Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Parity and risk of hemorrhagic strokes

Objectives: The association between parity and risk of hemorrhagic stroke (HS) remains to be clarified. This study assessed the association of parity with the overall risk of HS and compared its contribution to intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) and subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). Methods: We used a database from a nationwide multicenter case-control study, in which 471 female cases with incident HS were matched at 1:2 with 942 community or hospital controls. A total of 459 HS cases and 918 controls with information on parity were included. Parity was categorized as 0–1, 2, 3, and ≥4. Adjusted odds ratios (ORs) and their 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated by conditional logistic regression. As potential confounders, age, history of hypertension, history of diabetes, family history of stroke, smoking status, alcohol consumption, educational status, age at menarche, and use of oral contraceptives were included in the models. Results: Compared with nullipara and unipara, women with parity of 2, 3, and ≥4 had significantly higher risk for total HS, ICH, and SAH, respectively. Each additional parity increased the ORs of HS (adjusted OR for total HS = 1.27 [95% CI 1.14–1.41]; adjusted OR for SAH = 1.34 [95% CI 1.13–1.58]; adjusted OR for ICH = 1.27 [95% CI 1.08–1.48]). Likelihood ratio test for trends showed a significantly increased risk with increasing parity for total HS and for both types of HS (ptrend < 0.05 in all analyses). Conclusions: Increased number of childbirths may be related to an increased risk of both intracerebral hemorrhage and subarachnoid hemorrhage.
Government Debt, Human Capital, and Endogenous Growth

The effect of government debt on capital accumulation has been debated for more than a century. The debate has focused on the validity of the Ricardian equivalence hypothesis which asserts that the mix of government debt and nondistorting taxes to finance government expenditures has no real effect on an economy. In models with infinitely-lived agents, government bonds increase private assets by the full amount that offsets the rise in future tax liabilities for interest payments and the retirement of public debt. Even in a model with finitely-lived agents, Barro [1] showed that government debt is neutral when private intergenerational transfers are positive and when the rate of growth is lower than the interest rate. With operative intergenerational transfers, Carmichael [4] extended the debt neutrality into a regime where the rate of growth is greater than the interest rate while suggesting some sources of nonneutrality of public debt such as heterogeneous tastes and uncertainty. Moreover, Drazen [6] argued that when intergenerational transfers take the form of investments in human capital which have higher marginal returns than investments in physical capital, government bonds affect the equilibrium solution and increase welfare. In contrast, assuming that private intergenerational transfers are zero, van der Ploeg and Alogoskoufis [10] argued that an increase in government debt depresses real growth through reducing savings in an endogenous growth, overlapping-generations model. ' With constant population, the models mentioned above ignore possible responses of fertility to changes in government debt. In an overlapping-generations model with operative bequests, Becker and Barro [3] showed that the neutrality of social security needs modification if fertility is endogenous. Lapan and Enders [9] extended the insight of Becker and Barro [3] to examine the effects of government debt and found that a rise in government debt reduces fertility and raises capital intensity through increasing bequests which are part of the cost of having children. Wildasin [11] also obtained similar results. While endogenizing fertility, none of these models has endogenous growth of per capita income.
Impact of reconstituted cytosol on protein stability

Significance The cell cytoplasm contains a complex array of macromolecules at concentrations exceeding 300 g/L. The natural, most relevant state of a biological macromolecule is thus a “crowded” one. Moving quantitative protein chemistry from dilute solution to the inside of living cells represents a major frontier that will affect not only our fundamental biological knowledge, but also efforts to produce and stabilize protein-based pharmaceuticals. We show that the bacterial cytosol actually destabilizes our test protein, contradicting most theoretical predictions, but in agreement with a novel Escherichia coli model. Protein stability is usually studied in simple buffered solutions, but most proteins function inside cells, where the heterogeneous and crowded environment presents a complex, nonideal system. Proteins are expected to behave differently under cellular crowding owing to two types of contacts: hard-core repulsions and weak, chemical interactions. The effect of hard-core repulsions is purely entropic, resulting in volume exclusion owing to the mere presence of the crowders. The weak interactions can be repulsive or attractive, thus enhancing or diminishing the excluded volume, respectively. We used a reductionist approach to assess the effects of intracellular crowding. Escherichia coli cytoplasm was dialyzed, lyophilized, and resuspended at two concentrations. NMR-detected amide proton exchange was then used to quantify the stability of the globular protein chymotrypsin inhibitor 2 (CI2) in these crowded solutions. The cytosol destabilizes CI2, and the destabilization increases with increasing cytosol concentration. This observation shows that the cytoplasm interacts favorably, but nonspecifically, with CI2, and these interactions overcome the stabilizing hard-core repulsions. The effects of the cytosol are even stronger than those of homogeneous protein crowders, reinforcing the biological significance of weak, nonspecific interactions.
The contributions of the leading modes of the North Pacific sea surface temperature variability to the Arctic sea ice depletion in recent decades

Abstract. Arctic sea ice decrease in extent in recent decades has been linked to sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the North Pacific Ocean. In this study, we assess the relative contributions of the two leading modes in North Pacific SST anomalies representing external forcing related to global warming and internal forcing related to Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) to the Arctic sea ice loss in boreal summer and autumn. For the 1979–2017 period, the time series of the global warming and PDO modes show significant positive and negative trends, respectively. The global warming mode accounts for 44.9 % and 50.1 % of the Arctic sea ice loss in boreal summer and autumn during this period, compared to the 20.0 % and 22.2 % from the PDO mode. There is also a seasonal difference in the response of atmospheric circulations to the two modes. The PDO mode excites a wavetrain from North Pacific to the Arctic; the wavetrain is not seen in the response of atmospheric circulation to the global warming mode. Both dynamic and thermodynamic forcings work in the relationship of atmospheric circulation and sea ice anomalies.
Polyclonal Development of Mouse Mammary Preneoplastic Nodules

Studies of cellular interactions are critical to the understanding of tumorigenesis. Although many studies have demonstrated a monoclonal composition of advanced neoplasms in humans and mice, the clonal composition of smaller, antecedent lesions has been studied less thoroughly. To examine the clonal development of breast cancer, we generated chimeric mammary glands using mouse mammary epithelium with an inherited predisposition for neoplasia. Analysis of whey acidic protein-transforming growth factor-α transgenic mouse mammary glands, chimeric for two different cell lineage markers, revealed that mammary ducts and alveoli are polyclonal, and putative early preneoplastic lesions, hyperplastic alveolar nodules (HANs), frequently are polyclonal. Furthermore, the chimeric patch patterns in individual HANs were similar to the patterns observed in pregnant chimeric mammary glands. Thus, polyclonality in HANs appears to reflect persistence of the polyclonal architecture of ducts and/or alveoli, suggesting that hyperplasia formation can be the result of non-cell autonomous local tissue microenvironmental influences on groups of cells, rather than clonal progression of a single initiated cell.
Advanced Fitness Landscape Analysis and the Performance of Memetic Algorithms

Memetic algorithms (MAs) have demonstrated very effective in combinatorial optimization. This paper offers explanations as to why this is so by investigating the performance of MAs in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. A special class of MAs is used to discuss efficiency and effectiveness for local search and evolutionary meta-search. It is shown that the efficiency of MAs can be increased drastically with the use of domain knowledge. However, effectiveness highly depends on the structure of the problem. As is well-known, identifying this structure is made easier with the notion of fitness landscapes: the local properties of the fitness landscape strongly influence the effectiveness of the local search while the global properties strongly influence the effectiveness of the evolutionary meta-search. This paper also introduces new techniques for analyzing the fitness landscapes of combinatorial problems; these techniques focus on the investigation of random walks in the fitness landscape starting at locally optimal solutions as well as on the escape from the basins of attractions of current local optima. It is shown for NK-landscapes and landscapes of the unconstrained binary quadratic programming problem (BQP) that a random walk to another local optimum can be used to explain the efficiency of recombination in comparison to mutation. Moreover, the paper shows that other aspects like the size of the basins of attractions of local optima are important for the efficiency of MAs and a local search escape analysis is proposed. These simple analysis techniques have several advantages over previously proposed statistical measures and provide valuable insight into the behaviour of MAs on different kinds of landscapes.
Expression of matrix metalloproteinases and tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases define the migratory characteristics of human monocyte‐derived dendritic cells

Dendritic cells (DCs) have an essential role in the initiation of immune responses as they deliver antigen/epitope and the appropriate signals to activate naïve T cells and thus start an immune response. In order to fulfil their function, DCs have to patrol different part of the body, thus migrating through the extracellular matrix to sample the local ‘antigenic’ environment. In the present study, we have investigated which enzymes might be involved in this process using the Matrigel trans‐well migration assay, an in vitro model of extracellular matrix migration. In this assay we analysed the migratory ability of interleukin‐4 (IL‐4)/granulocyte macrophage–colony‐stimulating factor (GM‐CSF)‐derived immature DCs as well as mature DCs, induced by tumour necrosis factor‐α (TNF‐α) and modified vaccinia virus Ankara (MVA). The ‘mature’ DCs showed an increased migration through Matrigel, which was significantly inhibited by inhibitors of matrix metalloproteinases (MMP). We also observed that the dominant MMP involved in this process was MMP‐9, and a concomitant decrease of the endogenous tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (TIMP)‐1 and TIMP‐2 was also observed. Collectively these data suggest that the balance between MMP/TIMP determines the net migratory capacity of human DCs. Surprisingly, TIMP‐3 was significantly increased in mature DC. Our data thus indicate that MMP and TIMP play a role in the migratory ability of human DCs. Our results also suggest that TIMP‐3 expression might represent a new marker of maturation of human DCs.
Impact of Parenteral Fat Composition on Cholestasis in Preterm Infants

Objectives: Parenteral nutrition–associated liver disease (PNALD) is frequently detected in neonatal intensive care units. Parenteral lipid emulsion (PLE) content has been implicated in its pathogenesis. We aimed to study the effect on incidence and outcome of PNALD by replacing soy-based PLE with olive oil–based PLE in a population-based group of preterm infants. Methods: All infants in Stockholm County with gestational age (GA) <30 weeks were included (n = 615). Infants who died before 28 days of age or were referred to or from other regions were excluded (n = 97). PNALD was defined as conjugated serum bilirubin ≥30 &mgr;mol/L and exceeding 20% of the total fraction on at least 2 occasions. Two different 2-year time periods were compared: before (SOY period) and after (OLIVE period) switching PLE. For each PNALD case, 2 GA-matched controls were randomly identified. Results: PNALD incidence was 14.8% (37/250) in the SOY period and 12.7% (34/268) in the OLIVE period (P = 0.52). The OLIVE infants with PNALD had more risk factors, such as lower GA and longer periods of parenteral nutrition, for developing PNALD than the SOY infants. Nevertheless, treatment during the SOY period was an independent risk factor for PNALD in logistic regression analysis. Conclusions: Population-based incidence of PNALD is 1 of 7 in preterm infants with GA < 30 weeks. Changing from soy oil to olive oil–based PLE did not decrease the incidence of PNALD significantly. Olive oil–based PLE carries an equal or slightly decreased risk to develop PNALD compared with soy oil–based PLE.
Relationships between the completion of first cleavage and the chromosomal complement, sex, and developmental rates of bovine embryos generated in vitro

One thousand eighty‐four two‐cell bovine embryos produced from 1,574 oocytes matured and fertilized in vitro were cultured as groups separated according to the time when they completed their first cleavage (24,30,40,48, or 62 hr postinsemination; hpi). At 5 days after insemination, the proportions of each group that had progressed to the eight‐cell stage or beyond were determined and the 350 that had done so were fixed and examined cytogenetically for cell number, chromosomal abnormalities, and sex. Embryos in the “early” cleaving (24 and 30 hpi) and “late” cleaving (40–62 hpi) groups were compared. Early cleaving embryos were more likely to have developed to the eight‐cell stage or beyond (52.2% vs. 20%), contained more cells (22 vs. 17), and were more likely to be male (3.6:1 vs. 0.93:1). It is suggested that these phenotypic differences between the sexes begin before the embryonic genome is generally thought to become activated and are due either to differential processing of X‐ and Y‐bearing sperm within the zygote or to very early differential expression of genes derived from X‐ and Y‐bearing sperm. © 1993 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Effect of Syringeal Denervation in the Budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus): The Role of the Syrinx in Call Production

In the budgerigar, the left and right tracheosyringeal nerves (ts) were sectioned both above and below the common anastomosis in order to assess the roles of the hypoglossal nuclei and syringeal muscle halves in the control of call production. Signal processing software was used to quantify changes in contact call fundamental frequency and duration, and similarity analysis for pre- and postsurgical contact calls was performed by means of spectrogram cross-correlation. After resecting a portion of either the right or left ts nerve above the anastomosis (thereby eliminating the input from the ipsilateral half of the brainstem), contact call fundamental frequency decreased 40-50% on Day 1 postsurgery, while call structure and duration remained largely unaffected. Fundamental frequency returned to normal within 4-7 days after surgery. In contrast, nerve sectioning below the anastomosis on either side of the syrinx (thereby eliminating input to the ipsilateral half of the syringeal muscles) resulted in moderately noisy harsh-sounding calls with little change in temporal characteristics. Thus, budgerigars differ from many oscines studied to date in that they do not demonstrate laterality in vocal control at the level of the syrinx. Vocalizations produced by birds after bilateral syringeal denervation were abnormal, consisting entirely of broadband harmonic sounds with very low fundamental frequencies (i.e., less than 900 Hz) and poor frequency modulation. In contrast, individual call durations, as well as the rhythm and patterning of vocalizations resembling warble song, were remarkably similar to presurgical recordings after both unilateral and bilateral ts nerve resection. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Design, Formulation, and Physicochemical Evaluation of Montelukast Orally Disintegrating Tablet

Background: Orally disintegrating tablets (ODTs) are a modern form of tablets that when placed in the oral cavity, disperses rapidly. These tablets have advantages, particularly good applications for children and old patients who have a complication in chewing or swallowing solid dosage forms. The aim of this study was to design, formulate, and evaluate the physicochemical properties of 5 mg montelukast ODTs for the prevention of asthma and seasonal allergies. Methods: Formulations were prepared with different amounts of super disintegrating agents and effervescent bases as disintegrant agents. Flowability and compressibility of mixed powders were evaluated. The prepared formulations were tested for hardness, thickness, friability, weight variation, drug content, wetting time, disintegration time, dissolution study, and moisture uptake studies. Results: The compressibility index and angle of repose were in the range of 15.87%–23.43% and 32.93–34.65, respectively. Hardness, thickness, friability, wetting time, and content uniformity of formulations were in the range of 33.7–37.1 N, 3.00–3.81 mm, 0.27%–0.43%, 31–50 s and 96.28%–99.90%, respectively. Disintegration time of the tablets prepared with super disintegrating agents, effervescent bases, and combination of two were in the range of 30–50, more than 60 and 20–36 s, respectively. Conclusions: Mixture of powders and tablets passed all the specified tests. The results showed formulations prepared by super disintegrating agents and super disintegrating agents with effervescent bases had shorter disintegration time compared to formulations with effervescent bases alone.
Coaction in multiple behavior change interventions: consistency across multiple studies on weight management and obesity prevention.

OBJECTIVE Coaction refers to the extent to which taking action on one behavior increases the odds of taking action on a second behavior. This integrative study examines the generalization of coaction in three studies on weight-related behaviors. METHOD Data from three randomized trials of tailored interventions (n = 1,277, n = 1,800, and n = 6,000) were examined to determine if coaction of behavior change occurred differentially in treatment and control groups. In each analysis, the likelihood of progressing to the Action or Maintenance stages for the target behaviors was evaluated using logistic regression. RESULTS Despite differences in populations, targeted behaviors, levels of tailoring in interventions, and timing of follow-up assessments, 17 out of 24 (70.8%) logistic regressions revealed significant coaction in the treatment group as opposed to only three out of 24 (12.5%) in the control condition. In 23/24 analyses, coaction of behavior change was larger on an absolute basis in the treatment group. Individuals in the treatment group progressing to Action/Maintenance for one behavior were 1.4-5 times more likely to make progress on another behavior compared to those in the treatment group who did not make such progress on the first behavior. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrates that despite considerable variability in study design, coaction reliably occurs more in the presence of Transtheoretical-Model based multiple behavior change interventions. Additional studies are needed to replicate these results in other behavioral areas and to examine the predictors of differential coaction. The ability to consistently create coaction within multiple behavior interventions can increase the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of multiple behavior change interventions.
The N‐ and C‐terminal fragments of ubiquitin are important for the antimicrobial activities

Secretory granules of chromaffin cells contain catecholamines and several antimicrobial peptides derived from chromogranins and proenkephalin‐A. These peptides are secreted in the extracellular medium following exocytosis. Here, we show that ubiquitin is stored in secretory chromaffin granules and released into the circulation upon stimulation of chromaffin cells. We also show that the C‐terminal fragment (residues 65–76) of ubiquitin displays, at the micromolar range, a lytic antifungal activity. Using confocal laser scan microscopy and rhodamine‐labeled synthetic peptides, we could demonstrate that the C‐terminal peptide (residues 65–76) is able to cross the cell wall and the plasma membrane of fungi and to accumulate in fungi, whereas the N‐terminal peptide (residues 1–34) is stopped at the fungal wall level. Furthermore, these two peptides act synergistically to kill filamentous fungi. Because of the interaction of the C‐terminal sequence of ubiquitin with calmodulin, the synthetic peptide (residues 65–76) was tested in vitro against calmodulin‐dependent calcineurin, an enzyme crucial for fungal growth. This peptide was found to inhibit the phosphatase activity of calcineurin. Our data show a new property of ubiquitin C‐terminal‐derived peptide (65–76) that could be used with N‐terminal peptide (1–34) as a new potent antifungal agent.
A Note on Monitoring Fuzzy Financial Returns

This paper presents change point analysis for stock market time series where it is assumed the rate of return on securities is approximated as LR-fuzzy numbers. We consider the change point detection in the mean and variance of returns. The methods are proposed and their theoretical aspects are studied. A real data set is also considered. Finally, a conclusion sectionis given.
Development of a dynamic cluster: enabling role of government policies in India

Cluster development remains an important goal for India, the same as in any other country. The policies for small and medium enterprises contained in this segment promise lucrative prospects for national economy. Through a case study, this paper analyses the role of central and state government policies in the development of a ceramic cluster. Historically, this cluster is centuries old. However, the present case analyses its evolution in the last six decades since its revival. Here, cluster has been found to be vibrant and dynamic in nature as the gaps and problems that existed at one point of time did not remain to be the same later. The case reveals both the processes of cooperation and competition among the co-located units of ceramic manufacturing units. There are some suggestions for specific policy interventions to make a levelled development of the cluster.
How a race to the bottom can make you fat

ABSTRACT This article measures the effect of fiscal competition on obesity rates in the United States through education and health spending. We hypothesize that fiscal competition to attract firms results in lower business tax revenues and higher public infrastructure spending which crowds out education and health spending leading to an increase in obesity rates. We empirically test this hypothesis. We find that there is significant fiscal competition to attract firms. Next, we show that when business tax revenues are lowered and public infrastructure spending favouring businesses increased, public health and education spending declines and obesity rates significantly increase. Thus, fiscal competition significantly contributes to obesity rates through the education and health spending channel.