete Function Inversion Problems

In this paper we study the problem of estimating the time required to process decompositions of hard SAT instances encoding inversion problems of some cryptographic functions. In particular, we consider one type of SAT decompositions, usually referred to as SAT partitioning. The effectiveness of a specific SAT parititioning is the total time required to solve all SAT instances from this partitioning. In the paper we construct statistical estimations of effectiveness of SAT partitionings with the help of computational scheme of the Monte Carlo method. We discuss the problem of accuracy of such estimations that arises because of drastic difference between the sizes of random samples, that can be processed in reasonable time, and the size of statistical population. We propose the method for improving constructed statistical estimations by using sets of random samples of increasing size followed by the extrapolation of obtained relation to the size of statistical population.
Social networks applied to distance education courses: analysis of interaction in discussion forums

Driven by public policies, distance education courses or EAD are now a reality in the Brazilian educational system. However, a major difficulty faced by professionals and institutions involved in this type of education refers to the effective monitoring of students. One alternative used by the scientific community to deal with this problem have been investigating techniques for exploring the data stored by the technological systems used, trying to turn them into useful information. This work demonstrated some possibilities of using social network analysis techniques in order to obtain information from the interaction in discussion forums. In the experiments some potentially useful information was obtained, indicating the feasibility of this proposal.
Quantitative analyses of dynamic strain sensitivity in human skin mechanoreceptors.

Microneurographical recordings from 24 slowly adapting (SA) and 16 fast adapting (FA) cutaneous mechanoreceptor afferents were obtained in the human radial nerve. Most of the afferents innervated the hairy skin on the back of the hand. The afferents' receptive fields were subjected to controlled strains in a ramp-and-hold fashion with strain velocities from 1 to 64%. s(-1), i.e., strain velocities within most of the physiological range. For all unit types, the mean variation in response onset approached 1 ms for strain velocities >8%. s(-1). Except at the highest strain velocities, the first spike in a typical SAIII unit was evoked at strains <0.5% and a typical SAII unit began to discharge at <1% skin strain. Skin strain velocity had a profound effect on the discharge rates of all classes of afferents. The "typical" peak discharge rate at the highest strain velocity studied was 50-95 imp/s(-1) depending on unit type. Excellent fits were obtained for both SA and FA units when their responses to ramp stretches were modeled by simple power functions (r2 > 0.9 for 95% of the units). SAIII units grouped with SAII with respect to onset latency and onset variation but with SAI units with respect to dynamic strain sensitivity. Because both SA and FA skin afferents respond strongly, quickly, and accurately to skin strain changes, they all seem to be able to provide useful information about movement-related skin strain changes and therefore contribute to proprioception and kinesthesia.
Modelling and analysis on wear behaviour of aluminium metal matrix composites: A statistical approach

This paper presents the influence of wear parameters on the wear rate of Al/ZrO2 composites. The composite has been fabricated by a stir casting route and heat treated at 490°C for 5 h and then quenched in water followed by artificially aged at 150°C for 7 h. The tribological behaviour of the composites against EN32 steel was studied using a pin on disc type wear test rig. The mathematical model to predict the wear rate of the Al/ZrO2 composites has been expressed in terms of reinforcement volume fraction, applied load, sliding speed and sliding distances using a four-factor, five-level central composite design matrix approach by response surface method. The morphology and topography of the worn surface wear were studied using a scanning electron microscope. The effect of wear parameters on the wear rate of the composites was analysed by a statistical method.
Electric characterization of sands with heterogeneous saturation distribution

In the soil sciences it is of great relevance to accurately determine the electromagnetic properties of the soils, specially the complex permittivity. But in the high frequency regime (relevant band for geophysical applications) accurate permittivity measurements are complicated as the relation of the measured quantities with the permittivity itself, becomes highly non-linear. Moreover, in this type of measurements (core scale), the medium is taken to be homogeneous and there is no study about the limitations of this approximation. The scope of our research is to set accurate measurements of the electromagnetic properties of the soils in the lab that will enhance the resolution of existing geophysical models and techniques. For that purpose we have developed a measurement tool and carried out a set of experiments to test the validity of measuring the permittivity as an effective property.
Rapid Reversal of Psychotic Depression Using Mifepristone

The rationale for treating psychotic major depression with glucocorticoid receptor (GR) antagonists is reviewed. Five patients with psychotic major depression were given 600 mg of mifepristone in a 4-day, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover study. All the patients completed the protocol and adverse effects were not observed or reported. All of the five patients showed substantial improvements in their Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression scores while they were receiving mifepristone, and four of the five patients showed substantial improvement in their Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale scores. Little, if any, improvement was seen with placebo. These preliminary results suggest that short-term use of GR antagonists may be effective in the treatment of psychotic major depression and that additional study, perhaps using higher doses or more treatment days, seems warranted.
Impaired collateral vessel development associated with reduced expression of vascular endothelial growth factor in ApoE-/- mice.

BACKGROUND The impact of disordered lipid metabolism on collateral vessel development was studied in apolipoprotein (apo)E-/- mice with unilateral hindlimb ischemia. METHODS AND RESULTS Hindlimb blood flow and capillary density were markedly reduced in apoE-/- mice versus C57 controls. This was associated with reduced expression of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in the ischemic limbs of apoE-/- mice. Cell-specific immunostaining localized VEGF protein expression to skeletal myocytes and infiltrating T cells in the ischemic limbs of C57 mice; in contrast, T-cell infiltrates in ischemic limbs of apoE-/- mice were severely reduced. The critical contribution of T cells to VEGF expression and collateral vessel growth was reinforced by the finding of accelerated limb necrosis in athymic nude mice with operatively induced hindlimb ischemia. Adenoviral VEGF gene transfer to apoE-/- mice resulted in marked augmentation of hindlimb blood flow and capillary density. CONCLUSIONS These findings thus underscore the extent to which hyperlipidemia adversely affects native collateral development but does not preclude augmented collateral vessel growth in response to exogenous cytokines. Moreover, results obtained in the apoE-/- and athymic nude mice imply a critical role for infiltrating T cells as a source of VEGF in neovascularization of ischemic tissues.
A LPV approach to control and real-time scheduling codesign: Application to a robot-arm control

This paper deals with real-time control under computational constraints. A robust control approach to control/real-time scheduling co-design is proposed using the H¿ framework for linear parameter varying (LPV) polytopic systems. The originality consists in a new resource sharing between control tasks according to the controlled plant performances. Here the varying parameters are images of the control performance w.r. t. the sampling frequencies. Then a LPV based feedback scheduler is designed to adapt the control tasks periods according to the plant behavior and to the availability of computing resources. The approach is illustrated with a robot-arm controller design, whose feasibility is assessed in simulation.
Bile Acids Enhance Invasiveness of Cryptosporidium spp. into Cultured Cells

ABSTRACT Bile salts such as sodium taurocholate (NaTC) are routinely used to induce the excystation of Cryptosporidium oocysts. Here we show that NaTC significantly enhanced the invasion of several cultured cell lines by freshly excysted Cryptosporidium parvum and Cryptosporidium hominis sporozoites. A variety of purified bile salts or total bile from bovine also enhanced the invasion of cultured cells by C. parvum. Further studies demonstrated that NaTC increased protein secretion and gliding motility of sporozoites, the key processes for successful invasion. These observations may lead to improved Cryptosporidium infectivity of cultured cells and help future studies on the host-parasite interaction.
Anatomical anomalies of the laryngeal branches of the vagus nerve in pigs (Sus scrofa)

To delineate the anomaly and frequency of their occurrence in a pig model, we reported the topography of the vagus laryngeal branches and compared the differences with humans. Thirty sides of cervical vagus nerve in 15 fresh cadavers (Sus scrofa) were microdissected. We measured the branch diameters and lengths of the laryngeal branches using a Vernier caliper with a resolution of 0.01 mm. Two patterns of the vagus laryngeal branches were shown: 56.7% with the cranial laryngeal nerve (CLN) and 43.3% without the CLN. The diameters and the length of the CLN were not affected by the side of the neck (P > 0.05), but the diameters of the recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) and the nodose ganglion were significantly different between left and right sides (P < 0.05). The left RLN was thinner than the right side in diameter (P < 0.05). Four of the 30 sides had anastomoses between the vagus and the cervical sympathetic chain. There were some differences between the pig anatomy and human anatomy, but the patterns were largely similar. The similarities support the utility of this model, which is closer in size to humans than the standard rodent models.
Multiple Regression based Graphical Modeling for Images

Super resolution is one of the commonly referred inference problems in computer vision. In the case of images, this problem is generally addressed using a graphical model framework wherein each node represents a portion of the image and the edges between the nodes represent the statistical dependencies. However, the large dimensionality of images along with the large number of possible states for a node makes the inference problem computationally intractable. In this paper, we propose a representation wherein each node can be represented as a combination of multiple regression functions. The proposed approach achieves a tradeoff between the computational complexity and inference accuracy by varying the number of regression functions for a node. Keywords— Belief propagation, Graphical model, Regression, Super resolution.
FRACTURE MECHANICS APPROACH TO NONLINEAR DEBONDING PROBLEMS IN RC BEAMS STRENGTHENED WITH COMPOSITE MATERIALS

The nonlinear debonding mechanism in reinforced concrete beams strengthened with externally bonded FRP is analytically investigated. The paper focuses on beams with pre-existing debonded regions and on cases in which various loading scenarios yield compressive stresses in the bonded strip. Under these conditions, the FRP strip tends to buckle, which, in turn, may trigger the unstable growth of the debonded region. The high order geometrically nonlinear model of the strengthened beam is combined with the fracture mechanics concept of the energy release rate to provide a quantitative criterion for the initiation, propagation, and stability of the debonding process. Numerical results that demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed modeling approach and throw light on some of the physical phenomena associated with the structural response of the strengthened beam are presented. A summary and conclusions closes the paper.
An NFS Trace Player for File System Evaluation

File system traces have been used in simulation of specific design techniques such as disk scheduling, in workload characterization and modeling, and in identifying interesting file access patterns for performance optimization. Surprisingly they are rarely used to test the correctness and to evaluate the performance of an actual file system or server. The main reason is that up until now there does not exist a flexible and easy-to-use trace player that, given an input trace, can properly initialize the test file system and feed the trace to the test file system in such a way that respects the dependency constraint among file access requests in the trace. This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of an NFS trace play-back tool called FEUT (File system Evaluation Using Traces), which can automatically derive the initial file system image from a trace, can speed up or slow down a trace play-back using temporal or spatial scaling, and features a highly efficient implementation that minimizes the CPU and disk I/O overhead during trace play-back. Experiments using a large NFS trace set show that trace-driven file system evaluation can indeed produce substantially different throughput and latency measurements than synthetic benchmarks such as SPECsfs, and FEUT’s trace player is actually more efficient that SPECsfs’s workload generator despite the fact that the former requires more CPU computation and disk I/O accesses.
On the stability of temporal data reference profiles

Growing computer system complexity has made program optimization based solely on static analyses increasingly difficult. Consequently; many code optimizations incorporate information from program execution profiles. Most memory system optimizations go further and rely primarily on profiles. This reliance on profiles makes off-line optimization effectiveness dependent on profile stability across multiple program runs. While code profiles such as basic block, edge, and branch profiles, have been shown to satisfy this requirement, the stability of data reference profiles, especially temporal data reference profiles that are necessary for cache level optimizations, has neither been studied nor established. This paper shows that temporal data reference profiles expressed in terms of hot data streams, which are data reference sequences that frequently repeat, are quite stable; an encouraging result for memory optimization research. Most hot data streams belong to one of two categories: those that appear in multiple runs with their data elements referenced in the same order, and those with the same set of elements referenced in a different order, and this category membership is extremely stable. In addition, the fraction of hot data streams that belong to the first category is quite large.
Fitting 3D morphable models using implicit representations

A damping system for damping relative rotation of a pair of members having confronting surfaces spaced apart by a primary gap or zone of capillary dimension, a viscous damping fluid in the gap contacting the confronting surfaces of said members and held in the gap by capillary attraction to provide a damping action upon rotation of the members relative to one another, the arrangement providing a non-migrating self-supporting viscous fluid damping system. In a preferred embodiment of the invention, the confronting surfaces of the members defining the capillary gap or zone are in non-parallel relationship, for example, one of the confronting surfaces may be planar and the other conical wherein the rotational axis of the rotatable member is disposed on the point of the cone to provide a point contact bearing minimizing friction and centering the viscous damping material adjacent the axis of rotation to provide a more uniform controlled damping action. Still another feature of the invention resides in the provision of a secondary capillary viscous fluid reservoir of slightly larger capillary dimension than the primary capillary zone between the members. The reservoir serves to replenish any fluid lost in the capillary zone due to evaporation for example, and eliminates the criticality of metering a precise amount of viscous fluid to the primary zone initially.