Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CpG Oligodeoxynucleotides Adsorbed onto Polylactide-Co-Glycolide Microparticles Improve the Immunogenicity and Protective Activity of the Licensed Anthrax Vaccine

ABSTRACT To reduce the biothreat posed by anthrax, efforts are under way to improve the protection afforded by vaccination. This work examines the ability of immunostimulatory CpG oligodeoxynucleotides (ODN) adsorbed onto cationic polylactide-co-glycolide (PLG) microparticles (CpG ODN-PLG) to accelerate and boost the protective immunity elicited by Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed (AVA, the licensed human anthrax vaccine). The results indicate that coadministering CpG ODN-PLG with AVA induces a stronger and faster immunoglobulin G response against the protective antigen of anthrax than AVA alone. Immunized mice were protected from lethal anthrax challenge within 1 week of vaccination with CpG ODN-PLG plus AVA, with the level of protection correlating with serum immunoglobulin G anti-protective antigen titers.
Leakage Power Analysis attacks: Well-defined procedure and first experimental results

In this paper, attacks aiming at recovering the secret key of a cryptographic core from measurements of its static (leakage) power are presented. These attacks exploit the dependence of the leakage current of CMOS Integrated Circuits (ICs) on their inputs (e.g., the secret key of a cryptographic circuit). For this reason, these novel attacks are referred to as Leakage Power Analysis (LPA) attacks in this paper. Since the leakage power increases much faster than the dynamic power at each new technology node, LPA attacks are shown to be a serious threat to information security of cryptographic circuits in sub-100 nm technologies. For the first time in the literature, a well-defined procedure to perform LPA attacks is presented. Advantages and measurement issues are also analyzed in comparison with traditional Power Analysis attacks based on dynamic power measurements. An experimental attack to a register is finally performed for the first time.
Bilateral Persistent Hyperplastic Primary Vitreous:  A Close Mimic of Retinoblastoma

Bilateral persistent hyperplastic primary vitreous (PHPV) is a rare disorder of eye. It is one of the most important differential diagnoses of retinoblastoma, hence early and accurate diagnosis is important. We here report a case of an 11-month-old child which was referred to ocular OPD with complaints of bilateral leukocoria. Examination revealed greyish-white masses posterior to both lenses, raising the clinical suspicion of retinoblastoma. Ultrasonography demonstrated echogenic masses extending from the posterior surface of the lens to the optic disc with reduced axial lengths. These masses demonstrated flow on color Doppler evaluation. CT scan revealed hyperdense masses behind the lens without any evidence of intralesional calcification. Clinical features and imaging findings point towards the diagnosis of bilateral PHPV. PHPV is a developmental disorder of the globe in which the hyaloid vasculature fails to regress normally. While unilateral PHPV is common, bilateral PHPV is a rare entity. It is one of the most important conditions mimicking retinoblastoma; hence early and accurate diagnosis is required. Ophthalmological examination is still the best way to confirm the diagnosis. However, if the diagnosis remain unclear, further evaluation using ultrasonography, Color Doppler, and CT scan is useful.
Effects Of Crude Extracts Of Portulaca Oleracea On Male Reproductive Functions In Albino Rats

Portulaca oleraces is a shrub which is grown as a vegetable in many parts of the world. Many studies have reported the hypoxic nerve tissue protective, anti- inflammatory and wound-healing effects of its extracts, but there is scanty information on its effect on reproduction. This study was designed to investigate the effect of its aqueous and methanolic extracts on reproductive parameters in male albino rats. Aqueous and methanolic extracts are designated as AEPO and MEPO respectively. AEPO and MEPO were prepared using cold maceration. The extracts at various doses (25 mg/g, 50mg/kg and 75 mg/kg) were orally administered for 50 days. Distilled water (0.5ml) served as the control. Plasma testosterone levels were assayed using Enzyme-linted I(mmunosorbent Assay (ELISA) and semen analysis was done microscopically, histology of the testes was also done. Data were analysed using ANOVA at p< 0.05. Treatment of rats with all the doses (except 25 mg/kg and 50 mg/kg AEPO) caused significant (p < 0.05) decrease in testosterone levels. Treatment of rats with all the doses (except 25 mg/kg AEPO) caused significant (p < 0.05) reduction in % progressive sperm motility, while treatment with all the doses cause significant (p < 0.05) increase in % abnormal sperm cells. The extracts (AEPO and MEPO) also caused reductions of germinal epithelial cells. It can therefore be suggested that Portulaca oleracea has deleterious effect on the reproductive functions in male albino rats
A new noise variance and post detection SNR estimation method for MIMO OFDM systems

In this paper, a new noise variance and post detection SNR estimation algorithm is proposed for MIMO OFDM systems. The estimated channel vector is employed and multiplied by a special Q matrix which comes from the QR decomposition of a partial frequency domain transform matrix. The noise components in the processed channel estimation vector are used to estimate the noise variance. The post detection SNR can be calculated out with the channel estimation results and the estimated noise variance. Simulation results show that the proposed estimator can obtain accurate estimation results. Moreover, the new estimator is not sensitive to frequency selectivity of wireless channels.
MAGI-1, a Membrane-associated Guanylate Kinase with a Unique Arrangement of Protein-Protein Interaction Domains*

Membrane-associated guanylate kinase (MAGUK) proteins participate in the assembly of multiprotein complexes on the inner surface of the plasma membrane at regions of cell-cell contact. MAGUKs are characterized by three types of protein-protein interaction modules: the PDZ domain, the Src homology 3 (SH3) domain, and the guanylate kinase (GuK) domain. The arrangement of these domains is conserved in all previously known MAGUKs: either one or three PDZ domains in the NH2-terminal half, followed by the SH3 domain, followed by a COOH-terminal GuK domain. In this report, we describe the cDNA cloning and subcellular distribution of MAGI-1, a MAGUK with three unique structural features: 1) the GuK domain is at the NH2 terminus, 2) the SH3 domain is replaced by two WW domains, and 3) it contains five PDZ domains. MAGI-1 mRNA was detected in several adult mouse tissues. Sequence analysis of overlapping cDNAs revealed the existence of three splice variants that are predicted to encode MAGI-1 proteins with different COOH termini. The longest variant, MAGI-1c, contains three bipartite nuclear localization signals in its unique COOH-terminal sequence and was found predominantly in the nucleus of Madin-Darby canine kidney cells. A shorter form lacking these signals was found primarily in membrane and cytoplasmic fractions. This distribution, which is reminiscent of that seen for the tight junction protein ZO-1, suggests that MAGI-1 may participate in the transmission of regulatory signals from the cell surface to the nucleus.
Funding of US biomedical research, 2003-2008.

CONTEXT With the exception of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, funding support for biomedical research in the United States has slowed after a decade of doubling. However, the extent and scope of slowing are largely unknown. OBJECTIVE To quantify funding of biomedical research in the United States from 2003 to 2008. DESIGN Publicly available data were used to quantify funding from government (federal, state, and local), private, and industry sources. Regression models were used to compare financial trends between 1994-2003 and 2003-2007. The numbers of new drug and device approvals by the US Food and Drug Administration over the same period were also evaluated. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Funding and growth rates by source; numbers of US Food and Drug Administration approvals. RESULTS Biomedical research funding increased from $75.5 billion in 2003 to $101.1 billion in 2007. In 2008, funding from the National Institutes of Health and industry totaled $88.8 billion. In 2007, funding from these sources, adjusted for inflation, was $90.2 billion. Adjusted for inflation, funding from 2003 to 2007 increased by 14%, for a compound annual growth rate of 3.4%. By comparison, funding from 1994 to 2003 increased at an annual rate of 7.8% (P < .001). In 2007, industry (58%) was the largest funder, followed by the federal government (33%). Modest increase in funding was not accompanied by an increase in approvals for drugs or devices. In 2007, the United States spent an estimated 4.5% of its total health expenditures on biomedical research and 0.1% on health services research. CONCLUSION After a decade of doubling, the rate of increase in biomedical research funding slowed from 2003 to 2007, and after adjustment for inflation, the absolute level of funding from the National Institutes of Health and industry appears to have decreased by 2% in 2008.
IT Security Governance Innovations: Theory and Research

Information technology in the workplace is vital to the management of workflow in the company; therefore, IT security is no longer considered a technical issue but a necessity of an entire corporation. The practice of IT security has rapidly expanded to an aspect of Corporate Governance so that the understanding of the risks and prospects of IT security are being properly managed at an executive level. IT Security Governance Innovations: Theory and Research provides extraordinary research which highlights the main contributions and characteristics of existing approaches, standards, best practices, and new trends in IT Security Governance. With theoretical and practical perspectives, the book aims to address IT Security Governance implementation in corporate organizations. This collection of works serves as a reference for CEOs and CIOs, security managers, systems specialists, computer science students, and much more.
Cellular Uptake and Delivery-Dependent Effects of Tb3+-Doped Hydroxyapatite Nanorods

With the increasing interest in hydroxyapatite (HA) nanostructures for use in biomedicine, the systematic evaluation of their potential effects on biological systems is becoming critically important. In this work, we report the in vitro cellular uptake, in vivo tissue distributions and toxicity of Tb3+-doped HA (HA-Tb) after short-, intermediate-, and long-term exposure. Transmission electron microscopy analysis indicated that HA-Tb was taken up by cells via vesicle endocytosis. Cell proliferation and cytotoxicity assay, combined with confocal laser scanning microscopy, indicated excellent cell viability with no changes in cell morphology at the examined doses. Three HA-Tb delivery methods (intraperitoneal, intragastric, and intravenous) resulted in similar time-dependent tissue distributions, while intraperitoneal injection produced the highest bioavailability. HA-Tb initially accumulated in livers and intestines of rats (4 h to one day after administration), then became increasingly distributed in the kidney and bladder (seven days), and finally decreased in all tissues after 30 to 90 days. No histopathological abnormalities or lesions related to treatment with HA-Tb were observed. These results suggest that HA-Tb has minimal in vitro and in vivo toxicity, regardless of the delivery mode, time, and dose. The findings provide a foundation for the design and development of HA for biological applications.
Because I said so: the persistence of mainstream policy advice

The current global crisis has shown the limitations of the mainstream approach. We trace the origins of the limitations of the dominant neoclassical views to the capital debates and to the rise to dominance of intertemporal general equilibrium. The limited use of the Arrow-Debreu model, which became dominant after the capital debates, in terms of policymaking, is central to understand the persistence of policy guided by the aggregative model. We use the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a case study of this perplexing continuity of policy advice. Given our survey, we conclude that even though the economy is in the midst of the worst capitalist crisis since the Great Depression, a significant paradigmatic shift in economics is extraordinarily unlikely.
Traveling Wave and Aggregation in a Flux-Limited Keller-Segel Model

Flux-limited Keller-Segel (FLKS) model has been recently derived from kinetic transport models for bacterial chemotaxis and shown to represent better the collective movement observed experimentally. Recently, associated to the kinetic model, a new instability formalism has been discovered related to stiff chemotactic response. This motivates our study of traveling wave and aggregation in population dynamics of chemotactic cells based on the FLKS model with a population growth term. Our study includes both numerical and theoretical contributions. In the numerical part, we uncover a variety of solution types in the one-dimensional FLKS model additionally to standard Fisher/KPP type traveling wave. The remarkable result is a counter-intuitive backward traveling wave, where the population density initially saturated in a stable state transits toward an unstable state in the local population dynamics. Unexpectedly, we also find that the backward traveling wave solution transits to a localized spiky solution as increasing the stiffness of chemotactic response. In the theoretical part, we obtain a novel analytic formula for the minimum traveling speed which includes the counterbalancing effect of chemotactic drift vs. reproduction/diffusion in the propagating front. The front propagation speeds of numerical results only slightly deviate from the minimum traveling speeds, except for the localized spiky solutions, even for the backward traveling waves. We also discover an analytic solution of unimodal traveling wave in the large-stiffness limit, which is certainly unstable but exists in a certain range of parameters.
Replication of Many Human Viruses Is Refractory to Inhibition by Endogenous Cellular MicroRNAs

ABSTRACT The issue of whether viruses are subject to restriction by endogenous microRNAs (miRNAs) and/or by virus-induced small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) in infected human somatic cells has been controversial. Here, we address this question in two ways. First, using deep sequencing, we demonstrate that infection of human cells by the RNA virus dengue virus (DENV) or West Nile virus (WNV) does not result in the production of any virus-derived siRNAs or viral miRNAs. Second, to more globally assess the potential of small regulatory RNAs to inhibit virus replication, we used gene editing to derive human cell lines that lack a functional Dicer enzyme and that therefore are unable to produce miRNAs or siRNAs. Infection of these cells with a wide range of viruses, including DENV, WNV, yellow fever virus, Sindbis virus, Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus, measles virus, influenza A virus, reovirus, vesicular stomatitis virus, human immunodeficiency virus type 1, or herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1), failed to reveal any enhancement in the replication of any of these viruses, although HSV-1, which encodes at least eight Dicer-dependent viral miRNAs, did replicate somewhat more slowly in the absence of Dicer. We conclude that most, and perhaps all, human viruses have evolved to be resistant to inhibition by endogenous human miRNAs during productive replication and that dependence on a cellular miRNA, as seen with hepatitis C virus, is rare. How viruses have evolved to avoid inhibition by endogenous cellular miRNAs, which are generally highly conserved during metazoan evolution, remains to be determined. IMPORTANCE Eukaryotic cells express a wide range of small regulatory RNAs, including miRNAs, that have the potential to inhibit the expression of mRNAs that show sequence complementarity. Indeed, previous work has suggested that endogenous miRNAs have the potential to inhibit viral gene expression and replication. Here, we demonstrate that the replication of a wide range of pathogenic viruses is not enhanced in human cells engineered to be unable to produce miRNAs, indicating that viruses have evolved to be resistant to inhibition by miRNAs. This result is important, as it implies that manipulation of miRNA levels is not likely to prove useful in inhibiting virus replication. It also focuses attention on the question of how viruses have evolved to resist inhibition by miRNAs and whether virus mutants that have lost this resistance might prove useful, for example, in the development of attenuated virus vaccines.
Cooperative Parallel Metaheuristics based Penguin Optimization Search for Solving the Vehicle Routing Problem

In this work the authors present a new approach based on the cooperation of many variants of metaheuristics in order to solve the large existing benchmark instances of the capacitated vehicle routing problem CVRP. The proposed method follows the parallel pattern of the generalized island model GIM. Consequently, the used metaheuristics, namely genetic algorithm GA, the ant colony optimization ACO, and the first application of the penguin optimization search PEO have been used to handle the large size of the CVRP. These optimization processes have been put over numerous islands that communicate via the process of exchanging solutions. Comparative studies as well as tests over the existing benchmark instances have been reported to prove the efficiency of the proposed approach.
Soft Tissue Impingement Syndrome of the Ankle: Diagnostic Efficacy of MRI and Clinical Results after Arthroscopic Treatment

Background: Soft-tissue impingement syndrome is now increasingly being recognized as a significant cause of chronic ankle pain. The aim of this study was to investigate the diagnostic accuracy of contrast-enhanced, fat-suppressed, three-dimensional (3D), fast-gradient-recalled acquisition in the steady state with radio-frequency-spoiling (CE 3D-FSPGR) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and to evaluate the clinical outcome of arthroscopic treatment of soft-tissue impingement associated with the ankle trauma. Methods: This study reviewed 38 patients who had preoperative MRI and arthroscopic treatment of chronic ankle pain after trauma. The CE 3D-FSPGR MRI was used to evaluate the chronic ankle pain, and the American Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Society (AOFAS) Ankle-Hindfoot Score was used to evaluate the clinical results after arthroscopic treatment. Results: The CE 3D-FSPGR MRI showed a sensitivity of 91.9%, a specificity of 84.4%, and an accuracy of 87.5% in diagnosing synovitis and soft tissue impingement. All patients had excellent or good outcomes after arthroscopic debridement. Conclusion: The results of this study suggest that a preoperative fat-suppressed CE 3D-FSPGR MRI is highly beneficial in diagnosing synovitis and soft-tissue impingement and that arthroscopic debridement of the synovitis or soft-tissue impingement has a good clinical outcome.
Increased Number of Voltage Steps for Cascaded H-bridge Multilevel Inverters using 3-level Operation in each Half-cycle

Some renewable energy sources provide dc electrical energy. For example, photovoltaic sources, fuel cells, and the rectified output of some turbine driven sources, produce dc voltages. If the outputs of these devices are to be fed to the ac power grid, a power interface is required. The cascaded h-bridge multilevel inverter is an electronic interface that can connect multiple dc energy sources to an ac power system. In this paper we present an analysis to demonstrate the degree to which the total harmonic distortion of a cascaded H-bridge can be reduced by having some H- bridges provide 3-level voltage contributions in each half-cycle of the stepped output voltage waveform. Such 3-level operation produces a very significant distortion reduction, the result of an increase in the number of steps.
Evolution of Caenorhabditis elegans host defense under selection by the bacterial parasite Serratia marcescens

Parasites can impose strong selection on hosts. In response, some host populations have adapted via the evolution of defenses that prevent or impede infection by parasites. However, host populations have also evolved life history shifts that maximize host fitness despite infection. Outcrossing and self-fertilization can have contrasting effects on evolutionary trajectories of host populations. While selfing and outcrossing are known to affect the rate at which host populations adapt in response to parasites, these mating systems may also influence the specific traits that underlie adaptation to parasites. Here, we determined the role of evolved host defense versus altered life history,in mixed mating (selfing and outcrossing) and obligately outcrossing C. elegans host populations after experimental evolution with the bacterial parasite, S. marcescens. Similar to previous studies, we found that both mixed mating and obligately outcrossing host populations adapted to S. marcescens exposure, and that the obligately outcrossing populations exhibited the greatest rates of adaptation. Regardless of the host population mating system, exposure to parasites did not significantly alter reproductive timing or total fecundity over the course of experimental evolution. However, both mixed mating and obligately outcrossing host populations exhibited significantly reduced mortality rates in the presence of the parasite after experimental evolution. Therefore, adaptation in both the mixed mating and obligately outcrossing populations was driven, at least in part, by the evolution of increased host defense and not changes in host life history. Thus, the host mating system altered the rate of adaptation, but not the nature of adaptive change in the host populations.
The nucleotide sequence of transthyretin cDNA isolated from a sheep choroid plexus cDNA library.

A cDNA library was constructed in xgtlO from polyadenylated RNA obtained from the choroid plexus of 5 sheep. Several cDNA clones were isolated from the library by hybridization with a [32 P-labetled rat transth retin cDNA. The nucleotide sequence of the largest clone (610 nucleotides), as well as the deduced amino acid sequence are presented below. The nucleotide sequences were determined for both strands. The two bases, T and C, were found in position 457 (3' untranslated region, indicated by an asterisk) in two different cDNA clones. The deduced amino acid sequence exhibits 86%, 83%, 83% and 84% homology with the corresponding sequences of human (1), rat (2), mouse (3) and rabbit (4) transthyretin respectively. There was a high conservation of amino acid residues located at the core (underlined) and central channel (double underlined) regions of the protein (3,4,5). At the nucleotide level, the sequence homologies within the coding region were 84% (human), 83% (mouse) and 82% (rat).