Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inflammatory process in Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer Disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder and the most common form of dementia. Histopathologically is characterized by the presence of two major hallmarks, the intracellular neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs) and extracellular neuritic plaques (NPs) surrounded by activated astrocytes and microglia. NFTs consist of paired helical filaments of truncated tau protein that is abnormally hyperphosphorylated. The main component in the NP is the amyloid-β peptide (Aβ), a small fragment of 40–42 amino acids with a molecular weight of 4 kD. It has been proposed that the amyloid aggregates and microglia activation are able to favor the neurodegenerative process observed in AD patients. However, the role of inflammation in AD is controversial, because in early stages the inflammation could have a beneficial role in the pathology, since it has been thought that the microglia and astrocytes activated could be involved in Aβ clearance. Nevertheless the chronic activation of the microglia has been related with an increase of Aβ and possibly with tau phosphorylation. Studies in AD brains have shown an upregulation of complement molecules, pro-inflammatory cytokines, acute phase reactants and other inflammatory mediators that could contribute with the neurodegenerative process. Clinical trials and animal models with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) indicate that these drugs may decrease the risk of developing AD and apparently reduce Aβ deposition. Finally, further studies are needed to determine whether treatment with anti-inflammatory strategies, may decrease the neurodegenerative process that affects these patients.
Experimental investigation of drying of malt bagasse

The aim of this work was to investigate the convective drying process of malt bagasse and to evaluate the influence of this process on the application of this residue as adsorbent in methylene blue removel by adsorption process. The experimental system for drying was a fixed bed dryer with parallel airflow, with operating conditions: air temperature in the range of 40 to 90 oC and air veocity of 2 m/s. The adsorption experiments were perfomed with solution of methylene blue at 70 ppm concentration. The drying kinetics showed a constant drying rate period followed by a falling drying rate. The results obtained for the dye removal efficiency were 56% for in natura sample and in the range of 81.69% to 93.99% for dried samples.Keywords: dryin; malt bagasse; adsorption
Nanosuspension: An approach to enhance solubility of drugs

One of the major problems associated with poorly soluble drugs is very low bioavailability. The problem is even more complex for drugs like itraconazole, simvastatin, and carbamazepine which are poorly soluble in both aqueous and nonaqueous media, belonging to BCS class II as classified by biopharmaceutical classification system. Formulation as nanosuspension is an attractive and promising alternative to solve these problems. Nanosuspension consists of the pure poorly water-soluble drug without any matrix material suspended in dispersion. Preparation of nanosuspension is simple and applicable to all drugs which are water insoluble. A nanosuspension not only solves the problems of poor solubility and bioavailability, but also alters the pharmacokinetics of drug and thus improves drug safety and efficacy. This review article describes the preparation methods, characterization, and applications of the nanosuspension.
Obscuro: A Bitcoin Mixer using Trusted Execution Environments

Bitcoin provides only pseudo-anonymous transactions, which can be exploited to link payers and payees -- defeating the goal of anonymous payments. To thwart such attacks, several Bitcoin mixers have been proposed, with the objective of providing unlinkability between payers and payees. However, existing Bitcoin mixers can be regarded as either insecure or inefficient. We present Obscuro, a highly efficient and secure Bitcoin mixer that utilizes trusted execution environments (TEEs). With the TEE's confidentiality and integrity guarantees for code and data, our mixer design ensures the correct mixing operations and the protection of sensitive data (i.e., private keys and mixing logs), ruling out coin theft and address linking attacks by a malicious service provider. Yet, the TEE-based implementation does not prevent the manipulation of inputs (e.g., deposit submissions, blockchain feeds) to the mixer, hence Obscuro is designed to overcome such limitations: it (1) offers an indirect deposit mechanism to prevent a malicious service provider from rejecting benign user deposits; and (2) scrutinizes blockchain feeds to prevent deposits from being mixed more than once (thus degrading anonymity) while being eclipsed from the main blockchain branch. In addition, Obscuro provides several unique anonymity features (e.g., minimum mixing set size guarantee, resistant to dropping user deposits) that are not available in existing centralized and decentralized mixers. Our prototype of Obscuro is built using Intel SGX and we demonstrate its effectiveness in Bitcoin Testnet. Our implementation mixes 1000 inputs in just 6.49 seconds, which vastly outperforms all of the existing decentralized mixers.
Factoring rational polynomials over the complexes

We give NC algorithms for determining the number and degrees of the absolute factors (factors irreducible over the complex numbers C) of a multi-variate polynomial with rational coefficients. NC is the class of functions computable by logspace-uniform Boolean circuits of polynomial size and polylogarithmic depth. The measures of size of the input polynomial are its degree <italic>d</italic>, coefficient length <italic>c</italic>, number of variables <italic>n</italic>, and for sparse polynomials, the number of non-zero coefficients <italic>s</italic>. For the general case, we give a random (Monte-Carlo) NC algorithm in these input measures. If <italic>n</italic> is fixed, or if the polynomial is dense, we give a deterministic NC algorithm. The algorithm also works in random NC for polynomials represented by straight-line programs, provided the polynomial can be evaluated at integer points in NC. Finally, we discuss a method for obtaining an approximation to the coefficients of each factor whose running time is polynomial in the size of the original (dense) polynomial. These methods rely on the fact that the connected components of a <italic>complex</italic> hypersurface <italic>P</italic>(<italic>z</italic><subscrpt>1</subscrpt>…,<italic>z<subscrpt>n</subscrpt></italic>) = 0 minus its singular points correspond to the absolute factors of <italic>P</italic>.
Spectrum-blind minimum-rate sampling and reconstruction of multiband signals

We propose a universal sampling pattern and corresponding reconstruction algorithms that guarantee well-conditioned reconstruction of all multiband signals with a given spectral occupancy bound without prior knowledge of the spectral support. It is shown that such a universal sampling pattern can asymptotically achieve the Nyquist-Landau (1957) minimal sampling rate. Also, the new design method replaces the nonaliasing or packability criterion for a reconstructive sampling pattern with a more lenient criterion, allowing reconstruction of signals aliased by sampling.
Temporal Ontology and Temporal Reference

A semantics of temporal categories in language and a theory of their use in defining the temporal relations between events both require a more complex structure on the domain underlying the meaning representations than is commonly assumed. This paper proposes an ontology based on such notions as causation and consequence, rather than on purely temporal primitives. A central notion in the ontology is that of an elementary event-complex called a "nucleus. " A nucleus can be thought of as an association of a goal event, or "culmination," with a "preparatory process" by which it is accomplished, and a "consequent state," which ensues. Natural-language categories like aspects, futurates, adverbials, and when-clauses are argued to change the temporal/aspectual category of propositions under the control of such a nucleic knowledge representation structure. The same concept of a nucleus plays a central role in a theory of temporal reference, and of the semantics of tense, which we follow McCawley, Partee, and Isard in regarding as an anaphoric category. We claim that any manageable formalism for natural-language temporal descriptions will have to embody such an ontology, as will any usable temporal database for knowledge about events which is to be interrogated using natural language.
Healthcare Utilization Monitoring System in Korea

Objectives It is important to monitor the healthcare utilization of patients at the national level to make evidence-based policy decisions and manage the nation's healthcare sector. The Health Insurance Review & Assessment Service (HIRA) has run a Healthcare Utilization Monitoring System (HUMS) since 2008. The objective of this paper is to introduce HIRA's HUMS. Methods This study described the HUMS's system structure, capacity, functionalities, and output formats run by HIRA in the Republic of Korea. Regarding output formats, this study extracted diabetes related health insurance claims through the HUMS from August 1, 2014 to May 31, 2015. Results The HUMS has kept records of health insurance claim data for 4 years. It has a 14-terabyte hardware capacity and employs several easy-to-use programs for maintenance of the system, such as MSTR, SAS, etc. Regarding functionalities, users should input diseases codes, target periods, facility types, and types of attributes, such as the number of healthcare utilizations or healthcare costs. It also has a functionality to predict healthcare utilization and costs. When this study extracted diabetes related data, it was found that the trend of healthcare costs for the treatment of diabetes and the number of patients with diabetes were increasing. Conclusions HIRA's HUMS works well to monitor healthcare utilization of patients at the national level. The HUMS has a high-capacity hardware infrastructure and several operational programs that allows easy access to summaries as well as details to identify contributing factors for abnormality, but it has a limitation in that there is often a time lag between the provision of healthcare to patients and the filing of health claims.
Multi-clock pipeline structure for 802.11 a WLAN transceiver

The IEEE 802.11a standard is an attractive choice for wireless local-area networking (WLAN) because its 5 GHz band is less crowded than the alternative 2.4 GHz band. This work describes a hardware architecture for the digital part of the 802.11a physical layer. Our design features a multi-clock pipeline structure that allows for non-stop data flow. This leads to high throughput, low dynamic power consumption, and low overhead of switching between different data rates.
Physics engine on reconfigurable processor — Low power optimized solution empowering next-generation graphics on embedded platforms

Physics engine is an important auxiliary middleware component library needed by the graphics display system. It is used to provide realistic animation effects in applications ranging from games, multimedia, user interfaces etc based on Newtonian laws of physics. With the evolution of high-end graphics on embedded platforms, there is a subtle need for the provision of a dedicated physics library whose processing can be offloaded to separate processing unit other than the main processor to maintain the optimal frame-rate requirement of the end user application. Currently physics processing is accelerated using high power high performance architectures like graphics processing units (GPU) or physics processing units (PPU). Reconfigurable computing facilitates execution of software with higher flexibility than that of any dedicated hardware while providing increased performance and low power consumption. In this paper we demonstrate that physics processing can be optimized using a reconfigurable processor. We also propose a novel method of executing collision solver algorithm in a physics engine library on Coarse Grained Reconfigurable Array (CGRA) based reconfigurable processors.
A novel scanning force microscopy probe with thermal-electrical actuation and piezo-resistive sensing

This work presents a novel scanning force microscopy probe with electro-thermal actuation and piezo-resistive detection. The fabricated probe of 270 × 58 × 2.5 μm3 can generate a force between 1.05 μN and 16.52 μN with a resolution of nano-newton, and can detect the nanometer-scale deflection. The minimum detectable output signal of the probe could be down to 20 μV and the sensitivity reaches 4.92 mV μm−1. This is a straight-forward technique for characterizing the mechanical properties of micro/nano-structures and devices.
Influence of conversion of penicillin G into a basic derivative on its accumulation and subcellular localization in cultured macrophages

beta-Lactam antibiotics do not accumulate in phagocytes, probably because of their acidic character. We therefore synthesized a basic derivative of penicillin G, namely, 14C-labeled N-(3-dimethylamino-propyl)benzylpenicillinamide (ABP), and studied its uptake and subcellular localization in J774 macrophages compared with that of 14C-labeled penicillin G. Whereas the intracellular concentration (Ci) of penicillin G remained lower than its extracellular concentration (Ce), ABP reached a Ci/Ce ratio of 4 to 5. Moreover, approximately 50% of intracellular ABP was found associated with lysosomes after isopycnic centrifugation of cell homogenates in isoosmotic Percoll or hyperosmotic sucrose gradients. The behavior of ABP was thus partly consistent with the model of de Duve et al. (C. de Duve, T. de Barsy, B. Poole, A. Trovet, P. Tulkens, and A. Van Hoof, Biochem. Pharmacol. 23:2495-2531, 1974), in which they described the intralysosomal accumulation of weak organic bases in lysosomes. Although ABP is microbiologically inactive, our results show that beta-lactam antibiotics can be driven into cells by appropriate modification. Further efforts therefore may be warranted in the design of active compounds or prodrugs that may prove useful in the chemotherapy of intracellular infections.
Naive Bayes Modeling with Proper Smoothing for Information Extraction

Information extraction (IE) summarizes a collection of documents into a structural representation by identifying specific facts from text. The naive Bayes model is one of the first statistical models that have been applied to IE for learning extraction patterns from labeled data. In spite of the simplicity and popularity of the naive Bayes model, we have observed a formulation problem in previous work on naive Bayes IE. In this paper, we present a formal naive Bayes modeling for IE, by which the derived formula for the filler probability estimation is more theoretically sound. We also address smoothing techniques in order to overcome the data sparseness problem. Our proposed smoothing strategy is shown to be critical to the robustness of a naive Bayes IE system. Experimental results show that our naive Bayes IE systems achieve better extraction performance compared to related work.
Interaction patterns in human augmented mapping

Graphical Abstract Interactive robots can benefit from learning from humans in situated communications, for instance in a guided tour, where the human user explains the environment to a mobile robot, or from being instructed to handle a specific task in an industrial setting. We have to assume that human users do not always give unambiguous or consistent information, which might result in inconsistent information being stored, which can later lead to confusing situations in further interaction with the user. We suggest to consider behavioural features observable from user actions, including commands given to the robot, to detect inconsistencies in the information given by the user with respect to the overall understanding of the situation. We explain our concept of Interaction Patterns and discuss how such patterns can be applied to support hypothesis generation regarding the category of a presented item in a guided tour scenario, which can lead to meaningful request formulation in mixed-initiative interaction. We report on results regarding the identification of Interaction Patterns in data from a user study with 37 subjects.
Parsing with an Extended Domain of Locality

One of the claimed benefits of Tree Adjoining Grammars is that they have an extended domain of locality (EDOL). We consider how this can be exploited to limit the need for feature structure unification during parsing. We compare two wide-coverage lexicalized grammars of English, LEXSYS and XTAG, finding that the two grammars exploit EDOL in different ways.
Flexible terahertz modulators based on graphene FET with organic high-k dielectric layer

Graphene field-effect-transistor (GFET) based terahertz (THz) modulators usually possess an unfulfilling modulation depth (MD) of 15% ∼ 20%. In this work we developed a flexible GFET based THz modulator, where the graphene monolayer is coated with an organic high-K dielectric as the screening layer and an ion-gel layer as the gate. With this exquisite composite modulating structure, the new device possesses a significantly enhanced modulation depth (MD) up to 70% over a broad frequency band, an extremely low insert loss (IL) of 1.3 dB, and unexpected good structural and properties stability. The large intrinsic MD, low IL, as well as its flexibility, render this performance enhanced modulator versatile in fabrication of novel THz devices, such as multi-level modulator, for nonplanar or wearable applications.
Measuring the Absorption Coefficients of TiN Thin Films with Different Thickness

In this work, different thick TiN thin films were prepared by pulsed laser deposition on GaN substrates at 650°C. The crystal structure and morphology are characterized by X-ray Diffraction and Atomic Force Microscopy. We characterized the sample by cathodoluminescence spectroscopy at room temperature and measured the thickness of the film by a cross-sectional scanning electron microscopy. Combining the attenuation of light intensity and the thickness, the absorption coefficient of the samples can be estimated by the Beer-Lambert law. The absorption coefficients of TiN metal thin film obtained here are closed with each other. The optical properties may not change with increasing thickness.
Formalized methodology for data reuse exploration in hierarchical memory mappings

Efficient use of an optimized memory hierarchy to exploit temporal locality in the memory accesses on array signals can have a very large impact on the power consumption in data dominated applications. In the past, this task has been identified as crucial in a complete low-power memory management methodology. But effective formalized techniques to deal with this specific task have not been addressed yet. In this paper the design freedom available for the basic problem is explored in-depth and the outline of a systematic solution methodology is proposed. The efficiency of the methodology is illustrated on a real-life motion estimation application.
Concomitant Use of Dietary Supplements and Medicines in Patients due to Miscommunication with Physicians in Japan

We previously reported that some patients used dietary supplements with their medication without consulting with physicians. Dietary supplements and medicines may interact with each other when used concomitantly, resulting in health problems. An Internet survey was conducted on 2109 people who concomitantly took dietary supplements and medicines in order to address dietary supplement usage in people who regularly take medicines in Japan. A total of 1508 patients (two admitted patients and 1506 ambulatory patients) and 601 non-patients, who were not consulting with physicians, participated in this study. Purpose for dietary supplement use was different among ages. Dietary supplements were used to treat diseases in 4.0% of non-patients and 11.9% of patients, while 10.8% of patients used dietary supplements to treat the same diseases as their medication. However, 70.3% of patients did not declare dietary supplement use to their physicians or pharmacists because they considered the concomitant use of dietary supplements and medicines to be safe. A total of 8.4% of all subjects realized the potential for adverse effects associated with dietary supplements. The incidence of adverse events was higher in patients who used dietary supplements to treat their disease. Communication between patients and physicians is important for avoiding the adverse effects associated with the concomitant use of dietary supplements and medicines.
Combining Automatic and Manual Index Representations in Probabilistic Retrieval

Results from research in information retrieval suggest that significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness could be obtained by combining results from multiple index representations and query strategies. Recently, an inference network based probabilistic retrieval model has been proposed, which views information retrieval as an evidential reasoning process in which multiple sources of evidence about document and query content are combined to estimate the relevance probabilities. In this paper we report a series of experiments we conducted using a specific implementation of this model to study the retrieval effectiveness of combining manaul and automatic index representations in queries and documents. The results indicate that significant benefits in retrieval effectiveness can be obtained through combined representations.
Effects of Heat Acclimation on Photosynthesis, Antioxidant Enzyme Activities, and Gene Expression in Orchardgrass under Heat Stress

The present study was designed to examine the effects of heat acclimation on enzymatic activity, transcription levels, the photosynthesis processes associated with thermostability in orchardgrass (Dactylis glomerata L.). The stomatal conductance (Gs), net photosynthetic rate (Pn), and transpiration rates (Tr) of both heat-acclimated (HA) and non-acclimated (NA) plants were drastically reduced during heat treatment [using a 5-day heat stress treatment (38/30 °C ‒ day/night) followed by a 3-day recovery under control conditions (25/20 °C ‒ day/night), in order to consolidate the second cycle was permitted]. Water use efficiency increased more steeply in the HA (4.9 times) versus the NA (1.8 times) plants, and the intercellular CO2 concentration decreased gently in NA (10.9%) and HA (25.3%) plants after 20 d of treatments compared to 0 days’. Furthermore, heat-acclimated plants were able to maintain significant activity levels of superoxide disumutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), guaiacol peroxidase (POD), and transcription levels of genes encoding these enzymes; in addition, HA plants displayed lower malondialdehyde content and lower electrolyte leakage than NA plants. These results suggest that maintenance of activity and transcription levels of antioxidant enzymes as well as photosynthesis are associated with variable thermostability in HA and NA plants. This likely occurs through cellular membrane stabilization and improvements in water use efficiency in the photosynthetic process during heat stress. The association between antioxidant enzyme activity and gene expression, both of which may vary with genetic variation in heat tolerance, is important to further understand the molecular mechanisms that contribute to heat tolerance.