Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mechanical and biological consequences of repetitive loading: crack initiation and fatigue failure in the red macroalga Mazzaella

SUMMARY On rocky shores, wave-swept macroalgae experience dramatic and repeated wave-induced hydrodynamic forces. However, previous studies of macroalgal mechanics have shown that individual waves are not forceful enough to account for observed rates of breakage. Instead, fatigue may contribute to algal breakage, with damage accumulating over time in conditions of repeated loading. Here I examine the entire process of fatigue, from crack initiation to eventual specimen fracture, in the common red alga Mazzaella. Propensity for fatigue failure in laboratory tests varied with life history phase and species: at a given repeated loading stress, male gametophytes endured more loading cycles before breakage than tetrasporophytes, which in turn lasted longer than female gametophytes; likewise, M. splendens withstood more loading cycles at a given repeated loading stress than M. flaccida. Fatigue failure begins with formation of cracks, the timing and location of which were assessed. Cracks formed, on average, after approximately 80–90% of cycles required for failure had passed, although crack timing varied with life history phase. Also, crack formation frequently occurred in association with endophytes and female gametophyte reproductive structures, suggesting a cost of endophyte infection and a tradeoff between reproduction and mechanical survival. Comparison between laboratory and field loading conditions provides robust confirmation that fatigue breaks fronds in natural M. flaccida populations. Large, female gametophyte fronds are predicted to be most susceptible to fatigue failure in the field, whereas small, male gametophyte fronds are least likely to break.
A taxonomy of accelerator architectures and their programming models

As the clock frequency of silicon chips is leveling off, the computer architecture community is looking for different solutions to continue application performance scaling. One such solution is the multicore approach, i.e., using multiple simple cores that enable higher performance than wide superscalar processors, provided that the workload can exploit the parallelism. Another emerging alternative is the use of customized designs (accelerators) at different levels within the system. These are specialized functional units integrated with the core, specialized cores, attached processors, or attached appliances. The design tradeoff is quite compelling because current processor chips have billions of transistors, but they cannot all be activated or switched at the same time at high frequencies. Specialized designs provide increased power efficiency but cannot be used as general-purpose compute engines. Therefore, architects trade area for power efficiency by placing in the design additional units that are known to be active at different times. The resulting system is a heterogeneous architecture, with the potential of specialized execution that accelerates different workloads. While designing and building such hardware systems is attractive, writing and porting software to a heterogeneous platform is even more challenging than parallelism for homogeneous multicore systems. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that allows us to define classes of accelerators, with the goal of focusing on a small set of programming models for accelerators. We discuss several types of currently popular accelerators and identify challenges to exploiting such accelerators in current software stacks. This paper serves as a guide for both hardware designers by providing them with a view on how software best exploits specialization and software programmers by focusing research efforts to address parallelism and heterogeneity.
Virtual shelves: interactions with orientation aware devices

Triggering shortcuts or actions on a mobile device often requires a long sequence of key presses. Because the functions of buttons are highly dependent on the current application's context, users are required to look at the display during interaction, even in many mobile situations when eyes-free interactions may be preferable. We present Virtual Shelves, a technique to trigger programmable shortcuts that leverages the user's spatial awareness and kinesthetic memory. With Virtual Shelves, the user triggers shortcuts by orienting a spatially-aware mobile device within the circular hemisphere in front of her. This space is segmented into definable and selectable regions along the phi and theta planes. We show that users can accurately point to 7 regions on the theta and 4 regions on the phi plane using only their kinesthetic memory. Building upon these results, we then evaluate a proof-of-concept prototype of the Virtual Shelves using a Nokia N93. The results show that Virtual Shelves is faster than the N93's native interface for common mobile phone tasks.
Using Dropped Call as an Authentication Factor

Increasing numbers of remotely accessed software applications are adopting Two Factor Authentication (TFA) methods, particularly when performing sensitive actions such as payment transactions. TFA methods, though addressed several weaknesses of purely password based authentication systems, have their own challenges such as their adverse effect on usability and, most notably, the operating cost. For instance, in a TFA mechanism that relies on sending a one-time password(OTP) to user's phone via SMS, the cost of just sending OTPs can be prohibitive for high volume transactions e.g. in case of an e-commerce payment gateway. We introduce "dropped call" initiated from a user's phone as a new authentication factor (AF), and present a novel authentication system that uses this new AF. We refer to a phone call which is instantaneously rejected by the callee as a dropped call. This system eliminates operational costs associated with a second factor of authentication. The proposed system can also be used as a sole authentication factor to build a passwordless authentication system. Analysis and evaluation of proposed system w.r. t various attack scenarios, performance and cost implications has been discussed. We show that cost savings in comparison to SMS based OTP transmission system are proportional to the volume of transactions. Considering a volume of 50,000 daily transactions and current pricing of sending bulk SMS (in UK), the cost of proposed system is less than 1% of the SMS based OTP alternative. An actual implementation of this system is deployed at: http://www.dcauth. in.
Epigenetics and life-long consequences of an adverse nutritional and diabetic intrauterine environment

The phenomenon that adverse environmental exposures in early life are associated with increased susceptibilities for many adult, particularly metabolic diseases, is now referred to as ‘developmental origins of health and disease (DOHAD)’ or ‘Barker’ hypothesis. Fetal overnutrition and undernutrition have similar long-lasting effects on the setting of the neuroendocrine control systems, energy homeostasis, and metabolism, leading to life-long increased morbidity. There are sensitive time windows during early development, where environmental cues can program persistent epigenetic modifications which are generally assumed to mediate these gene–environment interactions. Most of our current knowledge on fetal programing comes from animal models and epidemiological studies in humans, in particular the Dutch famine birth cohort. In industrialized countries, there is more concern about adverse long-term consequences of fetal overnutrition, i.e. by exposure to gestational diabetes mellitus and/or maternal obesity which affect 10–20% of pregnancies. Epigenetic changes due to maternal diabetes/obesity may predispose the offspring to develop metabolic disease later in life and, thus, transmit the adverse environmental exposure to the next generation. This vicious cycle could contribute significantly to the worldwide metabolic disease epidemics. In this review article, we focus on the epigenetics of an adverse intrauterine environment, in particular gestational diabetes, and its implications for the prevention of complex disease.
Inequality Constraints in Causal Models with Hidden Variables

We present a class of inequality constraints on the set of distributions induced by local interventions on variables governed by a causal Bayesian network, in which some of the variables remain unmeasured. We derive bounds on causal effects that are not directly measured in randomized experiments. We derive instrumental inequality type of constraints on nonexperimental distributions. The results have applications in testing causal models with observational or experimental data.
Targeting Topics: Recent Scientific References Rat Basal Forebrain Cholinergic Lesion Affects Neuronal Nitric Oxide Synthase Activity in Hippocampal and Neocortical Target Regions

Nitric oxide (NO) mediates a variety of mechanisms in the brain including cortical perfusion, learning and memory, and neuronal plasticity. Cholinergic dysfunction has been associated with some of these same processes, notably reduced cortical cerebral blood flow and impaired performance in learning and memory tasks. The authors use a single intracerebroventricular injection of 192Saporin (2.8 μg; Cat. # IT-01) to deplete the cholinergic neurons of the basal forebrain. Although total cortical neuronal NO synthase levels are not affected, the activity levels in select neocortical hippocampal neurons are reduced. The data suggest the ratio of catalytically active and inactive cortical NO synthase may be driven in part by basal cholinergic forebrain input.
A General Lattice Representation for Explicit Model Predictive Control

Model predictive control (MPC) is one of the most successful techniques to control multi-variable constraint systems. The MPC uses a mathematical model to predict the future effects of control inputs to system behaviors. The optimal control policy is obtained by solving an optimization problem that minimizes/maximizes a performance objective subject to inputs and outputs constraints over a future time horizon (Morari & Lee, 1999, Mayne et al., 2000, Dua et al, 2008). The MPC control laws are open-loop optimal with respect to the corresponding objective function. However, the conventional MPC may require intensive online computation due to the repetitive solutions of an optimization problem. This limits its applications to large and slowly varying systems. In addition, the MPC control strategy is hard to validate, especially for safety critical system (Grancharova & Johansen, 2005, Pistikopoulos, et al. 2001, Alessio & Bemporad 2009). In 2002, Bemporad, Morari, Dua & Pistikopolous introduced the concept of explicit MPC (eMPC). The eMPC reformulates the online optimization in a MPC into a mutli-parametric linear/quadratic program (mpLP/mpQP). The optimal control action is calculated off-line as a continuous piecewise-affine (PWA) function of the state and reference vectors (Saffer et al, 2004, Bemporad et al. 2002a, 2002b). The eMPC has several advantages: i) The online computational time can be reduced to the microsecond-millisecond range. It makes the eMPC attractive for fast systems; ii) The MPC functionality is achieved in an easily verifiable way. The eMPC control policies can be validated before real online operations; iii) The eMPC solutions can be implemented with low-cost hardware (Johansen et al., 2007, Wen & Ma, 2008a, 2008b). The eMPC is then promising to be used in embedded systems, small/medium process systems, where the control systems should not be more expensive than the process systems. The eMPC found successful applications in many areas, e.g. AC-DC converters (Beccuti et al. 2009), autonomous vehicle steering, air separation unit (Grancharova et al. 2004), active valve train, hybrid separation, air condition (Pistikopoulos, et al. 2001), biomedical systems and drug delivery systems (Dua et al, 2004), scheduling (Ryu, & Pistikopoulos, 2007), spacecraft attitude control (Hegrenas et al, 2000)and crude distillation unit (Pannocchia et al, 2007). The eMPC is essentially a strategy of trading time for space. A continuous PWA control map is calculated offline, and stored in memory for online usage (Pannocchia et al, 2007). The 10
Structure, mechanism and function of prenyltransferases.

In this review, we summarize recent progress in studying three main classes of prenyltransferases: (a) isoprenyl pyrophosphate synthases (IPPSs), which catalyze chain elongation of allylic pyrophosphate substrates via consecutive condensation reactions with isopentenyl pyrophosphate (IPP) to generate linear polymers with defined chain lengths; (b) protein prenyltransferases, which catalyze the transfer of an isoprenyl pyrophosphate (e.g. farnesyl pyrophosphate) to a protein or a peptide; (c) prenyltransferases, which catalyze the cyclization of isoprenyl pyrophosphates. The prenyltransferase products are widely distributed in nature and serve a variety of important biological functions. The catalytic mechanism deduced from the 3D structure and other biochemical studies of these prenyltransferases as well as how the protein functions are related to their reaction mechanism and structure are discussed. In the IPPS reaction, we focus on the mechanism that controls product chain length and the reaction kinetics of IPP condensation in the cis-type and trans-type enzymes. For protein prenyltransferases, the structures of Ras farnesyltransferase and Rab geranylgeranyltransferase are used to elucidate the reaction mechanism of this group of enzymes. For the enzymes involved in cyclic terpene biosynthesis, the structures and mechanisms of squalene cyclase, 5-epi-aristolochene synthase, pentalenene synthase, and trichodiene synthase are summarized.
Molecular detection of chromosomal translocations that disrupt the putative retinoblastoma susceptibility locus

A candidate DNA sequence with many of the properties predicted for the retinoblastoma susceptibility (RB1) locus has been cloned (S. H. Friend, R. Bernards, S. Rogelj, R. A. Weinberg, J. M. Rapaport, D. M. Albert, and T. P. Dryja, Nature [London] 323:643-645, 1986). The large size of this gene (ca. 200 kilobases [kb]) and its multiple dispersed exons (Wiggs et al., N. Engl. J. Med. 318:151-157, 1988) complicate molecular screening strategies important in prenatal and presymptomatic diagnosis and in carrier detection. Here we used field inversion gel electrophoresis (FIGE) to construct a restriction map of approximately 1,000 kb of DNA surrounding the RB1 locus and to detect the translocation breakpoints in three retinoblastoma patients. DNA probes from either the 5' or 3' end of the gene were used to detect a 250-kb EagI restriction fragment in DNA from unaffected individuals. Both probes identified an additional hybridizing fragment in the DNA from each patient, permitting the breakpoints in all three to be mapped within the cloned RB1 gene. Analysis of the breakpoint in one translocation cell line allowed the RB1 gene to be oriented with its 5' end toward the centromere. The 5' end of the gene also appeared to be associated with a clustering of sites for several infrequently cleaving restriction enzymes, indicating the presence of an HpaII tiny fragment island. The detection and mapping of the translocation breakpoints of all three retinoblastoma patients to within the putative RB1 gene substantiated the authenticity of this candidate sequence and demonstrated the utility of FIGE in detecting chromosomal rearrangements affecting this locus.
Performance evaluation of SpatialHadoop for big web mapping data

Web mapping services are utilizing and overlaying different layers of maps gained by an information system for spatial data. This technique allows simple sharing of spatial data. However, with the enormous amounts of big spatial data that support emerging web mapping applications, processing and analyzing such data as well as preserving high levels of performance have received a lot of attention especially in NoSQL community. However, the performance and deployment aspects of the proposed architectures need to be evaluated and compared with well-known relational architectures. In this paper, we investigate the performance of SpatialHadoop and compare it against a variety of datasets and with the use of different operations including index creation, K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), spatial join, and so on. The results of this study demonstrate that as the volume of data increases, SpatialHadoop scales well and performs better than the relational engine. Also, the performance of this tool on the same datasets in two kinds of operations is examined with SQL Server database. The experiments have shown that for a large amount of data, SpatialHadoop is more scalable and has a relatively better performance than SQL Server.
Anticonvulsant activity of Hedranthera barteri

Context: Hedranthera barteri (Hook.f.) Pichon (Apocynaceae) is used traditionally in the treatment of convulsion in Southern Nigeria. Objective: The anticonvulsant activity of the methanol extract of H. barteri leaves was investigated. Materials and methods: The anticonvulsant activity of the extract (50,100 and 200 mg/kg, p.o.) was investigated in seizures induced by picrotoxin and strychnine in mice. The total phenol and flavonoid contents were determined using a modified colorimetric method and the aluminium chloride method, respectively. The mineral composition of the plant was analyzed using atomic absorption spectrophotometry. Results: The extract significantly prolonged the onset and reduced the duration of the seizures induced by picrotoxin (5 mg/kg, i.p.) and strychnine (1 mg/kg, i.p.). The response was, however, not dose-dependent. Phenobarbitone (2 mg/kg) completely protected the animals from seizures while diazepam (1 mg/kg) only prolonged the onset and reduced the duration of the seizures. The total phenol and flavonoid contents were 236.81 ± 0.05 mg gallic acid equivalent/g dry weight and 51.45 ± 0.01 mg quercetin equivalent/g dry weight, respectively. The elemental analysis revealed the presence of calcium 102.87 mg/g, magnesium 63.29 mg/mg, iron 54.16 mg/g, potassium 54 mg/g, sodium 48.95 mg/g, zinc 46.70 mg/g, manganese 41.72 mg/g, and copper 18.29 mg/g. Discussion and conclusion: The results suggest that the methanol extract of H. barteri has anticonvulsant activity and may be exerting its effect by affecting the gabaergic and glycinergic mechanisms. The observed activity may be due to its flavonoid content and the appreciable amount of calcium present in the plant.
A synchrotron self-Compton model for the VHE gamma-ray emission from Cen A

The H.E. S.S. experiment has reported the detection of very high energy (VHE: E>100 GeV) gamma-ray emission from the well-known radio-galaxy Cen A. Following this discovery, we refine the previous multi-blob synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) model applied to the multi-wavelength emission from this source using the new H.E. S.S. data. The prediction of the VHE gamma-ray level of emission for Cen A presented in Lenain et al. paper agrees very well in the view of this recent data. Further VHE observations of Cen A might detect variability, which would comfort our inner jet modeling. The next generation of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes, will help to reveal possible multiple sources of VHE emission in the complex structure of Cen A.
Memory impairment, executive dysfunction, and intellectual decline in preclinical Alzheimer's disease

In the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA), we examined the temporal unfolding of declining performance on tests of episodic memory (Free Recall on the Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test), executive function (Category Fluency, Letter Fluency, and Trails), and Verbal Intelligence (Nelson, 1982; American Version of the Nelson Adult Reading Test [AMNART]) before the diagnosis of dementia in 92 subjects with incident Alzheimer's disease (AD) followed for up to 15 years before diagnosis. To examine the preclinical onset of cognitive decline, we aligned subjects at the time of initial AD diagnosis and examined the cognitive course preceding diagnosis. We found that declines in performance on tests of episodic memory accelerated 7 years before diagnosis. Declining performance on tests of executive function accelerated 2–3 years before diagnosis, and verbal intelligence declined in close proximity to diagnosis. This cognitive profile is compatible with pathologic data suggesting that structures which mediate memory are affected earlier than frontal structures during the preclinical onset of AD. It also supports the view that VIQ as estimated by the AMNART does not decline during the preclinical onset of AD. (JINS, 2008, 14, 266–278.)Supported in part by grants AG017854, AG08325, AG03949, and AG16573 from the National Institutes of Health, and by the National Institute on Aging Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health.
Rapid diagnostic tests to improve treatment of malaria and other febrile illnesses: patient randomised effectiveness trial in primary care clinics in Afghanistan

Objective To assess the impact of rapid diagnostic tests on the diagnostic accuracy and treatment of malaria and non-severe fever in an Asian setting. Design Patient randomised trial in primary level clinics. Setting Two areas of Afghanistan where Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium falciparum are endemic; one area with moderate transmission (eastern region) and one with low transmission (northern region). Participants 5794 patients of all ages with suspected malaria enrolled by 80 clinicians in 22 clinics. Interventions Malaria rapid diagnostic tests were compared with clinical diagnosis where no parasite diagnostic test was available, longer established field microscopy, and recently introduced microscopy. Main outcome measures Proportion of patients appropriately treated with an antimalarial, defined as patients with P vivax who received chloroquine, patients with P falciparum who received artemisinin based combination therapy, and patients with no malaria parasites who did not receive an antimalarial. Secondary outcomes included diagnostic test accuracy and the proportion of patients negative for malaria who received antibiotics and antimalarials. Results In the low transmission area, comparing rapid diagnostic tests with clinical diagnosis, 65% (212/325) versus 12% (40/321) of febrile patients were appropriately treated for malaria (adjusted odds ratio 92.7, 95% confidence interval 12.4 to 694.1, P<0.001). The proportion of patients who were negative for malaria and received an antibiotic was 57% (185/325) in the rapid diagnostic test arm compared with 14% (46/321) in the clinical diagnosis arm (16.9, 3.8 to 75.4, P<0.001). In the comparison of rapid diagnostic test with microscopy in the moderate transmission area, 83.6% (1696/2028) versus 76.3% (1512/1983) of patients were appropriately treated for malaria (1.70, 1.30 to 2.23, P<0.001). A higher proportion of P falciparum cases received appropriate treatment with artemisinin based combination therapy when malaria was diagnosed by rapid diagnostic test (82%, 58/71 v 32%, 24/76; 9.2, 3.88 to 21.66, P<0.001). Conclusions In South and central Asian regions of low to moderate malaria transmission where clinics lack capacity for diagnosis with rapid diagnostic tests or microscopy, the introduction of the tests should be considered to improve clinical care, reduce the overuse of antimalarials, and improve disease surveillance.