Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pupil size, white-to-white corneal diameter, and anterior chamber depth in patients with myopia.

PURPOSE To evaluate anatomical parameters in a population of patients with myopia. METHODS Nine hundred sixty-four myopic eyes (-3.00 to -20.00 diopters [D] spherical equivalent refraction) were evaluated to measure mesopic and photopic pupil size with an infrared pupillometer; anterior chamber depth and white-to-white corneal diameter were obtained with Orbscan II (Bausch & Lomb). Correlation analysis was performed to evaluate the relationships among anatomical parameters of the anterior segment of the eye. RESULTS Average change in pupil size between mesopic and photopic conditions shows a uniform gap of 1.5 mm in patients aged 18 to 62 years with a slight insignificant trend to decrease with age. Photopic and mesopic pupil size were highly correlated (r=0.694, P<.001) and the difference between both measures was positively correlated with mesopic pupil size (r=0.207, P<.001) and inversely correlated with photopic pupil size (r=0.561, P<.001). Anterior chamber depth and white-to-white corneal diameter were positively correlated (r=0.389, P<.001). White-to-white corneal diameter and anterior chamber depth were not correlated with age (r=-0.096, P<.001) or anterior chamber depth (r=-0.183, P<.001-0.183) as a function of age. CONCLUSIONS Average difference between photopic and mesopic pupil size remained constant across the range of ages included in this cohort. A positive correlation was noted between anterior segment dimensions, and anterior chamber depth decreased with age.
Ecological implications of metabolic compensation at low temperatures in salamanders

Global warming is influencing the biology of the world’s biota. Temperature increases are occurring at a faster pace than that experienced by organisms in their evolutionary histories, limiting the organisms’ response to new conditions. Mechanistic models that include physiological traits can help predict species’ responses to warming. Changes in metabolism at high temperatures are often examined; yet many species are behaviorally shielded from high temperatures. Salamanders generally favor cold temperatures and are one of few groups of metazoans to be most species-rich in temperate regions. I examined variation in body temperature, behavioral activity, and temperature dependence of resting heart rate, used as a proxy for standard metabolic rate, in fire salamanders (Salamandra salamandra). Over 26 years, I found that salamanders are behaviorally active at temperatures as low as 1 °C, and aestivate at temperatures above 16 °C. Infrared thermography indicates limited thermoregulation opportunities for these nocturnal amphibians. Temperature affects resting heart rate, causing metabolic depression above 11 °C, and metabolic compensation below 8 °C: heart rate at 3 °C is 224% the expected heart rate. Thus, salamanders operating at low temperatures during periods of peak behavioral activity are able to maintain a higher metabolic rate than the rate expected in absence of compensation. This compensatory mechanism has important ecological implications, because it increases estimated seasonal heart rates. Increased heart rate, and thus metabolism, will require higher caloric intake for field-active salamanders. Thus, it is important to consider a species performance breadth over the entire temperature range, and particularly low temperatures that are ecologically relevant for cold tolerant species such as salamanders.
Identification of synaptic plasma membrane proteins co‐precipitated with fibrillar β‐amyloid peptide

The β‐amyloid peptide that is overproduced in Alzheimer's disease rapidly forms fibrils, which are able to interact with various molecular partners. This study aimed to identify abundant synaptosomal proteins binding to the fibrillar β‐amyloid (fAβ) 1–42. Triton X‐100‐soluble proteins were extracted from the rat synaptic plasma membrane fraction. Interacting proteins were isolated by co‐precipitation with fAβ, or with fibrillar crystallin as a negative control. Protein identification was accomplished (1) by separating the tryptically digested peptides of the protein pellet by one‐dimensional reversed‐phase HPLC and analysing them using an ion‐trap mass spectrometer with electrospray ionization; and (2) by subjecting the precipitated proteins to gel electrophoretic fractionation, in‐gel tryptic digestion and to matrix‐assisted laser desorption/ionization time‐of‐flight mass measurements and post‐source decay analysis. Six different synaptosomal proteins co‐precipitated with fAβ were identified by both methods: vacuolar proton‐pump ATP synthase, glyceraldehyde‐3‐phosphate dehydrogenase, synapsins I and II, β‐tubulin and 2′,3′‐cyclic nucleotide 3′‐phosphodiesterase. Most of these proteins have already been associated with Alzheimer's disease, and the biological and pathophysiological significance of their interaction with fAβ is discussed.
Effects of an integrated approach of hatha yoga therapy on functional disability, pain, and flexibility in osteoarthritis of the knee joint: a randomized controlled study.

OBJECTIVES The study objectives were to evaluate the efficacy of integrating hatha yoga therapy with therapeutic exercises for osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee joints. DESIGN This was a prospective, randomized, active controlled trial. Two hundred and fifty (250) participants who had OA knees and who were between 35 and 80 years (yoga 59.56±9.54) and (control 59.42±10.66) from the outpatient department of Ebnezar Orthopedic Center, Bengaluru, were randomly assigned to receive hatha yoga therapy or therapeutic exercises after transcutaneous electrical stimulation and ultrasound treatment (20 minutes per day). Both of the groups practiced supervised interventions (40 minutes per day) for 3 months. One hundred and eighteen (118) (yoga) and 117 (control) subjects were available for the final analysis. RESULTS There were significant differences within (Wilcoxon's, p<0.001) and between the groups (Mann-Whitney U, p<0.001) on all the variables, with better improvements in the yoga than the control groups. Walking pain in the yoga (37.3%, 64.9%) and control (24.9%, 42%), knee disability in the yoga (59.7%, 83%) and control (32.7%, 53.6%), range of knee flexion in yoga (12.7%, 26.5% right, 13.5%, 28% left) and control (6.9%, 13.3% right, 5.6%, 11.5% left), joint tenderness in yoga (52.3%, 86.1%) and control (28%, 57.1%), swelling in yoga (55.4%, 85.9%) and control (32.1%, 60%), crepitus in yoga (44.0%, 79.9%) and control (27.0%, 47.8%) and walking time in yoga (26.6%, 52.8%) and control (9.3%, 21.6%), all improved more in the yoga than the control groups on the 15th and 90th day, respectively. CONCLUSIONS An integrated approach of hatha yoga therapy is better than therapeutic exercises as an adjunct to transcutaneous electrical stimulation and ultrasound treatment in improving walking pain, range of knee flexion, walking time, tenderness, swelling, crepitus, and knee disability in patients with OA knees.
Robust Static Output Feedback Controllers via Robust Stabilizability Functions

This technical note addresses the design of robust static output feedback controllers that minimize a polynomial cost and robustly stabilize a system with polynomial dependence on an uncertain vector constrained in a semialgebraic set. The admissible controllers are those in a given hyper-rectangle for which the system is well-posed. First, the class of robust stabilizability functions is introduced, i.e., the functions of the controller that are positive whenever the controller robustly stabilizes the system. Second, the approximation of a robust stabilizability function with a controller-dependent lower bound is proposed through a sums-of-squares (SOS) program exploiting a technique developed in the estimation of the domain of attraction. Third, the derivation of a robust stabilizing controller from the found controller-dependent lower bound is addressed through a second SOS program that provides an upper bound of the optimal cost. The proposed method is asymptotically non-conservative under mild assumptions.
Induction of Plasma (TRAIL), TNFR-2, Fas Ligand, and Plasma Microparticles after Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 (HIV-1) Transmission: Implications for HIV-1 Vaccine Design

ABSTRACT The death of CD4+ CCR5+ T cells is a hallmark of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. We studied the plasma levels of cell death mediators and products—tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL), Fas ligand, TNF receptor type 2 (TNFR-2), and plasma microparticles—during the earliest stages of infection following HIV type 1 (HIV-1) transmission in plasma samples from U.S. plasma donors. Significant plasma TRAIL level elevations occurred a mean of 7.2 days before the peak of plasma viral load (VL), while TNFR-2, Fas ligand, and microparticle level elevations occurred concurrently with maximum VL. Microparticles had been previously shown to mediate immunosuppressive effects on T cells and macrophages. We found that T-cell apoptotic microparticles also potently suppressed in vitro immunoglobulin G (IgG) and IgA antibody production by memory B cells. Thus, release of TRAIL during the onset of plasma viremia (i.e., the eclipse phase) in HIV-1 transmission may initiate or amplify early HIV-1-induced cell death. The window of opportunity for a HIV-1 vaccine is from the time of HIV-1 transmission until establishment of the latently infected CD4+ T cells. Release of products of cell death and subsequent immunosuppression following HIV-1 transmission could potentially narrow the window of opportunity during which a vaccine is able to extinguish HIV-1 infection and could place severe constraints on the amount of time available for the immune system to respond to the transmitted virus.
Research on Hybrid Query Expansion Algorithm

This paper proposes a hybrid query expansion method named GAO, which derives from the fact that more and more documents have been annotated with one or several ontology concepts based on their semantic. The GAO method employs a combination of global analysis and ontology technology to improve query expansion performance. The global analysis technology is used to obtain term-concept association, and ontology technology is used to carry out semantic reasoning. Experimental results of query expansion on two different corpuses show that, compared with traditional query expansion methods, the GAO method can improve the precision effectively.
Detecting DNA Base Modifications Using Single Molecule , Real-Time Sequencing

Traditionally, it has been a challenge to study the wide variety of base modifications that are seen in nature. Most high-throughput techniques focus only on cytosine methylation and involve both bisulfite sequencing to convert unmethylated cytosine nucleotides to uracil nucleotides, and comparison of sequence reads from bisulfite-treated and untreated samples. SMRT sequencing, in contrast, does not require base conversion within the source material in order to detect base modifications. Instead, the kinetics of base addition is measured during the normal course of sequencing. These kinetic measurements present characteristic patterns in response to a wide variety of base modifications – researchers at PacBio have been able to observe unique kinetic characteristics for over 25 base modifications.
THE STATE OF THE ART AND THE FUTURE OF MODELING AND SIMULATION SYSTEMS

In this document we present a survey of the state of the art of Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Systems, and the anticipation of future technologies in this domain. We provide classifications of currently available M&S technologies and projects from various perspectives using illustrations with the hope that this work will provide as many pointers for developers as possible and serve as a source of reference to future articles on this topic. We will also provide an assessment of Open Source Software (OSS) and its current and possible future effects and uses in the M&S market. Our discussions will slightly emphasize large-scale military M&S projects as these are usually very long-term and the most serious M&S applications that have enormous influence in shaping up both military and commercial M&S markets. Such large projects are also prone to get out of hand quickly; therefore an analysis of potential risks that should be managed as an umbrella activity when undertaking such projects will also be presented.
FIDD Bearing-Only SLAM

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is perhaps the most fundamental problem to solve in robotics in order to build truly autonomous mobile robots. The sensors have a large impact on the algorithm used for SLAM. In this work a novel method, called Filtered Inverse Depth Delayed (FIDD) Initialization which is intended for initializing new features in Bearing-Only SLAM systems. Unlike range sensors which provide range and angular information, a bearing sensor (e.g. cameras) measures only the bearing (angular information) of features. Therefore depth information (range) cannot be obtained in a single step. This fact has propitiated the emergence of a new family of SLAM algorithms: the Bearing-Only SLAM methods, which mainly rely in especial techniques for features system-initialization in order to enable the use of bearing sensors (as cameras) in SLAM systems. The proposed approach is based in an inverse depth parameterization and delayed initialization scheme. The main idea is to incorporate to the SLAM process, an extra uncorrelated filter, which progressively incorporates the new bearing measurements needed to estimate the full state of each new feature. Several simulations are given in order to show the performance of the proposed approach.
Enabling Web Services Policy Negotiation with Privacy preserved using XACML

In recent Web services research, there are increasing demands and discussions about negotiation technologies for different Web services applications. One of the important topics is the policy negotiation. As many business activities become automated, policy compliance negotiation between human agents can be a bottleneck. In this paper, we focus on the policy negotiation research issues in privacy policy. We adopt the extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) as a policy description language and explore its potential in privacy policy negotiation. We first formalize the negotiation process in the context of Web services. Then, we illustrate the policy negotiation model by introducing a policy negotiation point (PNP) between the policy enforcement point (PEP) and policy decision point (PDP) in the XACML policy management architecture. We discuss different phases in a privacy policy negotiation and finally we illustrate how PNP can help on negotiating policies through an example scenario
A hybrid SLAM representation for dynamic marine environments

We present a hybrid SLAM system for marine environments that combines cubic splines to represent the trajectories of dynamic objects, point features to represent stationary objects and an occupancy grid to represent land masses. This hybrid representation enables SLAM to be applied in environments with moving objects, where solutions using point features alone are computationally prohibitive or where dense objects e.g. landmasses can not be represented correctly using point features. Estimation is achieved using a sliding window framework with reversible data-association and reversible model-selection. Our main contributions are: (i) a hybrid representation of the environment; (ii) occupancy grid fusion is continually refined for the duration of the sliding window; (iii) the trajectories of dynamic objects are represented using cubic splines and (iv) radar scans are re-rendered at a sub-scan resolution to compensate for the egomotion during the scan acquisition period. We show that the continual refinement of the occupancy grid greatly improves the quality of the resultant map, leading to a better estimate of the egomotion and therefore better estimates of the trajectories of dynamic objects. We also demonstrate that the use of cubic splines to represent trajectories has two major advantages: (i) the state space is compressed i.e. many vehicle poses can be represented using a single spline section and (ii) the trajectory becomes continuous and so fusing information from asynchronous sensors running at multiple frequencies becomes trivial. The efficacy of our system is demonstrated using real marine radar data, showing that it can successfully estimate the positions/velocities of objects and landmasses observed during a typical voyage on a small boat.
Complex Elastic Optical Network Simulator (CEONS)

This paper presents the features of an advanced software simulator for the Elastic Optical Network (EON) - Complex Elastic Optical Networks Simulator (CEONS). The CEONS is as a test environment for solving three main issues addressed in EON: Routing and Spectrum Assignment (RSA) problems; Routing, Modulation and Spectrum Assignment (RMSA) problems, and addressing regenerator placement problem. With a universal API, users can design their own algorithms in any programming language and implement them in the simulator as plugins to solve the problems mentioned above. The ease and versatility of implementing the algorithms allows usage of the CEONS in advanced problems and for the introduction of EON technology.
Male with 45, X karyotype

A 5‐month‐old male child with the clinical stigmata of Turner syndrome, bilateral testes and a non‐mosaic 45, X karyotype in blood and skin tissue is presented. This is the second case reported in the literature of an “XO‐male” with normal external genitalia.
Representing and recognizing visual dynamic events with support vector machines

Support vector machines (SVM) have been recently introduced as techniques for solving pattern recognition and regression estimation problems. SVM are derived within the framework of statistical learning theory and combine a solid theoretical foundation with very good performances in several applications. In this paper we describe a system able to detect, represent, and recognize visual dynamic events from an image sequence. While the events are initially detected by means of low-level visual processing, both the representation and recognition stages are performed with SVM. Therefore, the system is trained, instead of programmed, to perform the required tasks. The very good results obtained on real image sequences indicate that SVM can be profitably used for the construction of flexible and effective systems based on computer vision.
Multiscale modelling of precipitation in concentrated alloys: from atomistic Monte Carlo simulations to cluster dynamics I thermodynamics

Abstract In a recent paper, the authors showed how the clusters free energies are constrained by the coagulation probability, and explained various anomalies observed during the precipitation kinetics in concentrated alloys. This coagulation probability appeared to be a too complex function to be accurately predicted knowing only the cluster distribution in Cluster Dynamics (CD). Using atomistic Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, it is shown that during a transformation at constant temperature, after a short transient regime, the transformation occurs at quasi-equilibrium. It is proposed to use MC simulations until the system quasi-equilibrates then to switch to CD which is mean field but not limited by a box size like MC. In this paper, we explain how to take into account the information available before the quasi-equilibrium state to establish guidelines to safely predict the cluster free energies.
Compounds with anti-influenza activity: present and future of strategies for the optimal treatment and management of influenza Part II: Future compounds against influenza virus

Summary In the first part of this overview, we described the life cycle of the influenza virus and the pharmacological action of the currently available drugs. This second part provides an overview of the molecular mechanisms and targets of still-experimental drugs for the treatment and management of influenza. Briefly, we can distinguish between compounds with anti-influenza activity that target influenza virus proteins or genes, and molecules that target host components that are essential for viral replication and propagation. These latter compounds have been developed quite recently. Among the first group, we will focus especially on hemagglutinin, M2 channel and neuraminidase inhibitors. The second group of compounds may pave the way for personalized treatment and influenza management. Combination therapies are also discussed. In recent decades, few antiviral molecules against influenza virus infections have been available; this has conditioned their use during human and animal outbreaks. Indeed, during seasonal and pandemic outbreaks, antiviral drugs have usually been administered in mono-therapy and, sometimes, in an uncontrolled manner to farm animals. This has led to the emergence of viral strains displaying resistance, especially to compounds of the amantadane family. For this reason, it is particularly important to develop new antiviral drugs against influenza viruses. Indeed, although vaccination is the most powerful means of mitigating the effects of influenza epidemics, antiviral drugs can be very useful, particularly in delaying the spread of new pandemic viruses, thereby enabling manufacturers to prepare large quantities of pandemic vaccine. In addition, antiviral drugs are particularly valuable in complicated cases of influenza, especially in hospitalized patients. To write this overview, we mined various databases, including Embase, PubChem, DrugBank and Chemical Abstracts Service, and patent repositories.
Multistep Regulation of Membrane Insertion of the Fusion Peptide of Semliki Forest Virus

ABSTRACT A prevailing model for virus membrane fusion proteins has been that the hydrophobic fusion peptide is hidden in the prefusion conformation, becomes exposed once the fusion reaction is triggered, and then either inserts into target membranes or is rapidly inactivated. This model is in general agreement with the structure and mechanism of class I fusion proteins, such as the influenza virus hemagglutinin. We here describe studies of the class II fusion protein E1 from the alphavirus Semliki Forest virus (SFV). SFV fusion is triggered by low pH, which releases E1 from its heterodimeric interaction with the E2 protein and induces the formation of a stable E1 homotrimer. The exposure and target membrane interaction of the E1 fusion peptide (residues 83 to 100) were followed using a monoclonal antibody (MAb E1f) mapping to E1 residues 85 to 95. In agreement with the known structure of SFV and other alphaviruses, the fusion peptide was shielded in native SFV particles and exposed when E1-E2 dimer dissociation was triggered by acidic pH. In contrast, the fusion peptide on purified E1 ectodomains (E1*) was fully accessible at neutral pH. Functional assays showed that MAb E1f binding at neutral pH prevented subsequent low-pH-triggered E1* interaction with target membranes and trimerization. E1* was not inactivated by low pH when treated either in the absence of target membranes or in the presence of fusion-inactive cholesterol-deficient liposomes. Thus, the membrane insertion of the E1 fusion peptide is regulated by additional low-pH-dependent steps after exposure, perhaps involving an E1-cholesterol interaction.
Novel therapies in the treatment of ulcerative colitis

Ulcerative colitis is a chronic inflammatory disease of the colon of unknown cause. Its course is one of relapse and remission and requires therapy for both the induction and maintenance of remission. Progress in the fields of genetics and immunology affords important advances in our understanding of the inflammatory process. Traditional therapy for ulcerative colitis with nonspecific anti-inflammatories remains our gold standard. This review examines the most recent compounds in development for the treatment of ulcerative colitis, including data from early clinical trials and the potential clinical impact of future entities.