Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Involvement of hypothalamic nitric oxide signaling in the modulation of a rat’s exercise capacity

Purpose The aim of this study was to explore the effect of nitric oxide (NO) in some regions of the hypothalamus on exercise capacity. Materials and methods To assess the role of central NO in exercise capacity, L-arginine (L-Arg, a precursor of NO synthesis), NG-nitro-L-arginine methyl ester (L-NAME, a NO synthase inhibitor), or placebo saline was injected into the lateral cerebral ventricle of rats once a day for 4 consecutive days. Thereafter, an one-time exhaustive treadmill exercise was performed, and the levels of nitrate/nitrite, as a marker of NO production, in blood plasma and hypothalamus were assayed. Neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS)-expressing cells were immunohistochemically stained and analyzed in the paraventricular nucleus (PVN), the dorsomedial hypothalamus (DMH), and the ventromedial hypothalamus. Exercise time to exhaustion and total workload were determined. Results Compared with the rats in the saline group, the exercise time to exhaustion and total workload increased 50% in the L-Arg group and decreased 50% in the L-NAME group. The nitrate/nitrite level of hypothalamus in the L-Arg group increased 50% and decreased 29.4% in the L-NAME group. The number of nNOS-positive cells was significantly increased, 56.5%, in PVN and, 119%, in DMH, but not in ventromedial hypothalamus. No significant changes in nNOS-positive cells were found in L-NAME-treated rats. Conclusion These results show that the modulation of hypothalamic NO signaling can affect the rat’s running performance during a treadmill exercise and that enhanced NO signaling by induction of nNOS in PVN and DMH plays a role in improving exercise capacity after central administration of L-Arg. NO signaling in PVN and DMH may be a useful target for the pharmacological intervention of exercise performance or capacity.
Effects of low phosphate intake on bone and mineral metabolism and microbial protein synthesis in lambs

Growing lambs were fed diets either low or adequate in phosphorus and their effects on Ca and P retention, bone formation and resorption and on ruminal microbial protein synthesis were measured. Plasma osteocalcin was used as an indicator of bone formation rate. Levels in plasma were lower in lambs fed the low P diet and were associated with a fall in plasma P concentration and reduced Ca and P retention. Low P intake had no effect on microbial protein synthesis or on bone resorption determined using urinary pyridinoline and deoxypyridinoline as markers. These results suggest that lack of mineral, rather than reduced ruminal microbial protein synthesis, is the main factor contributing to the reduction in bone formation rate seen in lambs fed low P diets.
Beneficial Effect of Eplerenone on Cardiac Remodelling and Electrical Properties of the Failing Heart

Introduction. The effect of chronic administration of eplerenone on cardiac remodelling and electrical properties was investigated in the failing heart of cardiomyopathic hamsters (TO-2) at five months of age. Materials and Methods. Two-month-old hamsters were treated with eplerenone (200 mg/kg/day) administered into the chow for a period of three months. Measurements of membrane potential were performed with intracellular microelectrodes connected to a high impedance DC amplifier. The thickness of the ventricular wall as well as the area of fibrosis were measured. To investigate the influence of eplerenone on the electrogenic sodium pump myocytes were isolated from the ventricle and the pump current density was whole cell clamp configuration. measured in voltage clamped cells using the whole cell clamp configuration Results. The results indicated that: 1) the width of the left and right ventricular wall was significantly reduced; 2) the heart weight/body weight ratio was decreased by 38±2.4% (n=24 P ) (p<0.05); 3) the fibrotic area in the left ventricle (LV) was reduced by 12.6±2% (n=25) (p<0.05); 4) the incidence of cardiac arrhythmias was decreased from 58±3.8% (n=20) in the control to 40±4.1% (n=20) (p<0.05) in animals treated with eplerenone. Moreover, a significant reduction in the dispersion of the QT interval was found with the drug; 5) eplerenone increased the resting potential of ventricular fibres from 64.3±1.5 mV to 73.4±1.4 mV (n=30) (p<0.05), an effect related to the activation of an electrogenic sodium pump. The conduction velocity, in longitudinal direction, was enhanced from 50±2.2 cm/s (n=10) in the controls to 59±2.4 cm/s (n=13) (p<0.05) in animals treated with eplerenone. Conclusions. Eplerenone reduces cardiac remodelling, the incidence of cardiac arrhythmias and improves impulse propagation, an effect in part related to the antifibrotic effect of the drug but also to the activation of the electrogenic sodium pump.
The Antifungal Protein AFP from Aspergillus giganteus Inhibits Chitin Synthesis in Sensitive Fungi

ABSTRACT The antifungal protein AFP from Aspergillus giganteus is highly effective in restricting the growth of major human- and plant-pathogenic filamentous fungi. However, a fundamental prerequisite for the use of AFP as an antifungal drug is a complete understanding of its mode of action. In this study, we performed several analyses focusing on the assumption that the chitin biosynthesis of sensitive fungi is targeted by AFP. Here we show that the N-terminal domain of AFP (amino acids 1 to 33) is sufficient for efficient binding of AFP to chitin but is not adequate for inhibition of the growth of sensitive fungi. AFP susceptibility tests and SYTOX Green uptake experiments with class III and class V chitin synthase mutants of Fusarium oxysporum and Aspergillus oryzae showed that deletions made the fungi less sensitive to AFP and its membrane permeabilization effect. In situ chitin synthase activity assays revealed that chitin synthesis is specifically inhibited by AFP in sensitive fungi, indicating that AFP causes cell wall stress and disturbs cell integrity. Further evidence that there was AFP-induced cell wall stress was obtained by using an Aspergillus niger reporter strain in which the cell wall integrity pathway was strongly induced by AFP.
Path Diversity Media Streaming over Best Effort Packet Switched Networks

Abstract : Recent years has witnessed phenomenal growth of the Internet. According to Internet Software Consortium, number of hosts has reached 171 millions in January 2003 versus 71 millions in January 2000 and 5.8 millions in January 1995. Part of this explosive expansion is the proliferation of multimedia data such as image, audio and video on the Internet. The current best-effort Internet, however, does not guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) such as minimum bandwidth, packet loss rate, and delay which are critical to many multimedia applications. As such, many significant challenges remain to design and deploy delay sensitive multimedia applications over the Internet effectively. In this dissertation, we develop a path diversity framework for concurrent media streaming to a receiver using multiple routes. Without requiring QoS, our framework improves the quality of the streamed media via multiple routes created using either multiple senders or relay nodes, in order to increase available bandwidth, reduce packet loss and delay. Our path diversity framework combines many approaches from the network architecture and protocols, to source and channel coding to in order to improve the overall quality of the streamed media. From an architecture point of view, our proposed path diversity framework combats packet loss, delay, and insufficient bandwidth for pre-recorded streaming media by sending packets simultaneously from multiple senders to a single receiver. For interactive and live streaming applications, the path diversity framework allows a single sender to send packets simultaneously on both default and redundant paths to the receiver. To create a redundant path, the sender sends packets to the appropriate relay node, which then forwards the packets to the receiver.
Estimation of the Human Extrathoracic Deposition Fraction of Inhaled Particles Using a Polyurethane Foam Collection Substrate in an IOM Sampler

Extrathoracic deposition of inhaled particles (i.e., in the head and throat) is an important exposure route for many hazardous materials. Current best practices for exposure assessment of aerosols in the workplace involve particle size selective sampling methods based on particle penetration into the human respiratory tract (i.e., inhalable or respirable sampling). However, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has recently adopted particle deposition sampling conventions (ISO 13138), including conventions for extrathoracic (ET) deposition into the anterior nasal passage (ET1) and the posterior nasal and oral passages (ET2). For this study, polyurethane foam was used as a collection substrate inside an inhalable aerosol sampler to provide an estimate of extrathoracic particle deposition. Aerosols of fused aluminum oxide (five sizes, 4.9 µm–44.3 µm) were used as a test dust in a low speed (0.2 m/s) wind tunnel. Samplers were placed on a rotating mannequin inside the wind tunnel to simulate orientation-averaged personal sampling. Collection efficiency data for the foam insert matched well to the extrathoracic deposition convention for the particle sizes tested. The concept of using a foam insert to match a particle deposition sampling convention was explored in this study and shows promise for future use as a sampling device.
Nonlinear dynamic and pattern bifurcations in a model for spatial patterns in young mussel beds

Young mussel beds on soft sediments can display large-scale regular spatial patterns. This phenomenon can be explained relatively simply by a reaction–diffusion–advection (RDA) model of the interaction between algae and mussel, which includes the diffusive spread of mussel and the advection of algae. We present a detailed analysis of pattern formation in this RDA model. We derived the conditions for differential-flow instability that cause the formation of spatial patterns, and then systematically investigated how these patterns depend on model parameters. We also present a detailed study of the patterned solutions in the full nonlinear model, using numerical bifurcation analysis of the ordinary differential equations, which were obtained from the RDA model. We show that spatial patterns occur for a wide range of algal concentrations, even when algal concentration is much lower than the prediction by linear analysis in the RDA model. That is to say, spatial patterns result from the interaction of nonlinear terms. Moreover, patterns with different wavelength, amplitude and movement speed may coexist. The results obtained are consistent with the previous observation that self-organization allows mussels to persist with algal concentrations that would not permit survival of mussels in a homogeneous bed.
An Improved Smartphone-Based Non-Participatory Crowd Monitoring System in Smart Environments

Mobile Crowd Sensing and Computing (MCSC) is a replacement of static sensing infrastructure by user's mobile sensor-enhanced devices. MCSC collects user's local knowledge such as local information, ambient, and traffic conditions using sensor-enabled devices. The collected information is further aggregated and transferred to the cloud for detailed analysis. In this paper, we propose a Smartphone-based non-participatory crowd monitoring system, named CrowdTrack, to monitor the movement patterns of one or more persons (non-participatory) using unmodified Smartphones in a densely crowded environment. CrowdTrack uses the Smartphone as a sensing unit without any hardware modification to extract the MAC ids from the wireless probe requests emitted from the users' devices. MAC ids are stored and processed locally for short-term analysis and then the filtered data is uploaded to the server for better analysis and visualization. We have also developed a real-time testbed to identify mobility patterns in the data collected from our Institute campus and it is deployed to find the visiting sequences of students. Real-time experiments on a proof-of-concept prototype testbed with our dataset show the usability of our proposed system.
Successive interference cancelation amenable multiple access (SAMA) for future wireless communications

In this work, we introduce a novel multiple access scheme which is based on the joint design of the system signature matrix at the transmitter and the successive interference cancelation (SIC) based detector at the receiver. The symbols of the different users are judiciously spread in the frequency (space) domain, which can be effectively exploited by the SIC based technique, such as the iterative message-passing algorithm (MPA), to cancel the multi-user interference as well as to obtain diversity gain. Numerical results show that the non-orthogonal system based on the proposed successive interference cancelation amenable multiple access (SAMA) paradigm employing the iterative MPA achieves significant performances gain over the orthogonal one for the same spectral efficiency with affordable complexity.
Bohmian Conditional Wave Functions (and the status of the quantum state)

The de Broglie - Bohm pilot-wave theory - uniquely among realistic candidate quantum theories - allows a straightforward and simple definition of the wave function of a subsystem of some larger system (such as the entire universe). Such sub-system wave functions are called “Conditional Wave Functions” (CWFs). Here we explain this concept and indicate the CWF's role in the Bohmian explanation of the usual quantum formalism, and then develop (and motivate) the more speculative idea that something like single-particle wave functions could replace the (ontologically problematical) universal wave function in some future, empirically adequate, pilot-wave-type theory. Throughout the presentation is pedagogical and points are illustrated with simple toy models.
The ‘essences’ of the fifth discipline: Or where does senge stand to view the world?

This paper tries to establish the ‘theories in use’ that lie behind the injunctions for a systems practice embodied in the Fifth Discipline. The basic assumptions of the paradigm are split into four: about epistemology, about the nature of human motivations, about traditional organizational practice, and finally about the necessary preconditions for a new form of organizational practice, namely ‘learning organization’. The paper concludes that the implicit ‘theory in use’ contains assumptions that are capable of developing in contradictory ways and that the choice of boundaries sharpens attention to intra-boundary events at the expense of perception of the relationships between the chosen system and its broader social and political context. Despite its claims the Fifth Discipline is essentially an extension of ‘scientific management’ and is primarily a justification for a new form of managerial hegemony.
Accessibility of flood risk insurance in the UK: confusion, competition and complacency

Flood risk insurance can be an effective tool in assisting the restoration of damaged property after a flood event and sustaining communities through difficult times. It can also form part of a wider flood risk management strategy. In the light of recent flood events in the UK and in the context of changing property insurance markets, the universal cover previously enjoyed by floodplain residents has been called into question. Conflicting media and industry views leave the floodplain resident and the wider community in confusion. A survey of floodplain residents in England regarding their experience with flooding and flood insurance in England has been undertaken. The results reveal that some floodplain residents do indeed encounter difficulties when seeking insurance for their homes. However, despite the risk‐averse policies of some insurers, availability of insurance is still strong in both at‐risk and previously flooded locations. Success in gaining insurance may lead to complacency among residents who see no advantage in pursuing other, more costly, damage mitigation actions. As a tool in risk management, therefore, the market is prevented from realising its potential by competition, which results in a lack of a consistent approach, rewards homeowners' search strategies and reduces information flow.
Lysophosphatidic Acid Receptors 1 and 2 Play Roles in Regulation of Vascular Injury Responses but Not Blood Pressure

Phenotypic modulation of vascular smooth muscle cells (SMCs) is essential for the development of intimal hyperplasia. Lysophosphatidic acid (LPA) is a serum component that can promote phenotypic modulation of cultured SMCs, but an endogenous role for this bioactive lipid as a regulator of SMC function in vivo has not been established. Ligation injury of the carotid artery in mice increased levels in the vessel of both autotaxin, the lysophospholipase D enzyme responsible for generation of extracellular LPA, and 2 LPA responsive G protein–coupled receptors 1 (LPA1) and 2 (LPA2). LPA1−/−2−/− mice were partially protected from the development of injury-induced neointimal hyperplasia, whereas LPA1−/− mice developed larger neointimal lesions after injury. Growth in serum, LPA-induced extracellular signal-regulated protein kinase activation, and migration to LPA and serum were all attenuated in SMCs isolated from LPA1−/−2−/− mice. In contrast, LPA1−/− SMCs exhibited enhanced migration resulting from an upregulation of LPA3. However, despite their involvement in intimal hyperplasia, neither LPA1 nor LPA2 was required for dedifferentiation of SMCs following vascular injury or dedifferentiation of isolated SMCs in response to LPA or serum in vitro. Similarly, neither LPA1 nor LPA2 was required for LPA to elicit a transient increase in blood pressure following intravenous administration of LPA to mice. These results identify a role for LPA1 and LPA2 in regulating SMC migratory responses in the context of vascular injury but suggest that additional LPA receptor subtypes are required for other LPA-mediated effects in the vasculature.
Modeling diurnal hormone profiles by hierarchical state space models

Adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) diurnal patterns contain both smooth circadian rhythms and pulsatile activities. How to evaluate and compare them between different groups is a challenging statistical task. In particular, we are interested in testing (1) whether the smooth ACTH circadian rhythms in chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia patients differ from those in healthy controls and (2) whether the patterns of pulsatile activities are different. In this paper, a hierarchical state space model is proposed to extract these signals from noisy observations. The smooth circadian rhythms shared by a group of subjects are modeled by periodic smoothing splines. The subject level pulsatile activities are modeled by autoregressive processes. A functional random effect is adopted at the pair level to account for the matched pair design. Parameters are estimated by maximizing the marginal likelihood. Signals are extracted as posterior means. Computationally efficient Kalman filter algorithms are adopted for implementation. Application of the proposed model reveals that the smooth circadian rhythms are similar in the two groups but the pulsatile activities in patients are weaker than those in the healthy controls. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An expert system to perform functional diagnosis of a bus subsystem

AGATHA is an expert system designed to assist in the test and diagnosis of Hewlett-Packard PA-RISC processor boards during manufacturing. It consists of several smaller cooperating expert systems, called slices, capable of diagnosing different parts of a circuit board. The authors focus on the slice responsible for diagnosing the cachebus subsystem, outlining its design and performance. This slice diagnoses failures on an electronic bus by processing a large quantity of test data. Rather than using heuristics, it uses a causal rule-based approach, and it is able to handle intermittent faults and also most situations involving multiple faults. Updating the system to handle new boards is made easier by separating board-specific knowledge from test-specific knowledge and the process is now automated. The system has been deployed and is in regular use at three sites. <<ETX>>
Pharmacokinetic drug-drug interaction and their implication in clinical management

Drug-drug interactions (DDIs) are one of the commonest causes of medication error in developed countries, particularly in the elderly due to poly-therapy, with a prevalence of 20-40%. In particular, poly-therapy increases the complexity of therapeutic management and thereby the risk of clinically important DDIs, which can both induce the development of adverse drug reactions or reduce the clinical efficacy. DDIs can be classify into two main groups: pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic. In this review, using Medline, PubMed, Embase, Cochrane library and Reference lists we searched articles published until June 30 2012, and we described the mechanism of pharmacokinetic DDIs focusing the interest on their clinical implications.
She Wore Something in Her Hair: The Effect of Ornamentation on Tipping

Stillman and Hensley (1980) found that restaurant waitresses who wore a flower in their hair received higher tips. However, the question remains whether it was the ornamentation, per se, or the flower, which influenced tipping. In this experiment, restaurant waitresses wore three different ornaments (a barrette with a flower, a little bird, or a sprig of black currant). Results show that ornamentation compared to nonornamentation was associated with greater tipping for both male and female customers. However, no differences were found between the three ornaments.
Allocating Transmission to Mitigate Market Power in Electricity Networks

We ask what conditions transmission contracts increase or mitigate market power. We show that the allocation process of transmission rights is crucial. In an efficient arbitraged uniform price auction, generators will only obtain contracts that mitigate their market power. However, if generators inherit transmission contracts or buy them in a ‘pay-as-bid’ auction, then these contracts can enhance market power. In the two-node network case, banning generators from holding transmission contracts that do not correspond to delivery of their own energy mitigates market power. Meshed networks differ in important ways as constrained links no longer isolate prices in competitive markets from market manipulation. The paper suggests ways of minimising market power considerations when designing transmission contracts.