Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ultrasound-Guided Percutaneous Peripheral Nerve Stimulation: A Pragmatic Effectiveness Trial of a Nonpharmacologic Alternative for the Treatment of Postoperative Pain.

BACKGROUND Percutaneous peripheral nerve stimulation (PNS) is an analgesic modality involving the insertion of a lead through an introducer needle followed by the delivery of electric current after needle withdrawal. This modality has been used extensively to treat chronic pain, but only small series have been published involving postoperative pain. The ultimate objective of this study is to determine the postoperative effects of percutaneous PNS following moderately to severely painful ambulatory surgery within a real-world clinical practice setting. The primary hypothesis is that surgical pain and opioid consumption during the initial 7 days after surgery will be reduced by percutaneous PNS compared with usual and customary analgesia (dual primary outcome measures). DESIGN A multicenter pragmatic effectiveness trial. We are randomizing participants having painful orthopedic surgical procedures of the upper and lower extremity to receive 14 days of either 1) electrical stimulation or 2) sham in a double-masked fashion. End points are being assessed at various time points over 12 postoperative months. SUMMARY The postoperative experience will be much improved if percutaneous PNS provides potent analgesia while concurrently decreasing opioid requirements following painful surgery. Because this modality can be administered for up to 60 days at home, it may provide postoperative analgesia that outlasts surgical pain yet has relatively few risks and, unlike opioids, has no systemic side effects or potential for abuse, addiction, and overdose. Percutaneous PNS has the potential to revolutionize postoperative analgesia as it has been practiced for the past century. This study will inform key stakeholders regarding an evidence-based nonpharmacologic approach to the management of postoperative pain.
Molecular Evolution Genetics Analysis using likelihood, distance and parimony methods. Molecular Biology and

Seagrass ecosystems have suffered significant declines globally and focus is shifting to restoration efforts. A key component to successful restoration is an understanding of the genetic factors potentially influencing restoration success. This includes understanding levels of connectivity between restoration locations and neighbouring seagrass populations that promote natural recovery (source and sink populations), the identification of potential donor populations and assessment of genetic diversity of restored meadows and material used for restoration. In this study we carry out genetic surveys of 352 individuals from 13 populations using 11 polymorphic microsatellite loci to inform seagrass restoration activities by: i) understanding levels of genetic and genotypic diversity within meadows; and ii) understanding genetic structure and patterns of connectivity among these
Telomere dysfunction promotes cholangiocyte senescence and biliary fibrosis in primary sclerosing cholangitis

Cellular senescence and biliary fibrosis are prototypical features of obliterative cholangiopathies, such as primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC). Telomere dysfunction can lead to senescence either through telomere erosion or damaged telomeres. Our goal was to investigate a mechanistic relationship between telomere damage and biliary fibrosis in PSC. Telomere attrition was observed in the bile ducts of patients with PSC along with a reduction in telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) expression, compared with that in normal livers. Similarly, liver tissue from mouse models of biliary fibrosis showed telomere attrition with increased damage at telomeres measured as telomere-associated foci (TAF). Cellular models of senescence induction increased the TAF in cholangiocytes. This coincided with decreased TERT expression and increased senescence, which was rescued by modulating TERT levels. Epigenetic analysis revealed increased acquisition of repressive histone methylation at the TERT promoter, which correlated with decreased TERT transcription. Cholangiocyte-selective deletion of TERT in mice exacerbated fibrosis, whereas androgen therapy toward telomerase rescued liver fibrosis and liver function in a genetic mouse model of PSC. Our results demonstrate a mechanistic role for telomere dysfunction in cellular senescence and fibrosis that characterize PSC. This suggests that PSC may be, in part, a telomere biology disorder, and identifies TERT as a potential therapeutic target.
Letrozole During Frozen Embryo Transfer in Women With Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome

There was no difference in live-birth rate between women who had letrozole application and those with artificial cycles during frozen embryo transfer in women with polycystic ovarian syndrome. OBJECTIVE: To compare live-birth rates between letrozole application and artificial cycle for endometrium preparation during frozen embryo transfer (FET) cycle among women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). METHODS: A randomized controlled trial was conducted. Women with PCOS were randomized to letrozole application for ovulation induction compared with artificial cycle for endometrial preparation during FET. The primary outcome was live-birth rate per embryo transfer. Secondary outcomes included pregnancy-related outcomes, perinatal outcomes, and maternal complication rates. Assuming α=0.05 and 80% power, 186 patients per group were required to demonstrate a difference of 15% in live-birth rate: 205 patients (at least) per group were randomized to allow for a 10% dropout rate. RESULTS: Four hundred twenty patients were enrolled from 2018 to 2021. Two hundred ten patients were assigned to the letrozole application group, and 210 were assigned to the artificial cycle group. There was no difference in the live-birth rate (42.4% vs 42.9%, P=>.99). There was no difference in secondary outcomes, including clinical pregnancy rate (51.4% vs 56.2%, P=.378), implantation rate (51.8% vs 55.8%, P=.401), and miscarriage rate (8.6% vs 11.0%, P=.511). For perinatal outcomes, singleton birth weight was significantly higher in the artificial cycle group (3,108±56 g vs 3,301±58, P=.018), and the incidence of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) was significantly higher in letrozole application group (14.6% vs 5.6%, P=.050). The other outcome was no difference in maternal complications. CONCLUSION: There was no difference in pregnancy outcomes between letrozole application compared with artificial cycle for endometrial preparation in women with PCOS who underwent FET. The risk of GDM was higher in the letrozole application group, and the singleton birth weight was lower in the artificial cycle group. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: Chinese Clinical Trial Registry, ChiCTR1800014746.
Animal efficacy study of a plant extract complex (BEN815) as a potential treatment for COVID-19

In a short time, several types of injectable and oral therapeutics have been developed and used to effectively manage patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). BEN815 is an improved mixture of three extracts (Psidium guajava, Camellia sinensis, and Rosa hybrida) recognized by the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety of Korea as a health food ingredient that alleviates allergic rhinitis. The current animal efficacy study was performed to assess its probability of improving COVID-19 symptoms. BEN815 treatment significantly increased the survival of K18-hACE2 transgenic mice and reduced viral titers in the lungs at 5 days post infection (DPI). Furthermore, the lungs of the treated mice showed mild tissue damage at 5 DPI and nearly complete recovery from COVID-19 at 14 DPI. BEN815 appears to be an effective and minimally toxic anti-SARS-CoV-2 agent in mice and has potential for clinical applications.
Contextualizing Cisgender Women's Histories of Intimate Partner Violence Victimization With Men and Women

Sexual minoritized women (SMW) are more likely than exclusively heterosexual women to experience intimate partner violence (IPV). We conducted in-depth interviews with a clinic-based sample of plurisexual SMW (n = 25) ages 18 to 34 about the gender of their perpetrators. Participants primarily experienced physical and sexual IPV in relationships with men and emotional abuse in relationships with women. IPV perpetrated by men often included weapons with women fearing for their lives. Offering patients information about IPV resources and supports that do not make assumptions about women's sexualities may create more opportunity for empathic and effective communication with SMW experiencing IPV.
Carbon-Oriented Electricity Balancing Market for Generators and Flexible Loads

—In the transition to a low-carbon economy, the market share for renewable energy is significantly increasing and gradually substituting traditional energy. The high renewables penetration results in increased balancing action volumes due to system stability requirements. The balancing market (BM) primarily turns down renewable generation and turns up traditional carbon-intensive generation in response to real-time energy imbalance. Existing dual-stage market mechanisms conflict with the carbon reduction trajectory by implementing balancing actions regardless of their carbon footprint. This paper proposes a novel balancing market model by evaluating the negative externality of carbon to coordinate the environmental targets in both markets. Firstly, mathematical models are formulated for key participants in the dual-stage market . The emissions of dispatchable generators and flexible loads are distinguished by their operation modes and flexibility types, respectively. Carbon signals are incorporated into their bid/offer pricing models through the carbon emission flow (CEF) model. By integrating these incentives for carbon reduction, the dual-stage market model is formulated to minimize economic and environmental costs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed model effectively reduces carbon emissions in the BM and strike a balance between cost-efficiency and environmental benefits. It enables system operators to incentivize decarbonized energy resources in both stages.
Compensation of adverse growing media effects on plant growth and morphology by supplemental LED lighting

There is an increasing interest in alternatives to peat in growing media due to environmental constraints. However, plants grown in peat substitutes often show impaired growth compared to plants grown in peat-based media. Hence, it would be interesting to know whether these deficiencies can be compensated by supplementing other growth factors, e.g. light. The present study aims to investigate the interactive nature between growing media and supplemental lighting on plant growth and morphology, and to examine whether supplemental light emitting diode (LED) lighting may compensate adverse growing media effects. Basil (Ocimum basilicum L.) and Chinese cabbage (Brassica rapa subsp. pekinensis) were grown in different growing media consisting of peat, green compost, coconut pulp, wood fibre, perlite and sphagnum moss under blue, red and far-red supplemental LED lighting. We found significant interactions between growing media and supplemental photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) on plant growth, morphology and development. At low light intensities, peat-based and substituted growing media performed similarly, whereas with increasing light intensities the peat-based growing media significantly outperformed their alternatives. The substrate choice determines the required amount of supplemental light to compensate for adverse growing media effects and the amount varies depending on plant species and season. Thereby, it was indicated that red light alleviates adverse growing media effects best. We also found that far-red light is not effective when background PAR is low and becomes more effective under high background PAR. The implications and prospects of the results are discussed.
Rapid Biotic and Abiotic Transformation of Toxins produced by Ostreopsis. cf. ovata

The dinoflagellate Ostreopsis cf. ovata produces several families of toxic polyketides. Despite only a few field measurements of these phycotoxins in seawater and aerosols, they are believed to be responsible for dermatitis and the toxic inhalations reported during blooms of this species. Therefore, the stability of these compounds in seawater is essential to understanding the causes of these symptoms, however, this has never been assessed. In the current study, the optimization of a solid phase extraction (SPE) procedure was first performed to ensure the most efficient extraction of all phycotoxins known to be produced by this strain, including the recently described liguriatoxins. The SPE cartridge SDBL® under non acidified conditions offered the best option. The stability of the ovatoxins and the liguriatoxins under biotic and abiotic stress was assessed by exposing the spent medium of a culture of Ostreopsis cf. ovata to its bacterial consortium and natural sunlight. A rapid biotic transformation was detected for both families of compounds. When exposed to bacteria, the half-lives of the ovatoxins were reached before 10 h and at 36 h, 97% of these toxins had been transformed. The half-lives of the liguriatoxins were 10 h under these conditions. Photolysis (abiotic degradation) of the ovatoxins (T1/2 < 36 h) was faster than for the liguriatoxins (T1/2 > 62 h). Although none of the catabolites of these phycotoxins were thoroughly identified, an untargeted metabolomics approach combined with molecular networking highlighted the presence of several compounds exhibiting structural similarities with the ovatoxins. Additional work should confirm the preliminary findings on these potential ovatoxins’ catabolites and their biological properties. The rapid transformation of O. cf. ovata’s phycotoxins introduces questions concerning their presence in seawater and their dispersion in the sea spray aerosols. The compounds involved in the toxic inhalations and dermatitis often experienced by beachgoers may stem from the catabolites of these toxins or even unrelated and as yet unidentified compounds.
The paradox of closing mutual funds to new investors

I provide an explanation for the well-established paradox that mutual funds that close to new investors fail to maintain their pre-closure positive abnormal performance after closing. Using a large sample of active US equity mutual funds, I find that the within-style performance ranks of closed funds revert to the mean as strongly as those of a control group of open funds. Furthermore, I show that funds that are closed do not drastically alter their investment allocations and hold portfolios that are indistinguishable from their portfolios prior to closing in terms of risk-adjusted performance. Therefore, mean reverting stock returns explain the deterioration in fund performance after closing to new investors. I also document that funds are not capable of better preserving their assets when anticipating a decline in performance by closing to new investors and thus adding exclusivity. Furthermore, the control group of open funds does not suffer from excessive flows. Closing to new investors is at best unnecessary from the stand-alone perspective of the fund.
Centre Emile Bernheim

This paper unpacks the continuum of social finance institutions (SFIs), ranging from foundations offering pure grants to social banks supplying soft loans. The in-between category includes “quasifoundations” granting loans requiring partial repayment. In our model, SFIs maximize their social contribution arising from financing successful social projects, under a budget constraint dictated by their funders. We determine the feasibility of each SFI category. Quasifoundations appear to be efficient and adapted to low market rates. However, reciprocity from SFI borrowers can elicit a so-called “holdup” effect, whereby the SFI charges a high interest rate to its loyal clients.
Optionality in Australian Football League draftee contracts

Though player drafts have commonly been utilised to equitably disperse amateur talent and avoid bidding wars, often they have also been accused of creating a monopsony labour market which restricts player movement. Within the Australian Football League (AFL) some have called for the increase of the initial draftee contract from two to three seasons, which further pushes the envelope on monopsony power. Instead of increasing the contract length, this paper suggests a call option to be purchased by the teams allowing them to add a further season to the draftee contract at a predetermined compensation package should they choose to do so at the end of the initial contract. The call prices per pick were calculated using the Black-Scholes model and were valued between 1% and 1.5% of the pick value. However, it failed to follow a monotonic function similar to pick value, owing to managerial overconfidence and sunk investment plays. Overall, the findings allow teams to procure the option of increasing initial draftee contracts and not impede further on a player’s ability to move.
MEGA: Machine Learning-Enhanced Graph Analytics for Infodemic Risk Management

The COVID-19 pandemic brought not only global devastation but also an unprecedented infodemic of false or misleading information that spread rapidly through online social networks. Network analysis plays a crucial role in the science of fact-checking by modeling and learning the risk of infodemics through statistical processes and computation on mega-sized graphs. This article proposes MEGA, Machine Learning-Enhanced Graph Analytics, a framework that combines feature engineering and graph neural networks to enhance the efficiency of learning performance involving massive graphs. Infodemic risk analysis is a unique application of the MEGA framework, which involves detecting spambots by counting triangle motifs and identifying influential spreaders by computing the distance centrality. The MEGA framework is evaluated using the COVID-19 pandemic Twitter dataset, demonstrating superior computational efficiency and classification accuracy.
A Review of the Ganges Basin; its Fish and Fisheries.

The Ganges Basin drains an area of 814 800 km, spans the countries India, Nepal and Bangladesh and is occupied by around 200 million people. In its lower sectors it contains some of the highest population densities in the world and also includes major urban areas. There is pollution from industrial and domestic sources. There is also an intense demand for water principally for agriculture. In India all tributaries of the Ganges are controlled by barrages, which divert an estimated 66 percent of the flow for large-scale irrigation. Water is returned with reduced quality and increased chemical contamination. The barrages form barriers across the river. The largest is the Farraka Barrage, which diverts most of the flow down the Hooghly Canal and has been the source of considerable 229
A Synergy between On- and Off-Chip Data Reuse for GPU-based Out-of-Core Stencil Computation

Stencil computation is an extensively-utilized class of scientific-computing applications that can be efficiently accelerated by graphics processing units (GPUs). Out-of-core approaches enable a GPU to handle large stencil codes whose data size is beyond the memory capacity of the GPU. However, current research on out-of-core stencil computation primarily focus on minimizing the amount of data transferred between the CPU and GPU. Few studies consider simultaneously optimizing data transfer and kernel execution. To fill the research gap, this work presents a synergy between on- and off-chip data reuse for out-of-core stencil codes, termed SO2DR. First, overlapping regions between data chunks are shared in the off-chip memory to eliminate redundant CPU-GPU data transfer. Secondly, redundant computation at the off-chip memory level is intentionally introduced to decouple kernel execution from region sharing, hence enabling data reuse in the on-chip memory. Experimental results demonstrate that SO2DR significantly enhances the kernel-execution performance while reducing the CPU-GPU data-transfer time. Specifically, SO2DR achieves average speedups of 2.78x and 1.14x for five stencil benchmarks, compared to an out-of-core stencil code which is free of redundant transfer and computation, and an in-core stencil code which is free of data transfer, respectively.
Atopic dermatitis and skin disease Filaggrin-stratified transcriptomic analysis of pediatric skin identifies mechanistic pathways in patients with atopic dermatitis

Background: Atopic dermatitis (AD; eczema) is characterized by a widespread abnormality in cutaneous barrier function and propensity to inflammation. Filaggrin is a multifunctional protein and plays a key role in skin barrier formation. Loss-of-function mutations in the gene encoding filaggrin (FLG) are a highly significant risk factor for atopic disease, but the molecular mechanisms leading to dermatitis remain unclear. Objective: We sought to interrogate tissue-specific variations in the expressed genome in the skin of children with AD and to investigate underlying pathomechanisms in atopic skin. Methods: We applied single-molecule direct RNA sequencing to analyze the whole transcriptome using minimal tissue samples.
Stream Members Only: Data-Driven Characterization of Stellar Streams with Mixture Density Networks

Stellar streams are sensitive probes of the Milky Way's gravitational potential. The mean track of a stream constrains global properties of the potential, while its fine-grained surface density constrains galactic substructure. A precise characterization of streams from potentially noisy data marks a crucial step in inferring galactic structure, including the dark matter, across orders of magnitude in mass scales. Here we present a new method for constructing a smooth probability density model of stellar streams using all of the available astrometric and photometric data. To characterize a stream's morphology and kinematics, we utilize mixture density networks to represent its on-sky track, width, stellar number density, and kinematic distribution. We model the photometry for each stream as a single-stellar population, with a distance track that is simultaneously estimated from the stream's inferred distance modulus (using photometry) and parallax distribution (using astrometry). We use normalizing flows to characterize the distribution of background stars. We apply the method to the stream GD-1, and the tidal tails of Palomar 5. For both streams we obtain a catalog of stellar membership probabilities that are made publicly available. Importantly, our model is capable of handling data with incomplete phase-space observations, making our method applicable to the growing census of Milky Way stellar streams. When applied to a population of streams, the resulting membership probabilities from our model form the required input to infer the Milky Way's dark matter distribution from the scale of the stellar halo down to subhalos.