Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Three-Dimensional Architecture of Grana and Stroma Thylakoids of Higher Plants as Determined by Electron Tomography1[W][OA]

We have investigated the three-dimensional (3D) architecture of the thylakoid membranes of Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana), tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum), and spinach (Spinacia oleracea) with a resolution of approximately 7 nm by electron tomography of high-pressure-frozen/freeze-substituted intact chloroplasts. Higher-plant thylakoids are differentiated into two interconnected and functionally distinct domains, the photosystem II/light-harvesting complex II-enriched stacked grana thylakoids and the photosystem I/ATP synthase-enriched, nonstacked stroma thylakoids. The grana thylakoids are organized in the form of cylindrical stacks and are connected to the stroma thylakoids via tubular junctions. Our data confirm that the stroma thylakoids are wound around the grana stacks in the form of multiple, right-handed helices at an angle of 20° to 25° as postulated by a helical thylakoid model. The junctional connections between the grana and stroma thylakoids all have a slit-like architecture, but their size varies tremendously from approximately 15 × 30 nm to approximately 15 × 435 nm, which is approximately 5 times larger than seen in chemically fixed thylakoids. The variable slit length results in less periodicity in grana/stroma thylakoid organization than proposed in the original helical model. The stroma thylakoids also exhibit considerable architectural variability, which is dependent, in part, on the number and the orientation of adjacent grana stacks to which they are connected. Whereas some stroma thylakoids form solid, sheet-like bridges between adjacent grana, others exhibit a branching geometry with small, more tubular sheet domains also connecting adjacent, parallel stroma thylakoids. We postulate that the tremendous variability in size of the junctional slits may reflect a novel, active role of junctional slits in the regulation of photosynthetic function. In particular, by controlling the size of junctional slits, plants could regulate the flow of ions and membrane molecules between grana and stroma thylakoid membrane domains.
Dual-mode circular waveguide filters without tuning screws

The manufacture of dual-mode circular waveguide filters is a complex and labor-intensive task that could be greatly simplified with the use of accurate and fast CAD tools to predict the electrical behavior of the structures being developed. This is especially true for the tuning screws assembly that is an integral part of this type of filter. A method is proposed for the rigorous and efficient analysis of the tuning screws assembly for dual-mode filters in circular waveguides. The method is based on the introduction of a new waveguide called a ridged circular waveguide and in its use as a key component for the implementation of dual-mode filters. The modal spectrum of the ridged circular waveguide is investigated using the finite-element technique to show how the introduction of this waveguide can effectively resolve the problem of the CAD of the tuning screws in dual-mode filters in circular waveguides. <<ETX>>
Local Wetting at Contact Line on Textured Hydrophobic Surfaces

We theoretically studied the static contact angle on textured hydrophobic surfaces when spots with different wetting states exist under the bulk droplet. Two theoretical approaches were applied to derive the contact angle, one approach based on the thermodynamic equilibrium of the droplet-surface system and the other one based on the local force balance at the contact line. It was shown that the contact angle is determined solely by the local wetting at the contact line rather than the global wetting of the bulk droplet. Due to the dependence on local wetting, the contact angle can be related to the wetting state of single texture element at contact line. Three types of contact angles including Wenzel, Cassie and another type of contact angle due to partial wetting of the texture element were analyzed from the thermodynamic perspective.
Behavioral experiments in networked trade

We report on an extensive series of highly controlled human subject experiments in networked trade. Our point of departure is a simple and well-studied bipartite network exchange model, for which previous work has established a detailed equilibrium theory relating wealth to network topology. A notable feature of this theory is its prediction that there may be significant local variation in equilibrium wealths and prices purely as a result of structural asymmetries in the network. Our experiments mix recent lines of thought from algorithmic game theory, behavioral economics and social network theory, and are among the first and largest behavioral economics experiments on network effects conducted to date. They continue a line of human subject experiments on networked games and optimization allowing only local interactions.
Auxiliary tRNAs: large-scale analysis of tRNA genes reveals patterns of tRNA repertoire dynamics

Decoding of all codons can be achieved by a subset of tRNAs. In bacteria, certain tRNA species are mandatory, while others are auxiliary and are variably used. It is currently unknown how this variability has evolved and whether it provides an adaptive advantage. Here we shed light on the subset of auxiliary tRNAs, using genomic data from 319 bacteria. By reconstructing the evolution of tRNAs we show that the auxiliary tRNAs are highly dynamic, being frequently gained and lost along the phylogenetic tree, with a clear dominance of loss events for most auxiliary tRNA species. We reveal distinct co-gain and co-loss patterns for subsets of the auxiliary tRNAs, suggesting that they are subjected to the same selection forces. Controlling for phylogenetic dependencies, we find that the usage of these tRNA species is positively correlated with GC content and may derive directly from nucleotide bias or from preference of Watson–Crick codon–anticodon interactions. Our results highlight the highly dynamic nature of these tRNAs and their complicated balance with codon usage.
A Guided User Experience Using Subtle Gaze Direction

This paper demonstrates how illumination modulation can guide a user’s gaze on a display without them knowing. This technique takes advantage of eye biology and the differences in flicker fusion rate between the fovea and periphery, so that flickering in the periphery of a viewer’s attention attracts their gaze, yet is undetectable in their foveal vision. Applications for this technology include interactive media and gaming, visual training programs in medicine and defense, and advertising.
Yield Curve Fitting with Term Structure Models: Empirical Evidence from the Euro Market

We study the fitting of the euro yield curve with the Longstaff and Schwartz (1992) (LS) two-factor general equilibrium model and the Schaefer and Schwartz (1984) (SS) two-factor arbitrage model of the term structure of interest rates. The Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (1985b) (CIR) one-factor model is also studied as a reference. LS use the short-term interest rate and the volatility of the short-term interest rate as state variables while SS use the spread between the short-term and the long-term interest rate and the long-term interest rate. Thus, the LS model should perform better (worse) than the SS model in pricing short-term (long-term) securities. Moreover, since the CIR model can be nested into the LS model, we expect the latter model to perform better than the former. The results show that, as expected, the LS model is best adjusting to the short-term yields. Surprisingly, the CIR model is best fitting to long-term yields. In any case, the three models have difficulties matching both the entire yield curve and the term structure of volatilities.
Comparative antibacterial activity of avian egg white protein extracts

1. Egg white proteins from the eggs of domestic chicken (Gallus gallus), turkey (Meleagris gallopavo), duck (Anas platyrhynchos) and goose (Anser anser) were analysed in order to compare the antimicrobial activity of these products. 2. Albumen from each species was sampled and analysed by SDS-PAGE and Western blotting. Antimicrobial activity and lysozyme activity were measured. 3. Ovotransferrin and ovalbumin were identified in all species while c-type lysozyme was present in chicken, turkey and duck egg white samples, but not in goose. 4. Galliformes appear to possess albumens with greater antimicrobial activity than those of the Anseriformes. This can be attributed to higher concentrations of ovotransferrin and the broad acting c-type lysozyme.
Measurement of chromatic dispersion of microstructured polymer fibers by white-light spectral interferometry

We present a white-light spectral interferometric method for measuring the chromatic dispersion of microstructured fibers made of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA). The method uses an unbalanced Mach-Zehnder interferometer with the fiber of known length placed in one of the interferometer arms and the other arm with adjustable path length. We record the spectral interferograms to measure the equalization wavelength as a function of the path length difference, or equivalently the differential group refractive index dispersion over a wide wavelength range. First, we verify the applicability of the method by measuring the wavelength dependence of the differential group refractive index of a pure silica fiber. We apply a five-term power series fit to the measured data and confirm by its differentiation that the chromatic dispersion of pure silica glass agrees well with theory. Second, we measure the chromatic dispersion for the fundamental mode supported by two different PMMA microstructured fibers, the multimode fiber and the large-mode area one.
Role of Nebulisation in Perioperative Period for Lung Cancer Surgeries - A Narrative Review

One lung ventilation (OLV) is required for surgical intervention in patients with lung cancer. One lung ventilation is needed for better exposure and maintenance of ventilation and oxygenation. One lung ventilation for lung surgeries are associated with changes in respiratory mechanics. Also, OLV may lead to lung injury to both the ventilated lung and the collapsed lung and is associated with hypoxia during the procedure. Various strategies like pulmonary rehabilitation, lung recruitment are required in perioperative period to optimize lung function. In spite of these strategies, hypoxic events occur during the OLV. We review the helpfulness of inhaled bronchodilators for improved oxygention in the perioperative period after lung surgery requiring OLV.
The Nucleotide-binding Site of Human Sphingosine Kinase 1*

Sphingosine kinase catalyzes the formation of sphingosine 1-phosphate, a lipid second messenger that has been implicated in a number of agonist-driven cellular responses including mitogenesis, anti-apoptosis, and expression of inflammatory molecules. Despite the importance of sphingosine kinase, very little is known regarding its structure or mechanism of catalysis. Moreover, sphingosine kinase does not contain recognizable catalytic or substrate-binding sites, based on sequence motifs found in other kinases. Here we have elucidated the nucleotide-binding site of human sphingosine kinase 1 (hSK1) through a combination of site-directed mutagenesis and affinity labeling with the ATP analogue, FSBA. We have shown that Gly82 of hSK1 is involved in ATP binding since mutation of this residue to alanine resulted in an enzyme with an ∼45-fold higher K m (ATP). We have also shown that Lys103 is important in catalysis since an alanine substitution of this residue ablates catalytic activity. Furthermore, we have shown that this residue is covalently modified by FSBA. Our data, combined with amino acid sequence comparison, suggest a motif of SGDGX 17–21K is involved in nucleotide binding in the sphingosine kinases. This motif differs in primary sequence from all previously identified nucleotide-binding sites. It does, however, share some sequence and likely structural similarity with the highly conserved glycine-rich loop, which is known to be involved in anchoring and positioning the nucleotide in the catalytic site of many protein kinases.
Efficient compression of non-manifold polygonal meshes

We present a method for compressing non-manifold polygonal meshes, i.e. polygonal meshes with singularities, which occur very frequently in the real-world. Most efficient polygonal compression methods currently available are restricted to a manifold mesh: they require a conversion process, and fail to retrieve the original model connectivity after decompression. The present method works by converting the original model to a manifold model, encoding the manifold model using an existing mesh compression technique, and clustering, or stitching together during the decompression process vertices that were duplicated earlier to faithfully recover the original connectivity. This paper focuses on efficiently encoding and decoding the stitching information. By separating connectivity from geometry and properties, the method avoids encoding vertices (and properties bound to vertices) multiple times; thus a reduction of the size of the bit-stream of about 10% is obtained compared with encoding the model as a manifold.
HIGHLIGHTS FROM RESEARCH ON TUTORING

SYNTHESIS OF RESEARCH ON THE EFFECTS OF TUTORING T he tutoring programs offered in elementary and secondary schools today differ from yester day's tutorial programs in an impor tant way. In most modern programs, children are tutored by peers or paraprofessionals rather than by regular school teachers or by professional tutors. This change has dramatically affected the availability of tutoring programs in schools. No longer a lux ury open only to the few who can afford to pay, tutoring programs are today available to nearly all students in public schools throughout the country. Hundreds of teachers and research ers have already written reports on the effects of such programs on chil dren. Although some of the reports arc based on subjective impressions and thus arc of limited scientific value, other reports describe sound experi mental studies in which an investi gator compares the performance of equivalent groups of students assigned to classrooms with and without tutor ing programs. Comparisons often focus on learning gains in the two types of classrooms, and sometimes also cover affective growth of tutored and nontutored students.
Balancing value and modifiability when planning for the next release

Planning the next release in software release planning addresses the problem of assigning features to the next release such that technical, resource, risk, and budget constraints are met. This paper studies the planning for the next release of an evolving system from a bi-criteria perspective. We introduce a method called NRP-trade-off to adjust baseline release plans for more modifiability by replacing lower value features with features having a higher modifiability. For that purpose, we include a new approach for feature modeling and assessing modifiability by applying object-oriented design metrics to the feature domain. We also briefly introduce a case study.
Measuring sparsity in spatially interconnected systems

The goal of this paper is to develop a mathematical framework to measure sparsity of state feedback controllers for spatially interconnected systems. We introduce a new algebra of infinite-dimensional matrices equipped with a matrix quasi-norm which is defined using ℓq quasi-norm for 0 <; q ≤ 1. When q = 0, the value of the matrix quasi-norm is equal to the maximum number of nonzero entries in rows or columns of a matrix. When 0 <; q ≤ 1, the proposed matrix algebra forms a mathematical object so called q-Banach algebra, which is not a Banach algebra. We show that this matrix algebra is inverse-closed. Moreover, we prove that the unique solutions of Lyapunov and Riccati equations belong to this matrix algebra. We show that there exists a nonzero q for which the value of the matrix quasi-norm reflects a reasonable estimate for sparsity of a spatially decaying matrix.
A Novel Selective Ensemble Classification of Microarray Data Based on Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization

Aiming at the characteristics of high dimension and small samples in microarray data, this paper proposes a selective ensemble method to classify microarray data. Firstly, kruskal-wallis test is used to filter irrelevant genes with classification task and to obtain a set of genes, and then a reduced training set is produced from original training set according to gene subset obtained. Secondly, multiple gene subsets are generated by using neighborhood rough set model with different radius and used to construct training subsets on above reduced training set. Thirdly, every constructed training subset is used to train a classifier by using SVM algorithm, and then multiple classifiers are produced as base classifiers. Finally, a set of base classifiers are selected by using teachinglearning-based optimization and build an ensemble classifier by weighted voting. Five benchmarks tumor microarray datasets are applied to evaluate performance of our proposed method. Experimental results indicate our proposed method is very effective and efficient for classifying microarray data, and it improves not only classification accuracy, but also decrease memory costs and computation times.
An FDA-Drug Library Screen for Compounds with Bioactivities against Meticillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)

The lack of new antibacterial drugs entering the market and their misuse have resulted in the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria, posing a major health crisis worldwide. In particular, meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a pathogen responsible for numerous human infections, has become endemic in hospitals worldwide. Drug repurposing, the finding of new therapeutic indications for approved drugs, is deemed a plausible solution to accelerate drug discovery and development in this area. Towards this end, we screened 1163 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for bioactivities against MRSA in a 10 μM single-point assay. After excluding known antibiotics and antiseptics, six compounds were identified and their MICs were determined against a panel of clinical MRSA strains. A toxicity assay using human keratinocytes was also conducted to gauge their potential for repurposing as topical agents for treating MRSA skin infections.
Extensions to Self-Taught Hashing: Kernelisation and Supervision

The ability of fast similarity search at large scale is of great importance to many Information Retrieval (IR) applications. A promising way to accelerate similarity search is semantic hashing which designs compact binary codes for a large number of documents so that semantically similar documents are mapped to similar codes (within a short Hamming distance). Since each bit in the binary code for a document can be regarded as a binary feature of it, semantic hashing is essentially a process of generating a few most informative binary features to represent the documents. Recently, we have proposed a novel Self-Taught Hashing (STH) approach to semantic hashing (that is going to be published in SIGIR-2010): we first find the optimal l-bit binary codes for all documents in the given corpus via unsupervised learning, and then train l classifiers via supervised learning to predict the l-bit code for any query document unseen before. In this paper, we present two further extensions to our STH technique: one is kernelisation (i.e., employing nonlinear kernels to achieve nonlinear hashing), and the other is supervision (i.e., exploiting the category label information to enhance the effectiveness of hashing). The advantages of these extensions have been shown through experiments on synthetic datasets and real-world datasets respectively.
Drinking Frequency, Mediating Biomarkers, and Risk of Myocardial Infarction in Women and Men

Background—The associations of drinking frequency and quantity with risk of myocardial infarction have not been studied among women, and the degree to which specific risk factors mediate the inverse association of drinking frequency with risk of myocardial infarction is uncertain. Methods and Results—We conducted nested case-control studies of 32 826 women enrolled in the Nurses Health Study followed up from 1990 to 1998 and 18 225 men enrolled in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study followed up from 1994 to 2000. A total of 249 women and 266 men with incident myocardial infarction were matched on age, smoking, and date of entry to 498 female and 532 male control participants. We determined the risk of myocardial infarction related to frequency and quantity of alcohol intake and the change in risk before and after adjustment for putative cardiovascular risk factors. Among both women and men, drinking frequency tended to be associated with lower risk of myocardial infarction, with the lowest risks among those who drank 3 to 7 days per week. Further adjustment for levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, hemoglobin A1c, and fibrinogen attenuated 75% of the association of frequent drinking with risk among women and fully attenuated the association among men. Conclusions—Alcohol intake at least 3 to 4 days per week is associated with a lower risk of myocardial infarction among women and men, an association apparently attributable to the relationship of alcohol with HDL cholesterol, fibrinogen, and hemoglobin A1c. Because the effects of alcohol on HDL cholesterol, fibrinogen, and insulin sensitivity have been confirmed in randomized trials, our findings support the hypothesis that the inverse relation of alcohol use and myocardial infarction is causal.
Transverse sinus thrombosis and IVIg treatment: a case report and discussion of risk–benefit assessment for immunoglobulin treatment

A 54 year old woman presented with symptoms resulting from a thrombosis of the lateral transverse and sagittal sinuses the day after an infusion of intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) replacement treatment. She had previously suffered a milder episode after IVIg. Following recurrent bacterial chest infections and sinusitis for more than 40 years, a diagnosis of IgG1 deficiency had been made two years earlier, after exclusion of other causes. She made a good recovery from the thrombosis but high platelet counts were investigated and primary thrombocythaemia was diagnosed. Investigation of humoral immunity revealed protective amounts of IgG antibodies to pathogens, and because the previous IgG1 deficiency had resolved IVIg infusions were not restarted. She made a good response to treatment with hydroxyurea, with improvement of the headaches and lowering of the platelet counts. Prophylactic antibiotics reduced the number of bacterial chest infections and nasal corticosteroids improved the chronic sinusitis. This case is presented to highlight the need to look for other contributing factors for severe recurrent headaches after IVIg treatment, and to consider the risk of thrombosis even when replacement doses of IVIg are used. It is also important to emphasise the need to ensure that an isolated IgG subclass deficiency is not transient; that failure to produce specific IgG antibodies to immunisation and/or exposure antigens is confirmed, thus meeting the criteria for the diagnosis of primary antibody deficiency. A thorough risk–benefit assessment is essential before blood product treatment is started.