Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Cytochrome c on the Generation and Elimination of O 2 ⨪ and H2O2 in Mitochondria*

The primary recognized function of cytochromec is to act as an electron carrier transferring electrons from complex III to complex IV in the respiratory chain of mitochondria. Recent studies on cell apoptosis reveal that cytochromec is responsible for the programmed cell death when it is released from mitochondria to cytoplasm. In this study we present evidence showing that cytochrome c plays an antioxidative role by acting on the generation and elimination of O 2 ⨪ and H2O2 in mitochondria. The O 2 ⨪ and H2O2 generation in cytochromec-depleted Keilin-Hartree heart muscle preparation (HMP) is 7–8 times higher than that in normal HMP. The reconstitution of cytochrome c to the cytochromec-depleted HMP causes the O 2 ⨪ and H2O2 generation to exponentially decrease. An alternative electron-leak pathway of the respiratory chain is suggested to explain how cytochrome c affects on the generation and elimination of O 2 ⨪ and H2O2 in mitochondria. Enough cytochrome c in the respiratory chain is needed for keeping O 2 ⨪ and H2O2at a lower physiological level. A dramatic increase of O 2 ⨪ and H2O2 generation occurs when cytochrome c is released from the respiratory chain. The burst of O 2 ⨪ and H2O2, which happens at the same time as cytochrome c release from the respiratory chain, should have some role in the early stage of cell apoptosis.
Action needed to reduce health impact of harmful alcohol use.

11 FEBRUARY, 2011 – Geneva – Wider implementation of policies is needed to save lives and reduce the health impact of harmful alcohol drinking, says a new report launched today by the World Health Organization (WHO). Harmful use of alcohol results in the death of 2.5 million people annually, causes illness and injury to many more, and increasingly affects younger generations and drinkers in developing countries. Harmful use of alcohol is defined as excessive use to the point that it causes damage to health and often includes adverse social consequences. The Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health analyzes available evidence on alcohol consumption, consequences and policy interventions at global, regional and national levels. “Many countries recognize the serious public health problems caused by the harmful use of alcohol and have taken steps to prevent the health and social burdens and treat those in need of care. But clearly much more needs to be done to reduce the loss of life and suffering associated with harmful alcohol use,” says Dr Ala Alwan, WHO Assistant Director-General for Noncommunicable Diseases and Mental Health. aCtion needed to reduCe health impaCt of harmful alCohol use
UPLC Quantitative Analysis of Multi-Components by Single Marker and Quality Evaluation of Polygala tenuifolia Wild. Extracts

The quality control of Polygala tenuifolia Wild. is a major challenge in its clinical application. In this paper, a new strategy for the quality evaluation of P. tenuifolia extracts was verified through reverse-phase ultra-performance liquid chromatography (UPLC). The quantitative analysis of multi-components by a single marker (QAMS) was conducted with 3,6′-disinapoyl sucrose as an internal reference substance. Eight components (i.e., sibiricose A5, sibiricose A6, glomeratose A, tenuifoliside A, tenuifoliside B, tenuifoliside C, sibiricaxanthone B, and polygalaxanthone III) were determined based on the relative correction factors. The concentrations of these components were also determined by applying a conventional external standard method. The cosine value confirmed the consistency of the two methods (cosine ratio value >0.999920). Hierarchical cluster analysis, radar plots, and discriminant analysis were performed to classify 23 batches of P. tenuifolia extracts from Shanxi, Hebei, and Shaanxi in China. Results revealed that QAMS combined with radar plots and multivariate data analysis could accurately measure and clearly distinguish the different quality samples of P. tenuifolia. Hence, QAMS is a feasible and promising method for the quality control of P. tenuifolia.
Histopathological characteristics of five clinical types of equine sarcoid.

The purpose of this study was to determine the characteristics of occult, verrucous, fibroblastic, nodular and mixed equine sarcoids. Ten tumours of each type were examined histologically and analysed for the presence of bovine papilloma virus (BPV)- DNA. All tumours were positive for BPV - DNA and showed an increased density of dermal fibroblasts. Epidermal hyperplasia, hyperkeratosis, rete peg and 'picket fence' formation were only found consistently in the verrucous and mixed types and were often not present in occult and nodular sarcoids. Immunohistochemical staining for Keratins 10 and 16, Ki67 and p53 showed no important differences between the clinical types. It can be concluded that the presence of BPV - DNA and the increased density of dermal fibroblasts were the only common characteristics for all sarcoids of the different clinical types. The presence of other microscopic alterations was variable but could not be used in the differentiation of the clinical types based on histology.
Ju n 20 00 Chiral vacuum alignment in dense QCD

We discuss an interesting possibility of nontrivial, quark-mass induced chiral vacuum alignment in color-flavor locking phase of cold, dense QCD. With the simplifying assumption that the gaps for particles are identical to those of antiparticles and the light quark masses are given by mu = md and ms/md = 15, we find the true chiral vacuum can align only in one of the discrete number of directions in the continuum of chiral vacua. The alignment depends on the diquark condensates, and the vacuum transition from one direction to another caused by the evolution of the condensates can be a first order phase transition with vanishing or nonvanishing latent heat depending on the directions involved. The chiral symmetry SUL(3) × SUR(3) of QCD with three massless quark flavors is spontaneously broken to SUL+R(3) at low energies. Any point in the continuum of the chiral vacua, the coset space [SUL(3)× SUR(3)]/SUL+R(3), can be chosen as a vacuum, since any two vacua are equivalent as far as physics is concerned. However when quarks receive small (current) masses the chiral symmetry is then explicitly broken, and the quark mass term picks up, following Dashen’s procedure [1], a unique vacuum out of the continuum of vacua. Dashen has shown three decades ago that the correct chiral vacuum is the one that minimizes the potential V (Σ) = −Lm(Σ) ∝ −Re[Tr(mΣ)], where E-mail: tlee@ctp.snu. ac.kr
ELICITING AND DETECTING AFFECT IN COVERT AND ETHICALLY SENSITIVE SITUATIONS

There is growing interest in creating systems that can sense the affective state of a user for a variety of applications. As a result, a large number of studies have been conducted with the goals of eliciting specific affective states, measuring sensor data associated with those states, and building algorithms to predict the affective state of the user based on that sensor data. These studies have usually focused on recognizing relatively unambiguous emotions, such as anger, sadness, or happiness. These studies are also typically conducted with the subject’s awareness that the sensors are recording data related to affect. This thesis describes two experiments that are designed to explore these two areas that these studies have not examined. The first experiment in this thesis focuses on eliciting and detecting the feeling of guilt, an emotion that is much more subtle than the emotions that most studies have examined. In the context of a specific experiment, we show that guilt level during a self-reflection period is correlated with overall electrodermal activity above a baseline value, but not well correlated with the frequency of skin conductivity responses or two features of an electrocardiogram. Our results also imply that collecting physiological data during a self-reflection period may contain useful information for lie detection above and beyond physiological data collected during the actual lie. The second experiment focuses on eliciting and detecting affect covertly with an ordinary computer mouse. The widespread use of the computer mouse makes this a particularly interesting area to explore. We were unable to find a relationship between mouse trajectory features and valence. We did find that both velocity and acceleration off of a baseline level were correlated with arousal level. Thesis Supervisor: Rosalind W. Picard Title: Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Clustering Uncertain Graphs

An uncertain graph G = (V, E, p : E → (0, 1]) can be viewed as a probability space whose outcomes (referred to as possible worlds) are subgraphs of G where any edge e e E occurs with probability p(e), independently of the other edges. These graphs naturally arise in many application domains where data management systems are required to cope with uncertainty in interrelated data, such as computational biology, social network analysis, network reliability, and privacy enforcement, among the others. For this reason, it is important to devise fundamental querying and mining primitives for uncertain graphs. This paper contributes to this endeavor with the development of novel strategies for clustering uncertain graphs. Specifically, given an uncertain graph G and an integer k, we aim at partitioning its nodes into k clusters, each featuring a distinguished center node, so to maximize the minimum/average connection probability of any node to its cluster's center, in a random possible world. We assess the NP-hardness of maximizing the minimum connection probability, even in the presence of an oracle for the connection probabilities, and develop efficient approximation algorithms for both problems and some useful variants. Unlike previous works in the literature, our algorithms feature provable approximation guarantees and are capable to keep the granularity of the returned clustering under control. Our theoretical findings are complemented with several experiments that compare our algorithms against some relevant competitors, with respect to both running-time and quality of the returned clusterings.
Combined Effects of Noise and Kanamycin

The present series of experiments was designed to assess whether a low level noise could sensitize the cochlear hair cell to damage by kanamycin in the safe and low level dosages. The experiment was designed after a common clinical situation. Premature babies require care for varying lengths of time in an incubator and a good number of them receive a safe dose of kanamycin for a short period. The incubator generates about 68 to 72 dB noise at 125 Hz and very little at other frequencies.
Improving the service time of web clients using server redirection

This paper describes and evaluates experimentally a web server infrastructure, which consists of a small number of servers that redirect client requests based on the estimated client service time. The web servers have replicated content, are located in geographically different regions, and redirect clients between servers. The web servers use metrics obtained from server logs to estimate the service time of a client. Based on the estimated service time the server redirects the web client. The implementation of the measurement and redirection mechanism is done in the web servers and is independent of the clients. Using server logs the measuring mechanism does not introduce traffic into the network. We have experimentally evaluated the proposed web server infrastructure. In our experiments the client service time improved from 4 to 40 % when using the proposed mechanism. The web server infrastructure could be applied to improve the service time of selected clients, which frequently access a web server to retrieve a significant amount of data.
ACUA: API Change and Usage Auditor

Modern software uses frameworks through their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Framework APIs may change while frameworks evolve. Client programs have to upgrade to new releases of frameworks if security vulnerabilities are discovered in the used releases. Patching security vulnerabilities can be delayed by non-security-related API changes when the frameworks used by client programs are not up to date. Keeping frameworks updated can reduce the reaction time to patch security leaks. Client program upgrades are not cost free, developers need to understand the API usages in client programs and API changes between framework releases before conduct upgrading tasks. In this paper, we propose a tool ACUA to generate reports containing detailed API change and usage information by analyzing the binary code of both frameworks and clients programs written in Java. Developers can use the API change and usage reports generated by ACUA to estimate the work load and decide when to starting upgrading client programs based on the estimation.
Existence of Majorana fermions for M-branes wrapped in space and time

We show that it is possible to define Majorana (s)pinor fields on M-branes which have been identified under the action of the antipodal map on the adS factor of the throat geometry, or which have been wrapped on two-cycles of arbitrary genus. This is an important consistency check, since it means that one may still take the generators of supertranslations in superspace to transform as Majorana fermions under the adjoint action of Spin(10,1) even though the antipodally identified M2-brane is not space-orientable. We point out that similar conclusions hold for any p-branes which have the generic (adS)×(Sphere) throat geometry.
Validation of a birth weight prediction equation based on maternal characteristics.

OBJECTIVE To validate the accuracy of a birth weight prediction equation based on maternal and pregnancy-specific characteristics and to assess its value in predicting fetal macrosomia. STUDY DESIGN A previously published birth weight prediction equation based on maternal and pregnancy-specific characteristics was used to predict birth weight in 244 Caucasian gravidas with uncomplicated, singleton, term pregnancies. Results were assessed by calculating the mean absolute error, the mean absolute percentage error and the percentage of birth weights correctly predicted to within +/- 10% and +/- 15% of actual birth weight. The sensitivity, specificity and positive and negative predictive value for predicting fetal weight > 4,000 g were calculated. RESULTS Birth weight was accurately predicted to within an average of +/- 8.1% (+/- 280 g). The percentage of weights accurately predicted to within 15% of actual birth weight was 87%, and the percentage predicted to within +/- 10% was 68%. The sensitivity for predicting fetal weight > 4,000 g was 52%, specificity 90%, positive predictive value 42% and negative predictive value 93%. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for predicting fetal macrosomia was 0.83. CONCLUSION An equation using maternal and pregnancy-specific characteristics can predict term birth weight in gravidas with uncomplicated singleton pregnancies to within +/- 8.1% (+/- 280 g). The accuracy of the method for predicting birth weight > 4,000 g is comparable to that obtained using ultrasonic fetal biometry.
Cleft Lip with or without Cleft Palate: Effect of Family History on Reproductive Planning, Surgical Timing, and Parental Stress

Objective This study tested whether the presence of a family history of non-syndromic cleft lip with or without cleft palate (NSCLP) lessens the negative impact on reproductive planning, decreases treatment anxiety, and relieves parental stress when there is a recurrent cleft. Design Sixty-one participating families, retrospectively ascertained through their children with NSCLP, were divided into two groups: those with a family history of clefting and those in which only the proband was affected. Setting Each family completed a questionnaire either at their home or during a clinic visit. Participants Questionnaires were distributed to 117 families with an NSCLP child. Of these 117, 49 (42%) had another family member with NSCLP and 68 (58%) had no prior history of clefting. Sixty-one (52%) families returned the questionnaire and were categorized by family history. Main outcome Measures The Parenting Stess Index and the Hollingshead Index of Social Position were included with family and medical history questions in the 137-item questionnaire. Results The reproductive plans of the two groups were quite similar and were not dependent on the families' actual or perceived recurrence risks of NSCLP. The majority (85%) of the children with NSCLP underwent surgical closure at the recommended age. The two groups did not significantly differ on any score on the Parenting Stress Index, indicating a similar parental stress level between the groups. Conclusions These findings suggest that family history does not significantly influence reproductive plans, timing of cleft repair, or stress of parents of a child with NSCLP. Further, these results indicate a need for additional psychosocial study of this population.
SPOSOBNOST PLANIRANJA KOD DECE SA LAKOM INTELEKTUALNOM OMETENOŠĆU

Planiranje se smatra jednom od najkompleksnijih kognitivnih sposobnosti, koja podrazumeva stvaranje mentalne reprezentacije problema, evaluaciju nekoliko mogucih nacina resavanja i njihovih posledica. Cilj ovog rada je utvrđivanje nivoa razvoja sposobnosti planiranja kod dece sa lakom intelektualnom ometenoscu (LIO). Uzorkom je obuhvaceno 93-oje dece sa LIO, oba pola, uzrasta od 10 do 14 godina. Prosecan koeficijent inteligencije u uzorku iznosi oko 60 IQ jedinica (AS=60,45, SD=7,26), dok se minimalne i maksimalne vrednosti krecu u okvirima definisanog raspona za kategoriju lake intelektualne ometenosti (50-70). Iz skolske dokumentacije preuzeti su podaci o uzrastu i nivou intelektualnog funkcionisanja ispitanika. Za procenu sposobnosti planiraja upotrebljen je test Londonska kula. Analizom rezultata je utvrđeno da vecina dece sa LIO koristi nedovoljno efikasne strategije za resavanje problema. Nacin resavanja zadataka kod vecine ispitane dece (57%) karakterise nestabilan/kolebajuci pristup resavanju problema (intemedijarni nivo). Cetvrtina ispitanika uspesno koristi strategije viseg reda, dok 16.1% njih koristi perceptivnu strategiju, odn. metod pokusaj-greska. Utvrđena je znacajna negativna korelacija IQ-a i broja pomeranja kugli, kao i vremena resavanja zadataka. Korelacija IQ-a i ukupnog broja resenih zadataka je pozitivna. Varijabilnost uspesnosti resavanja zadataka nije znacajno povezana sa uzrastom i polom ispitanika. Kljucne reci: laka intelektualna ometenost, planiranje, egzekutivne funkcije, Londonska kula
Sixth International Conference on Sensitivity Analysis of Model Output Global Sensitivity Analysis for Systems with Independent and / or Correlated Inputs

A new unified global sensitivity analysis framework is introduced for systems whose input probability distribution can be independent and/or correlated. For correlated inputs, three sensitivity indices are defined to fully describe the total, structural (reflecting the system structure) and correlative (reflecting the correlated input probability distribution) contributions for an input or a subset of inputs. The magnitudes of all three indices need to be considered in order to quantitatively determine the relative importance of the inputs. For independent inputs, these indices reduce to a single index consistent with previous variance-based methods. This analysis is especially useful for the treatment of laboratory and field data.
SHEAR: A Highly Available and Flexible Network Architecture Marrying Distributed and Logically Centralized Control Planes

This paper presents SHEAR, a highly available hybrid network architecture which marries distributed legacy protocols with Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology. SHEAR is based on a small deployment of Openflow switches which serve as “observability points”: SHEAR leverages legacy distributed control plane protocols to detect and localize failures, but outsources the actual failover logic to the logically centralized SHEAR controller, which can make faster and more informed routing decisions. Moreover, the Openflow switches are used to logically decompose the legacy network into loopfree components, enabling a simple and flexible traffic-engineering. The deployment problem solved by SHEAR can be seen as a new variant of a network tomography problem, and may be of independent interest. Our simulations show that in enterprise networks, between 2 to 10 % Openflow switches are sufficient to implement SHEAR. We also report on our prototype implementation which detects a failure and reroutes traffic in less than . 3 seconds in our testbed-much faster than what is achieved by the less flexible and distributed legacy protocols. More generally, SHEAR demonstrates that in contrast to common belief, operating a hybrid software defined network can be simple, and given its benefits, a partial Openflow deployment may even be a long-term solution.
In vivo nmr diffusion spectroscopy: 31p application to phosphorus metabolites in muscle

Apparent diffusion coefficients (Da) of individual metabolites can be studied in vivo by diffusion NMR spectroscopy using an echo sequence sensitized to molecular motion. The methods are based on the echo attenuation due to phase dispersion resulting from incoherent displacement during the diffusion time. As the displacement of metabolites by diffusion in vivo can be affected by compartment size, temperature, adsorption processes, etc., the presented methods are potentially useful in studying such phenomena in vivo. Here, the methods are applied to phosphocreatine in the rat quadriceps muscle. It is demonstrated that the displacement of phosphocreatine resembles free diffusion for short diffusion times but becomes limited as a result of boundaries due to compartmenta‐tion for longer diffusion times. The limit of the displacement indicates an apparent average size of 44 pm of the compartment in the direction of the diffusion gradient. As the gradient was applied approximately parallel (angle i 25o) to the muscle fiber, this result indicates that phosphocreatine moves freely in the cytosol but is limited by the boundaries of the muscle cells. Error analyses are performed with regard to motion artifacts and gradient performance. The methods were tested extensively for distilled water and free metabolites. © 1990 Academic Press, Inc.
Epidemiology of Asthma

There is no illness more in need of epidemiological study than asthma. Despite significant advances in our understanding of the pathophysiology, course, and management of this disease, its prevalence, morbidity, and mortality appear to be on the rise, and the reasons are not entirely clear. Historically, epidemiological studies of asthma have suffered from the lack of a standardized definition of the disease and the lack of a ;;gold standard'' with which to compare objective measures for diagnosing the illness. Recent studies have overcome some of these difficulties to provide solid epidemiological data on asthma from a global perspective. International studies have demonstrated that asthma prevalence varies significantly worldwide, with Western, English-speaking countries having the highest prevalence rates. In the United States, the prevalence of asthma has increased by nearly 75% in the past 2 decades. Young children, blacks, and Hispanics tend to be disproportionately affected by the disease. Asthma morbidity, as measured by emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and medication usage has been increasing worldwide, and asthma mortality, although still rare, has been increasing as well. Epidemiological studies have provided important information regarding the etiology and risk factors for asthma. The disease is emerging as a prototypical illness for the alliance of genetic and environmental disease determinants. Some of the most important conclusions relate to the developing immune system and the timing of certain allergic or infectious exposures that may predispose the child to develop asthma. Indeed, advances in epidemiological study will be critical if we are to intervene and reverse some of asthma's disturbing trends.