Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Foetal Experience: Lifelong Consequences

Modification of the foetal environment has lifelong consequences for endocrine function and behaviour. Maternal stress through activation of the hypothalamus‐pituitary‐adrenal axis can lead to increased anxiety levels and stress reactivity in offspring. Furthermore, these effects can pass across generations. The race is now on to understand the mechanisms involved and to find ways to prevent or reverse the effects of an ‘adverse’ early environment in human populations.
Scale-invariant volume rendering

As standard volume rendering is based on an integral in physical space (or "coordinate space"), it is inherently dependent on the scaling of this space. Although this dependency is appropriate for the realistic rendering of semitransparent volumetric objects, it has several unpleasant consequences for volume visualization. In order to overcome these disadvantages, a new variant of the volume rendering integral is proposed, which is defined in data space instead of physical space. Apart from achieving scale invariance, this new method supports the rendering of isosurfaces of uniform opacity and color, independently of the local gradient or" the visualized scalar field. Moreover, it reveals certain structures in scalar fields even with constant transfer functions. Furthermore, it can be defined as the limit of infinitely many semitransparent isosurfaces, and is therefore based on an intuitive and at the same time precise definition. In addition to the discussion of these features of scale-invariant volume rendering, efficient adaptations of existing volume rendering algorithms and extensions for silhouette enhancement and local illumination by transmitted light are presented.
INCONSTANT SUN: HOW SOLAR EVOLUTION HAS AFFECTED COSMIC AND ULTRAVIOLET RADIATION EXPOSURE OVER THE HISTORY OF LIFE ON EARTH

Abstract— Four billion years ago, sea-level UV exposure was more than 400 times as intense as today, the dose from solar cosmic rays was five times present levels, and galactic cosmic rays accounted for only about 10% their current contribution to sea-level radiation doses. Exposure to cosmic radiation accounts for about 10% of natural background radiation exposure today and includes dose from galactic cosmic rays and solar charged particles. There is little exposure to ionizing wavelengths of UV due to absorption by ozone. The sun has evolved significantly over its life; in the past there were higher levels of particulate radiation and lower UV emissions from the sun, and a stronger solar wind reduced radiation dose in the inner solar system from galactic cosmic rays. Finally, since the early atmosphere contained little to no oxygen, surface levels of UV radiation were far higher in the past.
A Possible Variant of the Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome

A 20-year-old man developed generalised rigidity and signs of autonomic instability following the introduction of therapy with zuclopenthixol decanoate. A diagnosis of NMS was made, despite the absence of hyperthermia. He recovered on treatment with thiamine, dantrolene, and bromocriptine.
Prolyl isomerase Pin1: a catalyst for oncogenesis and a potential therapeutic target in cancer

Phosphorylation of proteins on serine or threonine residues preceding proline (Ser/Thr-Pro) is a major intracellular signaling mechanism. The phosphorylated Ser/Thr-Pro motifs in a certain subset of phosphoproteins are isomerized specifically by the peptidyl-prolyl cis-trans isomerase Pin1. This post-phosphorylation isomerization can lead to conformational changes in the substrate proteins and modulate their functions. Pin1 interacts with a number of mitotic phosphoproteins, and plays a critical role in mitotic regulation. Recent work indicates that Pin1 is overexpressed in many human cancers and plays an important role in oncogenesis. Pin1 regulates the expression of cyclin D1 by cooperating with Ras signaling and inhibiting the interaction ofβ -catenin with the tumor suppressor APC and also directly stabilizing cyclin D1 protein. Furthermore, PIN1 is an E2F target gene essential for the Neu/Ras-induced transformation of mammary epithelial cells. Pin1 is also a critical regulator of the tumor suppressor p53 during DNA damage response. Given its role in cell growth control and oncogenesis, Pin1 could represent a new anti-cancer target.
Ecology and management of grapevine leafroll disease

Grapevine leafroll disease (GLD) is caused by a complex of vector-borne virus species in the family Closteroviridae. GLD is present in all grape-growing regions of the world, primarily affecting wine grape varieties. The disease has emerged in the last two decades as one of the major factors affecting grape fruit quality, leading to research efforts aimed at reducing its economic impact. Most research has focused on the pathogens themselves, such as improved detection protocols, with limited work directed toward disease ecology and the development of management practices. Here we discuss the ecology and management of GLD, focusing primarily on Grapevine leafroll-associated virus 3, the most important virus species within the complex. We contextualize research done on this system within an ecological framework that forms the backbone of the discussion regarding current and potential GLD management strategies. To reach this goal, we introduce various aspects of GLD biology and ecology, followed by disease management case studies from four different countries and continents (South Africa, New Zealand, California-USA, and France). We review ongoing regional efforts that serve as models for improved strategies to control this economically important and worldwide disease, highlighting scientific gaps that must be filled for the development of knowledge-based sustainable GLD management practices.
Young African American males : Promoting psychological and social well-being

Abstract This article examines two studies on young African American males. Study I addresses the concept of lifescript for young adult males on probation. Study II explores help-seeking behaviors of young street males. The target populations came from a Mid-Atlantic urban environment. A survey design with an informal and formal semi-structured interview schedule was the chief method used to collect data for both studies. Findings indicate that the majority of informants report that they had good friendship and family ties, including excellent relationships with their mothers and good relationships with their fathers. The majority indicated that they were fathers themselves and were contributing to the support of their own children. Respondents viewed educational achievement as critical for their success. Utilization of formal systems, medical services, legal services and ministerial help are seen as most accessible, while police, social and mental health services are viewed as much less available or usef.
Dynamic Stability of Coral Reefs on the West Australian Coast

Monitoring changes in coral cover and composition through space and time can provide insights to reef health and assist the focus of management and conservation efforts. We used a meta-analytical approach to assess coral cover data across latitudes 10–35°S along the west Australian coast, including 25 years of data from the Ningaloo region. Current estimates of coral cover ranged between 3 and 44% in coral habitats. Coral communities in the northern regions were dominated by corals from the families Acroporidae and Poritidae, which became less common at higher latitudes. At Ningaloo Reef coral cover has remained relatively stable through time (∼28%), although north-eastern and southern areas have experienced significant declines in overall cover. These declines are likely related to periodic disturbances such as cyclones and thermal anomalies, which were particularly noticeable around 1998/1999 and 2010/2011. Linear mixed effects models (LME) suggest latitude explains 10% of the deviance in coral cover through time at Ningaloo. Acroporidae has decreased in abundance relative to other common families at Ningaloo in the south, which might be related to persistence of more thermally and mechanically tolerant families. We identify regions where quantitative time-series data on coral cover and composition are lacking, particularly in north-western Australia. Standardising routine monitoring methods used by management and research agencies at these, and other locations, would allow a more robust assessment of coral condition and a better basis for conservation of coral reefs.
Reconstruction of compressed sensed ECG signals using patient specific dictionaries

In this paper we investigate the reconstruction of compressed sensed ECG signals using dictionaries specific for each patient. Two projection matrices, random and Bernoulli, have been tested. For 24 records from the MIH-BIH database and for a compression ratio (CR) of 10:1 an average percentage root-mean-square difference (PRD) of 0.81, a normalized PRD (PRDN) of 15.49 and a quality score (QS) of 12.34 have been obtained. For record 117, for CR = 15:1 the PRD, PRDN and QS were 0.96, 17.28 and 15.62 respectively.
Respiratory flow estimation using data fusion techniques

Due to the evolution of electronics and measurement processes, today there are many systems and methods that can be used for measuring airflow, such as the method of differential pressure across of a pneumotachograph or measurements using various anemometers. This research proposes the design and development of a system for measuring respiratory flow using data fusion of information from the Transit Times method (ToF) obtained by the techniques of detection threshold and phase difference.
Glaucoma drainage device exposure in Asian eyes

might occur with the active treatment. Theoretically, with a greater drop in intraocular pressure, any differences between two actives might be exaggerated, and the study would more likely reach the 1.5 mmHg level, which is typically used in clinical trial design to determine a statistical difference in efficacy between treatment groups. However, no study has demonstrated that higher baseline intraocular pressures do indeed help differentiate the efficacy between two treatments with more validity. At the last active treatment visit, this study showed among prostaglandin treatment arms that a statistical difference among upper limit entry intraocular pressures continued to be observed for the morning and diurnal intraocular pressure measurements. This was not the case with beta-blockers, however. Further, the reductions from baseline were not statistically significant for either prostaglandins or beta-blockers for either the morning or diurnal intraocular pressure measurements among different upper limit entry intraocular pressures. Therefore, this difference between beta-blockers and prostaglandins in treatment intraocular pressures was not confirmed by the lack of difference in reduction of intraocular pressures. Accordingly, it is difficult to determine currently if the differences in treated intraocular pressures for prostaglandins based on the level of untreated baseline intraocular pressures is real or not. This study suggests that differences in the upper limit for entry of intraocular pressure at baseline in well-controlled clinical trials may influence the mean intraocular pressure at baseline.
Conduction block and glial injury induced in developing central white matter by glycine, GABA, noradrenalin, or nicotine, studied in isolated neonatal rat optic nerve

The damaging effects of excessive glutamate receptor activation have been highlighted recently during injury in developing central white matter. We have examined the effects of acute exposure to four other neurotransmitters that have known actions on white matter. Eighty minutes of Glycine or GABA‐A receptor activation produced a significant fall in the compound action potential recorded from isolated post‐natal day 10 rat optic nerve. This effect was largely reversed upon washout. Nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) or adrenoreceptor activation with noradrenalin resulted in an ∼35% block of the action potential that did not reverse during a 30‐min washout period. While the effect of nAChR activation was blocked by a nAChR antagonist, the effect of noradrenalin was not ablated by α‐ or β‐adrenoreceptor blockers applied alone or in combination. In the absence of noradrenalin, co‐perfusion with α‐ and β‐adrenoreceptor blockers resulted in nonreversible nerve failure indicating that tonic adrenoreceptor activation is required for nerve viability, while overactivation of these receptors is also damaging. Nerves exposed to nAChR + adrenoreceptor activation showed no axon pathology but had extensive glial injury revealed by ultrastructural analysis. Oligodendroglia exhibited regions of membrane vacuolization while profound changes were evident in astrocytes and included the presence of swollen and expanded mitochondria, vacuolization, cell processes disintegration, and membrane breakdown. Blinded assessment revealed higher levels of astrocyte injury than oligodendroglial injury. The findings show that overactivation of neurotransmitter receptors other than those for glutamate can produce extensive injury to developing white matter, a phenomenon that may be clinically significant. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Joined-up Working: Improving Young People's Sexual Health and Enhancing Social Inclusion?

This paper builds on debates about the meaning and definition of social exclusion through an empirical analysis undertaken as part of a four-year evaluation study of a Scottish demonstration project on young peoples’ sexual health. It examines how interventions to improve sexual well-being might be construed as a way of promoting social inclusion, and then explores to what extent the organisation of bureaucratic relations in an intervention characterised by ‘joined-up’ working helped or impeded social inclusion.
A user-centered framework for developing personal pet robots

Designing pet robots for home entertainment has become an important application of intelligent autonomous robot nowadays. Yet, robot design takes considerable amount of time and the short life cycle of toy-type robots with fixed prototypes and repetitive behaviors is in fact disadvantageous. Therefore, it is significant to develop a framework of robot configuration so that the user can always change the characteristics of his pet robot easily. In this paper, we present an interactive framework that mainly considers the issues of robot control, human-robot interaction, and robot emotion. For evaluation, we use our framework to construct a control system for a toy-type humanoid robot. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed framework
Hedgehog signaling to distinct cell types differentially regulates coronary artery and vein development

Vascular development begins with formation of a primary capillary plexus that is later remodeled to give rise to the definitive vasculature. Although the mechanism by which arterial and venous fates are acquired is well understood, little is known about when during vascular development arterial and venous vessels emerge and how their growth is regulated. Previously, we have demonstrated that a hedgehog (HH)/vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and angiopoeitin 2 (ANG2) signaling pathway is essential for the development of the coronary vasculature. Here, we use conditional gene targeting to identify the cell types that receive HH signaling and mediate coronary vascular development. We show that HH signaling to the cardiomyoblast is required for the development of coronary veins, while HH signaling to the perivascular cell (PVC) is necessary for coronary arterial growth. Moreover, the cardiomyoblast and PVC appear to be the exclusive cell types that receive HH signals, as ablation of HH signaling in both cell types leads to an arrest in coronary development. Finally, we present evidence suggesting that coronary arteries and veins may be derived from distinct lineages.
Distributed agent-based air traffic flow management

Air traffic flow management is one of the fundamental challenges facing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) today. The FAA estimates that in 2005 alone, there were over 322,000 hours of delays at a cost to the industry in excess of three billion dollars. Finding reliable and adaptive solutions to the flow management problem is of paramount importance if the Next Generation Air Transportation Systems are to achieve the stated goal of accommodating three times the current traffic volume. This problem is particularly complex as it requires the integration and/or coordination of many factors including: new data (e.g., changing weather info), potentially conflicting priorities (e.g., different airlines), limited resources (e.g., air traffic controllers) and very heavy traffic volume (e.g., over 40,000 flights over the US airspace). In this paper we use FACET -- an air traffic flow simulator developed at NASA and used extensively by the FAA and industry -- to test a multi-agent algorithm for traffic flow management. An agent is associated with a fix (a specific location in 2D space) and its action consists of setting the separation required among the airplanes going though that fix. Agents use reinforcement learning to set this separation and their actions speed up or slow down traffic to manage congestion. Our FACET based results show that agents receiving personalized rewards reduce congestion by up to 45% over agents receiving a global reward and by up to 67% over a current industry approach (Monte Carlo estimation).
Qualities of Focus

The genre of this pictorial is photographs as primary content. All of the images are deliberately and extremely out of focus, creating a puzzle for the viewer. The implications of this work are considered in terms of the images themselves, boundaries and balance in pictorials, politics and cognition, and technology. Qualities of focus in images--from everywhere in focus to selective to everywhere out of focus--are discussed as a technique and material quality of interaction design.
Generalized Cumulative Residual Entropy for Distributions with Unrestricted Supports

We consider the cumulative residual entropy (CRE) a recently introduced measure of entropy. While in previous works distributions with positive support are considered, we generalize the definition of CRE to the case of distributions with general support. We show that several interesting properties of the earlier CRE remain valid and supply further properties and insight to problems such as maximum CRE power moment problems. In addition, we show that this generalized CRE can be used as an alternative to differential entropy to derive information-based optimization criteria for system identification purpose.
Modelado del alumno: un enfoque bayesiano

El diagnostico es uno de los procesos mas importantes dentro de cualquier STI. En este trabajo se propone el uso de la teoria de la probabilidad como marco teorico para el diagnostico del alumno. Ademas, se conecta este problema con la teoria de los test adaptativos informatizados.
Diagnosis parameters used in treatment prediction of the lumbar spine

The paper proposes to define three parameters that can be associated with lumbar spine diagnosis. These parameters will further be used in a prediction software that aims to establish a treatment indication in the early stages of the medical exploration. These parameters quantifies very different conditions of the patient: pain - a very subjective parameter; the calories consumed in one day - measurable value; biomechanical parameters like range of motion in lumbar spine and postural angle - measurable parameter. These parameters have to be interconnected and therefore recordings before and after surgery and treatment have to be made. The interconnection of those represents a challenging task that requires a large patient's database from which the statistics can be computed. Another cornerstone in interconnection is the lake of biomechanical statistics on the lumbar spine pathologies.
Investigations of issues for using multiple acoustic models to improve continuous speech recognition

This paper investigates two important issues in constructing and combining ensembles of acoustic models for reducing recognition errors. First, we investigate the applicability of the AnyBoost algorithm for acoustic model training. AnyBoost is a generalized Boosting method that allows the use of an arbitrary loss function as the training criterion to construct ensemble of classifiers. We choose the MCE discriminative objective function for our experiments. Initial test results on a real-world meeting recognition corpus show that AnyBoost is a competitive alternate to the standard AdaBoost algorithm. Second, we investigate ROVER-based combination, focusing on the technique for selecting correct hypothesized words from aligned WTN. We propose a neural network based insertion detection and word scoring scheme for this. Our approach consistently outperforms the current voting technique used by ROVER in the experiments.
The role of iron metabolism as a mediator of macrophage inflammation and lipid handling in atherosclerosis

Iron is an essential mineral needed for normal physiologic processes. While its function in oxygen transport and other important physiologic processes is well known, less is understood about its role in inflammatory diseases such as atherosclerosis. Existing paradigms suggest iron as a driver of atherosclerosis through its actions as a pro-oxidant capable of causing lipid oxidation and tissue damage. Recently we and others have identified hemoglobin (Hb) derived iron as an important factor in determining macrophage differentiation and function in areas of intraplaque hemorrhage within human atherosclerosis. Hb associated macrophages, M(Hb), are distinct from traditional macrophage foam cells because they do not contain large amounts of lipid or inflammatory cytokines, are characterized by high levels of expression of mannose receptor (CD206) and CD163 in addition to producing anti-inflammatory cytokines such as IL-10. Despite the well-known role of iron as an catalyst capable of producing lipid peroxidation through generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) such as hydroxyl radical, we and others have shown that macrophages in areas of intraplaque hemorrhage demonstrate reduced intracellular iron and ROS which triggers production of anti-inflammatory cytokines as well as genes involved in cholesterol eﬄux. These data suggest that manipulation of macrophage iron itself may be a promising pharmacologic target for atherosclerosis prevention through its effects on macrophage inflammation and lipid metabolism. In this review we will summarize the current understanding of iron as it relates to plaque inflammation and discuss how further exploration of this subject may lead to new therapies for atherosclerosis.