Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improved bioengineered cartilage tissue formation following cyclic compression is dependent on upregulation of MT1‐MMP

The generation of bioengineered cartilage tissue suitable for transplantation is a potential therapy to treat damaged cartilage. We have shown previously that the physical and biomechanical properties of bioengineered cartilage can be improved by the application of 30 min of cyclic compression by a mechanism involving sequential upregulation of gene and protein levels of membrane type‐1 matrix metalloproteinase (MT1‐MMP) and MMP‐13. In the current study, we demonstrated that MT1‐MMP is critical to this response, as blocking the upregulation of MT1‐MMP prevented the improvement in tissue formation. MT1‐MMP seems to act by inducing tissue remodeling as evidenced by the presence of aggrecan degradation products by Western blot analysis and increased release of matrix molecules into the media. Release of these molecules was diminished when MT1‐MMP upregulation was prevented. This matrix degradation was likely due to MT1‐MMP, as under conditions where MMP‐13 expression is maintained (stimulation in the presence of MT1‐MMP siRNA) the release of these matrix molecules into the media was still prevented. It also appears that MT1‐MMP does not regulate MMP‐13 gene expression, as MT1‐MMP‐siRNA pretreatment had no effect on MMP‐13 expression following mechanical stimulation. Further analysis of the anabolic genes and proteins involved in mechanically stimulated cartilage will lead to better understanding of the mechanism(s) underlying tissue formation yielding improved bioengineered cartilage. © 2010 Orthopaedic Research Society. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Orthop Res 28:921–927, 2010
Molecular Mechanisms of Pesticide Toxicity

The environment represents a key contributor to human health and disease. Exposure to many environmental stressors such as pesticides have detrimental effects on health and are considered to contribute substantially to most diseases of major public health significance. Pesticide toxicity has been clearly demonstrated to alter a variety of physiological functions. In addition, evidence suggests that pesticide exposure increases the risk of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Recent evidence also demonstrates the ability of pesticides to act as endocrine disruptors, contributing to various adverse effects associated with reproductive and developmental toxicity (Colborn, 2006; Eskenazi et al., 1999). Thus, it is now evident that research towards understanding how pesticides influence the development and progression of disease will lead to further improvements in public health. A key for Environmental Sciences is identifying and understanding the basic biological processes that are altered or regulated by environmental factors, and that stimulate disease processes to begin, or the course of the disease to be substantially altered. For this, basic biology research with potential for future translation into the clinic must be pursued to understand the fundamental changes caused by exposure to environmental agents especially pesticides that will drive the scientific basis for health decisions. Cells respond and adapt to environmental signals such as toxicants or stressors through multiple mechanisms that involve communication pathways or signal transduction processes. A number of receptors sense the presence of foreign compounds in the cell and induce a cascade of events that is intended to lead to neutralization and excretion of these compounds. However, in many cases the metabolism of xenobiotic substances can give rise to toxic metabolites or to reactive oxygen species (ROS) that can harm the cell further. Additionally, the metabolism of foreign compounds can disturb other essential processes in the body, such as production and metabolism of certain hormones. Alterations in biochemical systems are often more sensitive indicators than those at higher levels of biological organization. Indeed, changes at the molecular level will underlie the effects at higher levels of organization. In this chapter, we focus on a number of molecular pathways implicated in responses to pesticides. In many cases, these responses are adaptive. However, the same systems are involved in reactions leading to toxic effects. They are crucial to the health effects associated with pesticide insult and can be linked to adverse toxic effects and pathologies at higher levels of organization. These systems are: Endocrine disruption that can take place at different physiological levels: A) Altering (inhibiting or stimulating) the secretion of hormones. This possible effect is related to
Magnesium sulfate treatment decreases the initial brain damage alterations produced after perinatal asphyxia in fetal lambs

The aim of this work was to analyze the effect of MgSO4 treatment in the brain after hypoxic–ischemic (HI) injury in premature fetal lambs. Injury was induced by partial occlusion of umbilical cord for 60 min, and then the preterm lambs (80–90% of gestation) were randomly assigned to one of the following groups: control group, in which the animals were managed by conventional mechanical ventilation for 3 hr; 3 hr postpartial cord occlusion (3‐hr‐PCO) group, in which injured animals were managed by ventilation and then sacrificed 3 hr after HI; and MgSO4 group, in which animals received 400 mg/kg MgSO4 for 20 min soon after HI was induced and were managed by ventilation for 3 hr. Brains were analyzed for apoptosis by TUNEL assay. Cell viability and intracellular state studies were assessed by flow cytometry. The delayed death index was significantly increased in the 3‐hr‐PCO group in comparison with control. Administration of MgSO4 elicited a delay in cell death that was similar to that in the control group. The 3‐hr‐PCO group showed a significantly higher concentration of reactive oxygen species, mitochondrial damage, and intracellular calcium in comparison with control and MgSO4‐ treated groups. Our results suggest that MgSO4 treatment might have potential therapeutic benefits after the HI event. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Primary HPV testing: a proposal for co‐testing in initial rounds of screening to optimise sensitivity of cervical cancer screening

As explained by Kitchener in a previous issue of Cytopathology (2015;26:4‐6), primary human papillomavirus (HPV) testing is likely to be introduced in the UK for all women aged 25–64 years following pilot site studies already in place. This will be necessary when the prevalence of cervical cancer and its precursors declines when vaccination takes effect but there is a risk in abandoning cytology as a primary test: a risk that would be most apparent in the present unvaccinated population in which the prevalence of cervical cancer and its precursors is exceptionally high. HPV testing is more sensitive than cytology but has a significant false‐negative rate that could be detrimental to a successful screening programme if introduced without cytology backup. Accurate cytology would be needed for triage and could be compromised if HPV‐negative tests were excluded from examination.
A Robust Divide and Conquer Algorithm for Progressive Medial Axes of Planar Shapes

The medial axis is an important shape representation that finds a wide range of applications in shape analysis. For large-scale shapes of high resolution, a progressive medial axis representation that starts with the lowest resolution and gradually adds more details is desired. In this paper, we propose a fast and robust geometric algorithm that computes progressive medial axes of a large-scale planar shape. The key ingredient of our method is a novel structural analysis of merging medial axes of two planar shapes along a shared boundary. Our method is robust by separating the analysis of topological structure from numerical computation. Our method is also fast and we show that the time complexity of merging two medial axes is <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(n\;\log n_v)$ </tex-math><alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="liu-ieq1-2511739.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>, where <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="liu-ieq2-2511739.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> is the number of total boundary generators, <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n_v$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="liu-ieq3-2511739.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> is strictly smaller than <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="liu-ieq4-2511739.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> and behaves as a small constant in all our experiments. Experiments on large-scale polygonal data and comparison with state-of-the-art methods show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method.
Context-aware Point-of-Interest Recommendation Using Tensor Factorization with Social Regularization

Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation is a new type of recommendation task that comes along with the prevalence of location-based social networks in recent years. Compared with traditional tasks, it focuses more on personalized, context-aware recommendation results to provide better user experience. To address this new challenge, we propose a Collaborative Filtering method based on Non-negative Tensor Factorization, a generalization of the Matrix Factorization approach that exploits a high-order tensor instead of traditional User-Location matrix to model multi-dimensional contextual information. The factorization of this tensor leads to a compact model of the data which is specially suitable for context-aware POI recommendations. In addition, we fuse users' social relations as regularization terms of the factorization to improve the recommendation accuracy. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Potential interests of heart rate lowering drugs

Epidemiological studies have shown that a high heart rate at rest is a risk factor for global and cardiovascular mortality.1-3 A rapid heart rate is associated with a variety of prognostic factors indicative of worse heart conditions (for example, hypoxaemia, anaemia, alcohol consumption, low physical training status). The link between a high resting heart rate and an increase in overall and cardiovascular mortality has, however, been shown to be independent of cardiac conditions that can contribute to an increase in the resting heart rate, and persists after adjustment for other classic variables (sex, arterial pressure, and alcohol consumption). 2 3 Recently, an elegant study showed that, among mammals, the relation between the number of beats per lifetime and life expectancy was remarkably constant, and the provocative question was raised as whether human life could be extended by slowing the heart rate.4Of course, such a study using bradycardiac drugs has not yet been performed, but these data point to the potential beneficial effect of heart rate lowering drugs in patients with cardiac disorders. This review examines the impact on the cardiovascular system of treatments which lower the heart rate. ### VASCULAR FUNCTION Arterial mechanical properties are determined by elastic, viscous, and inertial components of the vessel wall. The duration of the distension recoil cycle potentially affects arterial function. In vitro, the mechanical properties of the large arteries, particularly the incremental elastic modulus, index of arterial stiffness, are frequency dependent and may be influenced by the resting heart rate. In animal studies, pace induced tachycardia is associated with reductions in arterial compliance and distensibility, with a greater effect in carotid than in femoral arteries.5 A recent clinical study in humans has shown a positive correlation between high heart rate and high arterial stiffness.6 However, the beneficial effect of heart rate …
Design of biodegradable PCL/PI films as a joining tape for grafting plant

ABSTRACT In this study, novel eco-friendly blends based on environmental-friendly polymers and compatibilizers, such as poly(ϵ-caprolactone) (PCL), cis-1,4-polyisoprene (PI), soybean lecithin (SOLE) and acrylated-epoxidized soybean oil (AESO), have been prepared in order to suggest a biodegradable joining tool used for plant grafting in agriculture, which will be competitive from the environment and economic points of view against conventional nonbiodegradable tools. PCL/PI blends, in which the portion of PCL was 75 and 50, were mixed with a compatibilizer by a melt-blending technique. The resulting blends were investigated by thermogravimetric analysis, differential scanning calorimetry and scanning electron microscopy and also their mechanical properties were determined. Afterwards, the blend films were buried in the soil. Remarkable level of weight loss was achieved in 6 weeks, ∼46%. The results showed that the addition of SOLE helped to improve the compatibility between PCL and PI due to its amphipathic property, and, besides, accelerated the weight loss of the films in soil, increasing microorganism growth on the film.
Development of a Method for Accelerated Ageing of Cementitious Materials Used in Repositories for Nuclear Waste

The Swedish nuclear fuel and waste management company (SKB), is required to validate the service life prediction of the concrete structures in nuclear waste repositories. Considering the repository being in contact with water , the decalcification process of cementitious materials although being very slow can during the very long operational lifetime of the repository (up to 100000 years), cause the degradation of chemical and mechanical properties of the concrete structures. In order to predict the long-term service life of the structures without extrapolating short-term experimental results, methods that accelerate the leaching process of calcium from cementitious materials are required. In this work the development process of an electro-chemical migration method for acceleration of the calcium leaching from cementitious specimens is presented. The method enables ageing of cementitious specimens with sufficiently large sizes suitable for testing mechanical and transport properties. In this method, the cementitious specimen is placed in an electrochemical cell as a porous path way through which ions can migrate at a rate far higher than diffusion process. The results show that, by a careful adjustment of the experimental parameters such as the magnitude of electrical field and choice of anolyte and catholyte solutions, an effective leaching of calcium with an acceleration factor of >600 can be obtained. According to instrumental analysis the chemical and mineralogical properties of the treated specimens are comparable with the characteristics of the aged specimens in natural decalcification process
The solute carrier family 15A4 regulates TLR9 and NOD1 functions in the innate immune system and promotes colitis in mice.

BACKGROUND & AIMS Solute carrier family 15 (SLC15) A4 is a proton-coupled histidine and oligopeptide cotransporter expressed by the immune and nervous systems and associated with disorders such as inflammatory bowel diseases and systemic lupus erythematosus. High levels of SLC15A4 transcripts were observed in human antigen-presenting cells, including dendritic cells, activated macrophages, and B cells. However, the roles of SLC15A4 in the immune regulation are not known. We investigated the function of SLC15A4 in the innate immune system. METHODS We created SLC15A4-deficient (SLC15A4(-/-)) mice and compared Toll-like receptor 9 and NOD1-dependent innate immune responses between SLC15A4(-/-) and control (SLC15A4(+/+)) mice. RESULTS SLC15A4 deficiency impaired CpG-induced production of interleukin-12, interleukin-15, and interleukin-18 by dendritic cells. Correspondingly, SLC15A4(-/-) mice developed a less severe form of Th1-dependent colitis than SLC15A4(+/+) mice. Increased lysosomal histidine, in the absence of SLC15A4, appears to negatively regulate Toll-like receptor 9 function by inhibiting the proteolytic activities of cathepsins B and L. SLC15A4(-/-) mice also had a severe defect in NOD1-dependent cytokine production, indicating that SLC15A4 functions as a transporter of the NOD1 ligand. CONCLUSIONS SLC15A4 promotes colitis through Toll-like receptor 9 and NOD1-dependent innate immune responses. Histidine homeostasis within intracellular compartments is important for eliciting effective innate immune responses.
Incremental Computation of Time-Varying Query Expressions

We present and analyze algorithms for the incremental computation of time-varying queries in which selection predicates refer to the state of a clock. Such queries occur naturally in many situations where temporal data are processed. Incremental techniques for query computation have proven to be more efficient than other techniques in many situations. However, all existing incremental techniques for query computation assume that old query results remain valid if no intermediate changes are made to the underlying database. Unfortunately, this assumption does not hold for time-varying queries whose results may change just because time passes. In order to solve this problem, we introduce the notion of a superview which contains all current tuples that will eventually satisfy the selection predicate of a time-varying selection. Based on the notion of superview, we develop efficient algorithms for the incremental computation of time-varying selections. Our algorithms, combined with existing incremental algorithms, allow complex time-varying queries to benefit from the proven efficiency of incremental techniques. It is important to notice that without our algorithms, the existing algorithms for incremental computation would be useless for any time-varying query expression. >
Residues of deoxynivalenol (DON) and its metabolite de-epoxy-DON in eggs, plasma and bile of laying hens of different genetic backgrounds

In the present study, the potential for carry-over of deoxynivalenol (DON) into eggs and DON residues in plasma and bile of laying hens of different genetic backgrounds after long-term feeding trial was investigated. A total of 80, 23-week-old laying hens were assigned to a feeding trial with two diets, a control diet and a Fusarium toxin-contaminated diet (FUS) (0.4 and 9.9 mg DON kg−1, respectively). In the 60th week of hen’s life, 10 eggs from each group were collected. In the 70th week of hen’s life, all hens were slaughtered and samples of blood and bile were collected. The samples were analysed by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) for DON and de-epoxy-DON. DON was only detected in samples of hens which fed the FUS diet while none of the samples analysed had detectable levels of de-epoxy-DON. In plasma and bile samples, DON levels ranged from 0.2 to 0.6 ng ml−1 and from 1.8 to 4.1 ng ml−1, respectively. DON levels in egg yolk and albumen ranged between 0.0–0.46 ng g−1 and 0.0–0.35 ng g−1, respectively, corresponding to carry-over rates of DON into eggs from 0.0 to 0.000016. Moreover, no differences in DON levels or carry-over rates were noticed between the two tested breeds. These results show that very low levels of DON were transferred into eggs and indicate that although eggs could contribute to human exposure to DON, the levels are very low and insignificant.
Content Protection and Delivery System for the Internet

We describe a multi-level content protection system designed for Internet-based content delivery. Our system consists of a server module and a client module. The delivery of protected content is the same for all clients, but the decoding is dependent on the client’s level of authorization. The different levels of protection schemes used by the system include fast encryption exploiting the properties of MPEG streams, perceptual scrambling of visual content, and watermarking for both fingerprinting and copyright protection.
Recent development in electrospun polymer fiber and their composites with shape memory property: a review

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of recent systematic and comprehensive advancement in electrospun polymer fiber and their composites with shape memory property. Design/methodology/approach The nanofiber manufacture technique is initially reviewed. Then, the influence of electrospinning parameters and actuation method has been discussed. Finally, the study concludes with a brief review of recent development in potential applications. Findings Shape memory polymer (SMP) nanofibers are a type of smart materials which can change shape under external stimuli (e.g. temperature, electricity, magnetism, solvent). In general, such SMP nanofibers could be easily fabricated by mature electrospinning technique. The nanofiber morphology is mainly affected by the electrospinning parameters, including applied voltage, tip-to-collector distance, viscosity of solution, humidity and molecular weight. For actuation method, most SMP nanofibers and their composites can change their shapes in response to heat, magnetic field or solvent, while few can be driven by electricity. Compared with the block SMPs, electrospun SMP nanofibers’ mat with porosity and low mechanical property have a wide potential application field including tissue engineering, drug delivery, filtration, catalysis. Originality/value This paper provides a detailed review of shape memory nanofibers: fabrication, actuation and potential application, in the near future.
Increasing the customer's choice: query expansion based on the layer-seeds method and its application in e-commerce

In e-commerce it is often crucial to provide customers a large choice of relevant offers. As short and incomplete queries prevail, appropriate expansion methods are desirable. This work describes a method for the automatic construction of a thesaurus based on existing categories of documents. A clustering algorithm, the "Layer-Seeds method", is introduced, which facilitates the automatic generation of thesaurus reflecting the specific vocabulary occurring in a given collection of documents. The clustering works on terms extracted from the documents in a certain category and organizes them in a tree-like hierarchical structure - a thesaurus. The thesaurus is then employed for automatic query expansion in an e-commerce application in order to obtain better results for product searching. Experiments yield evidence that a significant increase of user satisfaction is achieved.
Groningen Radiocarbon Dates IV

An attempt has been made to assemble the large number of C14 dates measured in Groningen since the last date list was published in 1958. We have not succeeded in preparing all the measurements done in this time; the present list contains a more or less random selection. It is hoped the rest will be included in next year's list.
NoC-Based FPGA: Architecture and Routing

We present a novel network-on-chip-based architecture for future programmable chips (FPGAs). A key challenge for FPGA design is supporting numerous highly variable design instances with good performance and low cost. Our architecture minimizes the cost of supporting a wide range of design instances with given throughput requirements by balancing the amount of efficient hard-coded NoC infrastructure and the allocation of "soft" networking resources at configuration time. Although traffic patterns are design-specific, the physical link infrastructure is a performance bottleneck, and hence should be hard-coded. It is therefore important to employ routing schemes that allow for high flexibility to efficiently accommodate different traffic patterns during configuration. We examine the required capacity allocation for supporting a collection of typical traffic patterns on such chips under a number of routing schemes. We propose a new routing scheme, weighted ordered toggle (WOT), and show that it allows high design flexibility with low infrastructure cost. Moreover, WOT utilizes simple, small-area, on-chip routers, and has low memory demands