Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Both the cutaneous sensation and phosphene perception are modulated in a frequency-specific manner during transcranial alternating current stimulation.

PURPOSE Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) is a non-invasive stimulation technique for shaping neuroplastic processes and possibly entraining ongoing neural oscillations in humans. Despite the growing number of studies using tACS, we know little about the procedural sensations caused by stimulation. In order to fill this gap, we explored the cutaneous sensation and phosphene perception during tACS. METHODS Twenty healthy participants took part in a randomized, single-blinded, sham-controlled study, where volunteers received short duration stimulation at 1.0 mA intensity between 2 to 250 Hz using the standard left motor cortex-contralateral supraorbital montage. We recorded the perception onset latency and the strength of the sensations assessed by visual rating scale as dependent variables. RESULTS We found that tACS evoked both cutaneous sensation and phosphene perception in a frequency-dependent manner. Our results show that the most perceptible procedural sensations were induced in the beta and gamma frequency range, especially at 20 Hz, whereas minimal procedural sensations were indicated in the ripple range (140 and 250 Hz). CONCLUSIONS We believe that our results provide a relevant insight into the procedural sensations caused by oscillatory currents, and will offer a basis for developing more sophisticated stimulation protocols and study designs for future investigations.
Cooperative Database Systems

The sections in this article are 1 Overview 2 Structured Approach for Query Relaxation 3 Automatic Knowledge Acquisition 4 Cooperative Operations 5 A Scalable and Extensible Architecture 6 Performance Evaluation 7 Technology Transfer of Cobase 8 Conclusions 9 Acknowledgments
A teletraffic capacity analysis method for multiclass CDMA cellular systems

A capacity evaluation method for cellular systems with CDMA is introduced. In CDMA cellular systems, the capacity of each cell depends on the actual interference produced by users supported by the other cells of the systems. This is because cell capacity is interference-limited. In this way, valid configurations of the system in terms of users per cell taking into account the average interference are determined. A possible distribution of users per cell where all the users have a required E/sub b//N/sub 0/ for each different service is considered as a valid configuration. This information is used in the development of a birth and death process to evaluate the teletraffic system capacity. A unidimensional cellular system is used in the analysis and numerical results are obtained for different circuit switched services provided for the cdma2000 standard.
Serotonin binds to purified neuronal nitric oxide synthase: A possible explanation for ROS production induced by 5HT in the presence of nNOS

Serotonin (5HT) was shown to induce in vitro the production of ROS in the presence of neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) in addition to the basal NO• formation. With the aim of understanding this mechanism, this study investigated the potential binding of 5HT to nNOS. By using [3H]5HT, it is reported here that 5HT binds to nNOS, but only when the enzyme is active and in a superoxide-dependent manner. This binding is prevented by DPI but not by L-NAME. The formation of 5HT-nNOS complex was shown to be very well correlated with the production of ROS by 5HT in the presence of nNOS. A mechanism involving nNOS only in its initial step is proposed to explain both the formation of 5HT-nNOS complex and the production of ROS observed in the presence of nNOS and 5HT.
Replication but Not Transcription of Simian Virus 40 DNA Is Dependent on Nuclear Domain 10

ABSTRACT DNA viruses from several families including herpes simplex virus type 1, adenovirus type 5, and simian virus 40 (SV40), start their transcription and replication adjacent to a specific nuclear domain, ND10. We asked whether a specific viral DNA sequence determines the location of these synthetic activities at such restricted nuclear sites. Partial and overlapping SV40 sequences were introduced into a β-galactosidase expression vector, and the β-galactosidase transcripts were localized by in situ hybridization. Transcripts derived from control plasmids were found throughout the nucleus and at highly concentrated sites but not at ND10. SV40 genomic segments supported ND10-associated transcription only when the origin and the coding sequence for the large T antigen were present. When the large T-antigen coding sequence was eliminated but the T antigen was constitutively expressed in COS-7 cells, the viral origin was sufficient to localize transcription and replication to ND10. Deletion analysis showed that only the large T-antigen binding site II (the core origin) was required but the T antigen was needed for detectable transcription at ND10. Large T antigen expressed from plasmids without the viral core origin did not bind or localize to ND10. Blocking of DNA replication prevented the accumulation of transcripts at ND10, indicating that only sites with replicating templates accumulated transcripts. Transcription at ND10 did not enhance total protein synthesis of plasmid transcripts. These findings suggest that viral transcription at ND10 may only be a consequence of viral genomes directed to ND10 for replication. Although plasmid transcription can take place anywhere in the nucleus, T-antigen-directed replication is apparently restricted to ND10.
The diagnostic value of the forced expiratory time.

To the Editor. —Schapira et al 1 executed an excellent study of the FET in the diagnosis of obstructive airways disease. However, we are concerned about the reproducibility of the maneuver. We studied four internists examining 92 patients, yielding 342 examinations. 2 As in the study of Schapira et al, we used blinded, board-certified internists, who measured the FET while listening to the trachea with a stethoscope. We also trained our clinicians prior to the study by examining model patients. Unlike the study of Schapira et al, our examiners measured the FET with ordinary wristwatches, rather than stopwatches, and recorded the time to the nearest half second. When we analyzed our data using the spirometric and FET criteria of Schapira et al, we found that 38% of patients had airway obstruction. The κ statistic for measuring interphysician agreement was 0.27. When we explored the reason for only "fair agreement" between
Mastering the Photothermal Effect in Liquid Crystal Networks: A General Approach for Self‐Sustained Mechanical Oscillators

Chemical networks and molecular switches dominate the area of research geared toward macroscopic motion of materials. A counter‐intuitive approach to create self‐sustained oscillation by light irradiation of ordinary photostabilizers in splay‐aligned liquid‐crystalline networks made from commercial mesogens is developed. Photostabilizers or any molecules that are able to quickly dissipate the absorbed light through heat, by vibrational and/or rotational modes, can reach self‐oscillating macroscopic motion where self‐shadowing plays a critical role. The mechanical self‐oscillation is linked to temperature oscillations and the asymmetric response over the film thickness. Only a localized responsive zone, acting as hinge, activates the oscillation of a beam‐shaped device. The outcome of this research is extended from UV to near‐IR actuation, making bulk applications to convert sunlight into mechanical work within reach.
Functional Redundancy and New Roles for Genes of the Autonomous Floral-Promotion Pathway1[C][W][OA]

The early-flowering habit of rapid-cycling accessions of Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) is, in part, due to the genes of the autonomous floral-promotion pathway (AP). The AP promotes flowering by repressing expression of the floral inhibitor FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC). AP mutants are therefore late flowering due to elevated levels of FLC, and this late-flowering phenotype is eliminated by loss-of-function mutations in FLC. To further investigate the role of the AP, we created a series of double mutants. In contrast to the phenotypes of single mutants, which are largely limited to delayed flowering, a subset of AP double mutants show a range of defects in growth and development. These phenotypes include reduced size, chlorophyll content, growth rate, and fertility. Unlike the effects of the AP on flowering time, these phenotypes are FLC independent. Recent work has also shown that two AP genes, FCA and FPA, are required for the repression and, in some cases, proper DNA methylation of two transposons. We show that similar effects are seen for all AP genes tested. Microarray analysis of gene expression in AP single and double mutants, however, suggests that the AP is not likely to play a broad role in the repression of gene expression through DNA methylation: very few of the genes that have been reported to be up-regulated in DNA methylation mutants are misexpressed in AP mutants. Together, these data indicate that the genes of the AP play important and sometimes functionally redundant roles in aspects of development in addition to flowering time.
An analysis of superscalar sorting algorithms on an R8000 processor

We compare and analyze different in-memory sorting algorithms to understand their behavior on a superscalar MIPS R8000 processor. We explore Quick sort, Heap sort and an implementation variant of Radix sort that we propose. We compare the methods isolated and combined with Multiway merge and Bucket sort. The combination of methods helps to check for potential use of locality. We describe and analyze the models of the most significant algorithms. Some conclusions can be drawn from this work. First, Radix sort is the fastest algorithm. Second, the use of combined methods does not help to exploit locality. Third, with the help of the models and an analysis of the codes, it is possible to understand that Radix sort is the most promising of the methods studied here for future superscalar architectures.
Stress during Pregnancy and Offspring Pediatric Disease: A National Cohort Study

Background: Identifying risk factors for adverse health outcomes in children is important. The intrauterine environment plays a pivotal role for health and disease across life. Objectives: We conducted a comprehensive study to determine whether common psychosocial stress during pregnancy is a risk factor for a wide spectrum of pediatric diseases in the offspring. Methods: The study was conducted using prospective data in a population-based sample of mothers with live singleton births (n = 66,203; 71.4% of those eligible) from the Danish National Birth Cohort. We estimated the association between maternal stress during pregnancy (classified based on two a priori–defined indicators of common stress forms, life stress and emotional stress) and offspring diseases during childhood (grouped into 16 categories of diagnoses from the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, based on data from national registries), controlling for maternal stress after pregnancy. Results: Median age at end of follow-up was 6.2 (range, 3.6–8.9) years. Life stress (highest compared with lowest quartile) was associated with an increased risk of conditions originating in the perinatal period [odds ratio (OR) = 1.13; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.06, 1.21] and congenital malformations (OR=1.17; CI: 1.06, 1.28) and of the first diagnosis of infection [hazard ratio (HR) = 1.28; CI: 1.17, 1.39], mental disorders (age 0–2.5 years: HR = 2.03; CI: 1.32, 3.14), and eye (age 0–4.5 years: HR = 1.27; CI: 1.06, 1.53), ear (HR = 1.36; CI: 1.23, 1.51), respiratory (HR = 1.27; CI; 1.19, 1.35), digestive (HR = 1.23; CI: 1.11, 1.37), skin (HR = 1.24; CI: 1.09, 1.43), musculoskeletal (HR = 1.15; CI: 1.01–1.30), and genitourinary diseases (HR = 1.25; CI; 1.08, 1.45). Emotional stress was associated with an increased risk for the first diagnosis of infection (HR = 1.09; CI: 1.01, 1.18) and a decreased risk for the first diagnosis of endocrine (HR = 0.81; CI; 0.67, 0.99), eye (HR = 0.84; CI; 0.71, 0.99), and circulatory diseases (age 0–3 years: HR = 0.63; CI: 0.42, 0.95). Conclusions: Maternal life stress during pregnancy may be a common risk factor for impaired child health. The results suggest new approaches to reduce childhood diseases.
Using HPX and LibGeoDecomp for scaling HPC applications on heterogeneous supercomputers

With the general availability of PetaFLOP clusters and the advent of heterogeneous machines equipped with special accelerator cards such as the Xeon Phi[2], computer scientist face the difficult task of improving application scalability beyond what is possible with conventional techniques and programming models today. In addition, the need for highly adaptive runtime algorithms and for applications handling highly inhomogeneous data further impedes our ability to efficiently write code which performs and scales well. In this paper we present the advantages of using HPX[19, 3, 29], a general purpose parallel runtime system for applications of any scale as a backend for LibGeoDecomp[25] for implementing a three-dimensional N-Body simulation with local interactions. We compare scaling and performance results for this application while using the HPX and MPI backends for LibGeoDecomp. LibGeoDecomp is a Library for Geometric Decomposition codes implementing the idea of a user supplied simulation model, where the library handles the spatial and temporal loops, and the data storage. The presented results are acquired from various homogeneous and heterogeneous runs including up to 1024 nodes (16384 conventional cores) combined with up to 16 Xeon Phi accelerators (3856 hardware threads) on TACC's Stampede supercomputer[1]. In the configuration using the HPX backend, more than 0.35 PFLOPS have been achieved, which corresponds to a parallel application efficiency of around 79%. Our measurements demonstrate the advantage of using the intrinsically asynchronous and message driven programming model exposed by HPX which enables better latency hiding, fine to medium grain parallelism, and constraint based synchronization. HPX's uniform programming model simplifies writing highly parallel code for heterogeneous resources.
Context-Aware In-Page Search

In this paper we introduce a method for searching appropriate articles from knowledge bases (e.g. Wikipedia) for a given query and its context. In our approach, this problem is transformed into a multi-class classification of candidate articles. The method involves automatically augmenting smaller knowledge bases using larger ones and learning to choose adequate articles based on hyperlink similarity between article and context. At run-time, keyphrases in given context are extracted and the sense ambiguity of query term is resolved by computing similarity of keyphrases between context and candidate articles. Evaluation shows that the method significantly outperforms the strong baseline of assigning most frequent articles to the query terms. Our method effectively determines adequate articles for given query-context pairs, suggesting the possibility of using our methods in context-aware search engines.
Food Poisoning and Staphylococcus aureus Enterotoxins

Staphylococcus aureus produces a wide variety of toxins including staphylococcal enterotoxins (SEs; SEA to SEE, SEG to SEI, SER to SET) with demonstrated emetic activity, and staphylococcal-like (SEl) proteins, which are not emetic in a primate model (SElL and SElQ) or have yet to be tested (SElJ, SElK, SElM to SElP, SElU, SElU2 and SElV). SEs and SEls have been traditionally subdivided into classical (SEA to SEE) and new (SEG to SElU2) types. All possess superantigenic activity and are encoded by accessory genetic elements, including plasmids, prophages, pathogenicity islands, vSa genomic islands, or by genes located next to the staphylococcal cassette chromosome (SCC) implicated in methicillin resistance. SEs are a major cause of food poisoning, which typically occurs after ingestion of different foods, particularly processed meat and dairy products, contaminated with S. aureus by improper handling and subsequent storage at elevated temperatures. Symptoms are of rapid onset and include nausea and violent vomiting, with or without diarrhea. The illness is usually self-limiting and only occasionally it is severe enough to warrant hospitalization. SEA is the most common cause of staphylococcal food poisoning worldwide, but the involvement of other classical SEs has been also demonstrated. Of the new SE/SEls, only SEH have clearly been associated with food poisoning. However, genes encoding novel SEs as well as SEls with untested emetic activity are widely represented in S. aureus, and their role in pathogenesis may be underestimated.
Numerical design studies on a novel electrostimulative osteosynthesis system for the mandible

Abstract Fractures or other major bone defects in the mandible are commonly treated by mounting a reconstruction plate at the fracture site. To avoid complications due to loosening of the implant or the fixation screws, electrical stimulation presents a possibility to accelerate bone healing. The aim of this study was to investigate different combinations of activated electrodes and plate designs regarding their feasibility for electrostimulation of the mandibular bone. The electric field distribution for multiple implant designs was computed using the finite element method. The results suggest that the electrode insulation renders a crucial parameter, which influences substantially the stimulation impact and its power consumption.
Adaptive wavelet eye-gaze-based video compression

We present a novel approach to compression of video frames based on the foveation behavior of the human visual system (HSV). Eye fixations on a video frame, as depicted by eye-gaze trace data, define an imaginary region of interest. The perceived resolution of the frame by the human eye depends totally on this eye-gaze (fixation) point. The resolution, then, decreases dramatically with the distance from the fovea. This behavior of the HSV has gained interest in the image and video processing area recently especially in compression of images or video frames. We present an approach where eye-gaze trace data are intergral to the compression process which has demonstrated its usefulness in yielding high compression performance. We partition a video frame into three regions: the inner-most incudes a point of eye-gaze for which we apply lossless compression; an outer region which encompasses the first and for which we apply visually lossless (near-lossless) compression, and finally an outmost region where lossy compression is applied. Because of its low computational complexity, we use the Haar wavelet transform. Preliminary results are promising and show improvement over other methods which are mainly full frame based.
Calories from soft drinks--do they matter?

Obesity has emerged as one of the greatest global health challenges of the 21st century.1 Its increase among children and adolescents is particularly frightening, given the associated metabolic and cardiovascular complications.2,3 Studies from developing countries with populations that are undergoing rapid changes in nutrition are showing increases in the prevalence of childhood obesity.4 The increase in consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages among both adults and children in the United States and other countries is considered a potential contributor to the obesity pandemic.5,6 Sugar intake from sugar-sweetened beverages alone, which are the largest single caloric food source in the United .
The Tree and Net Components of Prokaryote Evolution

Phylogenetic trees of individual genes of prokaryotes (archaea and bacteria) generally have different topologies, largely owing to extensive horizontal gene transfer (HGT), suggesting that the Tree of Life (TOL) should be replaced by a “net of life” as the paradigm of prokaryote evolution. However, trees remain the natural representation of the histories of individual genes given the fundamentally bifurcating process of gene replication. Therefore, although no single tree can fully represent the evolution of prokaryote genomes, the complete picture of evolution will necessarily combine trees and nets. A quantitative measure of the signals of tree and net evolution is derived from an analysis of all quartets of species in all trees of the “Forest of Life” (FOL), which consists of approximately 7,000 phylogenetic trees for prokaryote genes including approximately 100 nearly universal trees (NUTs). Although diverse routes of net-like evolution collectively dominate the FOL, the pattern of tree-like evolution that reflects the consistent topologies of the NUTs is the most prominent coherent trend. We show that the contributions of tree-like and net-like evolutionary processes substantially differ across bacterial and archaeal lineages and between functional classes of genes. Evolutionary simulations indicate that the central tree-like signal cannot be realistically explained by a self-reinforcing pattern of biased HGT.
Sparse Quasi-Newton Optimization for Semi-supervised Support Vector Machines

In real-world scenarios, labeled data is often rare while unlabeled data can be obtained in huge quantities. A current research direction in machine learning is the concept of semi-supervised support vector machines. This type of binary classification approach aims at taking the additional information provided by unlabeled patterns into account to reveal more information about the structure of the data and, hence, to yield models with a better classification performance. However, generating these semi-supervised models requires solving difficult optimization tasks. In this work, we present a simple but effective approach to address the induced optimization task, which is based on a special instance of the quasi-Newton family of optimization schemes. The resulting framework can be implemented easily using black box optimization engines and yields excellent classification and runtime results on both artificial and real-world data sets that are superior (or at least competitive) to the ones obtained by competing state-of-the-art methods.
Protein phosphatases and the regulation of mitosis

Dynamic control of protein phosphorylation is necessary for the regulation of many cellular processes, including mitosis and cytokinesis. Indeed, although the central role of protein kinases is widely appreciated and intensely studied, the importance of protein phosphatases is often overlooked. Recent studies, however, have highlighted the considerable role of protein phosphatases in both the spatial and temporal control of protein kinase activity, and the modulation of substrate phosphorylation. Here, we will focus on recent advances in our understanding of phosphatase structure, and the importance of phosphatase function in the control of mitotic spindle formation, chromosome architecture and cohesion, and cell division.
Chemistry and Biology of the Potent Endotoxin from a Burkholderia dolosa Clinical Isolate from a Cystic Fibrosis Patient

This is the first report of the chemical and biological properties of the lipooligosaccharide (LOS) endotoxin isolated from Burkholderia dolosa IST4208, an isolate recovered from a cystic fibrosis (CF) patient in a Portuguese CF center. B. dolosa is a member of the Burkholderia cepacia complex, a group of closely related species that are highly problematic and opportunistic pathogens in CF. B. dolosa infection leads to accelerated loss of lung function and decreased survival. The structural determination of its endotoxin was achieved using a combination of chemistry and spectroscopy, and has revealed a novel endotoxin structure. The purified LOS was tested for its immunostimulatory activity on human HEK 293 cells expressing TLR‐4, MD‐2, and CD‐14. In these assays, the LOS showed strong proinflammatory activity.