Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characterization of a Legionella micdadei mip mutant

The pathogenesis of Legionella micdadei is dependent upon its ability to infect alveolar phagocytes. To better understand the basis of intracellular infection by this organism, we examined the importance of its Mip surface protein. In Legionella pneumophila, Mip promotes infection of both human macrophages and freshwater protozoa. Southern hybridization and immunoblot analyses demonstrated that mip sequences were present and expressed within a panel of virulent L. micdadei strains. Using allelic exchange mutagenesis, we then constructed an L. micdadei strain that completely and specifically lacked Mip. Although unimpaired in its ability to grow in bacteriologic media, this Mip mutant was defective in its capacity to infect U937 cells, a human macrophage-like cell line. Most significantly, the Mip- organism displayed a 24-fold reduction in survivability immediately after its entry into the phagocyte. Similarly, the mutant was less able to parasitize Hartmannella amoebae. Taken together, these data argue that Mip specifically potentiates intracellular growth by L. micdadei.
Orientation Maps Derived from TEM Diffraction Patterns Collected with an External CCD Camera

An automatic crystallographic orientation indexing procedure is developed for transmission electron microscopes. The numerical identification is performed by mapping the spot diffraction patterns with pre-calculated templates. The diffraction patterns are acquired thanks to an external CCD camera that points to the fluorescent screen through the TEM window. Orientation maps with spatial resolution better than 10 nm were obtained with this low cost equipment.
Consequences in Georgia of a nationwide outbreak of Salmonella infections: what you don't know might hurt you.

OBJECTIVES This study assessed the impact in Georgia of a nationwide salmonellosis outbreak caused by ice cream products and the effectiveness of the subsequent warning against eating the implicated products. METHODS A telephone survey of 250 randomly selected Georgia customers of the ice cream producer was conducted 13 to 17 days after the warning. RESULTS Respondents from 179 households representing 628 persons were interviewed. The median date of first hearing the warning was 5 days after it was issued, and 16 respondents (9%) had not heard it. Among those who had heard the warning, 42 (26%) did not initially believe the products were unsafe. In 22 (31%) of the 72 households that had the implicated ice cream when the respondent heard the warning, someone subsequently ate the ice cream. Diarrhea was reported in 26% (121/463) of persons who had eaten the products but in only 5% (8/152) who had not (odds ratio [controlling for household clustering] = 3.8; 95% confidence interval = 2.0, 7.5). We estimate this outbreak caused 11,000 cases of diarrhea in Georgia, 1760 (16%) with exposure after the warning. CONCLUSIONS A large outbreak occurred in Georgia, much of which might have been prevented by a more timely and convincing warning.
Reduction of direct tunneling power dissipation during behavioral synthesis of nanometer CMOS circuits

Direct tunneling current is the major component of static power dissipation of a CMOS circuit for technology below 65nm, where the gate dielectric (SiO/sub 2/) is very low. We intuitively believe that multiple oxide thickness may be useful to reduce the direct tunneling current dissipation. Since no foundry design rules are available for design and layout using technology below 90nm we provide analytical models to calculate the tunneling current and the propagation delay of behavioral level components. We then characterize those components for 45nm technology and provide an algorithm for scheduling of datapath operations such that the overall tunneling power dissipation of the circuit is minimal. We have carried out extensive experiments for various behavioral level benchmarks under various constraints and observed significant reductions.
An Efficient and Accurate Method for the Relaxation of Multiview Registration Error

This paper presents a new method for the relaxation of multiview registration error. The multiview registration problem is represented using a graph. Each node and each edge in the graph represents a 3-D data set and a pairwise registration, respectively. Assuming that all the pairwise registration processes have converged to fine results, this paper shows that the multiview registration problem can be converted into a quadratic programming problem of Lie algebra parameters. The constraints are obtained from every cycle of the graph to eliminate the accumulation errors of global registration. A linear solution is proposed to distribute the accumulation error to proper positions in the graph, as specified by the quadratic model. Since the proposed method does not involve the original 3-D data, it has low time and space complexity. Additionally, the proposed method can be embedded into a trust-region algorithm and, thus, can correctly handle the nonlinear effects of large accumulation errors, while preserving the global convergence property to the first-order critical point. Experimental results confirm both the efficiency and the accuracy of the proposed method.
Application of PCR assays to determine the genotype of Babesia bovis parasites isolated from cattle with clinical babesiosis soon after vaccination against tick fever.

OBJECTIVE To demonstrate the value of PCR assays to determine the genotypes of Babesia bovis in cattle with clinical signs of babesiosis within 3 weeks after vaccination against tick fever. DESIGN Samples from 5 cases of babesiosis in cattle soon after vaccination against tick fever were analysed in two PCR assays. PROCEDURE Parasite DNA was purified from blood taken from cattle with signs of babesiosis within 3 weeks of vaccination against tick fever. DNA was also prepared from the tissues of animals that died of babesiosis. Two PCR assays that amplify repeat sequences of DNA within the B bovis genes, Bv80 and BvVA1, were used to differentiate the genotypes of field isolates and vaccine strains of B bovis. RESULTS One of the five cases of babesiosis was found to be caused by a vaccine strain, but PCR analyses showed that the predominant isolate in the other four cases was not the vaccine strain. CONCLUSIONS PCR assays on the DNA of B bovis obtained from the blood or tissues of cattle clinically affected with tick fever within 3 weeks after vaccination are useful to distinguish between vaccine strains and field isolates as the source of infection.
Randomized Controlled Trial of Intensive Versus Conservative Glucose Control in Patients Undergoing Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery: GLUCO-CABG Trial

OBJECTIVE The optimal level of glycemic control needed to improve outcomes in cardiac surgery patients remains controversial. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We randomized patients with diabetes (n = 152) and without diabetes (n = 150) with hyperglycemia to an intensive glucose target of 100–140 mg/dL (n = 151) or to a conservative target of 141–180 mg/dL (n = 151) after coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG) surgery. After the intensive care unit (ICU), patients received a single treatment regimen in the hospital and 90 days postdischarge. Primary outcome was differences in a composite of complications, including mortality, wound infection, pneumonia, bacteremia, respiratory failure, acute kidney injury, and major cardiovascular events. RESULTS Mean glucose in the ICU was 132 ± 14 mg/dL (interquartile range [IQR] 124–139) in the intensive and 154 ± 17 mg/dL (IQR 142–164) in the conservative group (P < 0.001). There were no significant differences in the composite of complications between intensive and conservative groups (42 vs. 52%, P = 0.08). We observed heterogeneity in treatment effect according to diabetes status, with no differences in complications among patients with diabetes treated with intensive or conservative regimens (49 vs. 48%, P = 0.87), but a significant lower rate of complications in patients without diabetes treated with intensive compared with conservative treatment regimen (34 vs. 55%, P = 0.008). CONCLUSIONS Intensive insulin therapy to target glucose of 100 and 140 mg/dL in the ICU did not significantly reduce perioperative complications compared with target glucose of 141 and 180 mg/dL after CABG surgery. Subgroup analysis showed a lower number of complications in patients without diabetes, but not in patients with diabetes treated with the intensive regimen. Large prospective randomized studies are needed to confirm these findings.
Kinetic Studies of the Arf Activator Arno on Model Membranes in the Presence of Arf Effectors Suggest Control by a Positive Feedback Loop*

Proteins of the cytohesin/Arno/Grp1 family of Arf activators are positive regulators of the insulin-signaling pathway and control various remodeling events at the plasma membrane. Arno has a catalytic Sec7 domain, which promotes GDP to GTP exchange on Arf, followed by a pleckstrin homology (PH) domain. Previous studies have revealed two functions of the PH domain: inhibition of the Sec7 domain and membrane targeting. Interestingly, the Arno PH domain interacts not only with a phosphoinositide (phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate or phosphatidylinositol 3,4,5-trisphosphate) but also with an activating Arf family member, such as Arf6 or Arl4. Using the full-length membrane-bound forms of Arf1 and Arf6 instead of soluble forms, we show here that the membrane environment dramatically affects the mechanism of Arno activation. First, Arf6-GTP stimulates Arno at nanomolar concentrations on liposomes compared with micromolar concentrations in solution. Second, mutations in the PH domain that abolish interaction with Arf6-GTP render Arno completely inactive when exchange reactions are reconstituted on liposomes but have no effect on Arno activity in solution. Third, Arno is activated by its own product Arf1-GTP in addition to a distinct activating Arf isoform. Consequently, Arno activity is strongly modulated by competition with Arf effectors. These results show that Arno behaves as a bistable switch, having an absolute requirement for activation by an Arf protein but, once triggered, becoming highly active through the positive feedback effect of Arf1-GTP. This property of Arno might provide an explanation for its function in signaling pathways that, once triggered, must move forward decisively.
Asthma hospitalizations and mortality in Chicago: an epidemiologic overview.

STUDY OBJECTIVES To characterize the patterns and correlates of asthma hospitalizations and mortality in Chicago. DESIGN Cross-sectional analysis of discharge data for 1996 and mortality time trend data for the period from 1990 to 1997. SETTING The city of Chicago, IL, with Cook County, IL, and US data employed for comparisons. POPULATION STUDIED People who were hospitalized with a primary diagnosis of asthma and people whose underlying cause of death was asthma. INTERVENTIONS None. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS The 1996 asthma hospitalization rate for Chicago was 42.8 per 10,000, more than twice as high as suburban Chicago or US rates. Medicaid patients were overrepresented. Length of stay was longer for older patients and Medicaid patients. Age-adjusted asthma mortality in Chicago was 4.7 times higher in non-Hispanic blacks than in non-Hispanic whites. The black/white asthma mortality ratio is 2.5:1 for the nation overall. Asthma mortality rates for Hispanics in Chicago were between those of non-Hispanic whites and blacks but have almost doubled during this decade. CONCLUSIONS The rising asthma mortality and high asthma hospitalization rates in Chicago constitute a significant public health problem. Comorbidities more common in urban environments, such as substance abuse, may play a unique role in determining the distribution of adverse outcomes within Chicago's population. Asthma hospitalizations and deaths may vary in their risk profiles, and this should be taken into account when developing research and intervention strategies.
Adenosine upregulates CXCR4 and enhances the proliferative and migratory responses of human carcinoma cells to CXCL12/SDF‐1α

The level of expression of the chemokine receptor CXCR4 has been shown to play a crucial role in determining the ability of cancer cells to metastasize from the primary tumor and become established in tissue sites that are rich in the CXCR4 ligand CXCL12/SDF‐1α. High CXCR4 expression on cancer cells is associated with an increased risk of recurrence and poorer overall survival. We propose that local tissue mediators within the primary tumor or at secondary sites may modulate the level of CXCR4 expression and, therefore, potentially affect the ability of the cancer cells to metastasize. The purine nucleoside adenine‐9‐β‐D‐ribofuranoside (adenosine) is generated at high concentrations within the extracellular fluid of solid tumors because of their hypoxia. We show here that adenosine acts through A2A and A2B adenosine receptors on human colorectal carcinoma cells to upregulate CXCR4 mRNA expression up to 10‐fold and selectively increases cell‐surface CXCR4 protein up to 3‐fold. This increase in cell‐surface CXCR4 enables the carcinoma cells to migrate toward CXCL12, and enhances their proliferation in response to CXCL12. Adenosine may therefore be one of the factors within the tumor microenvironment that facilitates tumor dissemination, by upregulating CXCR4 on certain cancer cells and enhancing cellular responses to CXCL12. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Advances in the Cross-Linguistic Study of Ideophones

Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery found in many of the world’ sl anguages. They are noted for their special forms, distinct grammatical behaviour, rich sensory meanings, and interactional uses related to experience and evidentiality. This review surveys recent developments in ideophone research. Work on the semiotics of ideophones helps explain why they are marked and how they realise the depictive potential of speech. A true semantic typology of ideophone systems is coming within reach through a combination of language-internal analyses and language-independent elicitation tools. Documentation of ideophones in a wide variety of genres as well as sequential analysis of ideophone use in natural discourse leads to new insights about their interactional uses and about their relation to other linguistic devices like reported speech and grammatical evidentials. As the study of ideophones is coming of age, it sheds new light on what is possible and probable in human language.
Traffic offloading for 5G: L-LTE or Wi-Fi

To cope with increasing mobile data traffic, researchers are currently working on traffic offloading techniques for delivering data over unlicensed cellular bands. Current offloading schemes based on offloading data to Wi-Fi regardless Wi-Fi has sufficient throughput or not. Though, we propose a novel offloading technique based on the Remaining Throughput Scheme (RTS) for Wi-Fi selection. In our proposed RTS technique, data is offloaded from the Unlicensed Long-Term Evolution (U-LTE) network such as Pico/Femto cells or Programmable Base Stations (PBSs) to Wi-Fi Access Points. Further, we propose Distance-based Transfer (DT) and Speed-based Transfer (ST) schemes to transfer users from PBS to Wi-Fi or Licensed LTE (L-LTE) Base Stations (BSs), where the transfer process relies on distance and speed of users, respectively. In this paper, the following three important issues relating to facilitating this transfer are addressed: which Wi-Fi Access Point (AP) should be selected to transfer users, which U-LTE users should be transferred to Wi-Fi, and which U-LTE users should be transferred to L-LTE. Network performance will increase by using RTS, DT and ST schemes as per the analytical evaluations presented.
Hate is not Binary: Studying Abusive Behavior of #GamerGate on Twitter

Over the past few years, online bullying and aggression have become increasingly prominent, and manifested in many different forms on social media. However, there is little work analyzing the characteristics of abusive users and what distinguishes them from typical social media users. In this paper, we start addressing this gap by analyzing tweets containing a great amount of abusiveness. We focus on a Twitter dataset revolving around the Gamergate controversy, which led to many incidents of cyberbullying and cyberaggression on various gaming and social media platforms. We study the properties of the users tweeting about Gamergate, the content they post, and the differences in their behavior compared to typical Twitter users. We find that while their tweets are often seemingly about aggressive and hateful subjects, "Gamergaters" do not exhibit common expressions of online anger, and in fact primarily differ from typical users in that their tweets are less joyful. They are also more engaged than typical Twitter users, which is an indication as to how and why this controversy is still ongoing. Surprisingly, we find that Gamergaters are less likely to be suspended by Twitter, thus we analyze their properties to identify differences from typical users and what may have led to their suspension. We perform an unsupervised machine learning analysis to detect clusters of users who, though currently active, could be considered for suspension since they exhibit similar behaviors with suspended users. Finally, we confirm the usefulness of our analyzed features by emulating the Twitter suspension mechanism with a supervised learning method, achieving very good precision and recall.
Finding Intersections of Bichromatic Segments Defined by Points

Consider a set of n points in <, each colored either red or blue. A line segment defined by two red points is a red segment, and that defined by two blue points is a blue segment. A bichromatic intersection is an intersection between a red segment and a blue segment. We give an O(n + k) algorithm that reports k bichromatic intersections defined by the n points. Extending our algorithm to points on spherical curves, we can report in O(n + k) time the k simplices, defined by n points in <, containing a specified point in their interior.
A static pattern-independent technique for power grid voltage integrity verification

Design verification must be included the power grid. Checking that the voltage on the power grid does not drop by more than some critical threshold is a very difficult problem, for at least two reasons: 1. the obviously large size of the power grids for modern high-performance chips, and 2. the difficulty of setting up the right simulation conditions for the power grid that provide some measure of a realistic worst case voltage drop. The huge number of possible circuit operational modes or workloads makes it impossible to do exhaustive analysis. We propose a static technique for power grid verification, where static is in the sense of static timing analysis, meaning that it does not depend on, nor require, user-specified stimulus to drive a simulation. The verification is posed as an optimization problem under user-supplied current constraints. We propose that current constraints are the right kind of abstraction to use in order to develop a practical methodology for power grid verification. We present our verification approach, and report on the results of applying it to a number of test-case power grids
Breast Palpation Simulation with Haptic Feedback: Prototype and Initial Results

Breast palpation, when a health professional touches the breast of a patient searching for nodules is an important screening test for the breast cancer detection. This exam consists of a main means of the early detection, however, many medical professionals do not have the suitable training to do so. This stems from the fact that exam training depends on volunteers who do not represent the real situation of the disease, or models restricted to a few cases, which do not reflect the range of characteristics of the cancer training. Because of this, this procedure has a high demand for simulators that are able to provide greater realism with low cost and flexibility. This article presents the definition and implementation of a breast palpation simulator with haptic feedback. The main contribution of this paper is to evaluate the haptic feedback provided by the simulator. Evaluation results of the tool from an experiment conducted by palpation with lay users are presented. From the results obtained, it was concluded that the simulator can generate significant learning for users with no experience in the area, with satisfactory force feedback.
Clustering Stream Data by Regression Analysis

In data clustering, many approaches have been proposed such as K-means method and hierarchical method. One of the problems is that the results depend heavily on initial values and criterion to combine clusters. In this investigation, we propose a new method to cluster stream data while avoiding this deficiency. Here we assume there exists aspects of local regression in data. Then we develop our theory to combine clusters using F values by regression analysis as criterion and to adapt to stream data. We examine experiments and show how well the theory works.
Imaging and Nanomedicine in Inflammatory Atherosclerosis

The integration of immunology and cardiovascular medicine with engineering and nanotechnology will yield precision diagnostics and efficient therapeutics for atherosclerosis and its ischemic complications. Bioengineering provides unique opportunities to better understand and manage atherosclerotic disease. The field is entering a new era that merges the latest biological insights into inflammatory disease processes with targeted imaging and nanomedicine. Preclinical cardiovascular molecular imaging allows the in vivo study of targeted nanotherapeutics specifically directed toward immune system components that drive atherosclerotic plaque development and complication. The first multicenter trials highlight the potential contribution of multimodality imaging to more efficient drug development. This review describes how the integration of engineering, nanotechnology, and cardiovascular immunology may yield precision diagnostics and efficient therapeutics for atherosclerosis and its ischemic complications.
Immediate and long-term effects of 2016 Zika Outbreak: A Twitter-based study

Twitter is becoming a popular social media platform for syndromic surveillance. We explored the Twitter discussion in the context of the 2016 Zika Outbreak. The Zika virus can have severe long-term (such as microcephaly in newborns) effects and not so serious immediate (such as fever or headache) effects. We explored whether social media discussions effectively capture the severity of these long-term concerns. We performed volumetric and text mining analysis, such as the co-occurrence of words and hierarchical clustering, to explore the different underlying themes in the Twitter discussion regarding the immediate and long-term concerns. Our findings suggest that the concerns related to the long-term consequences are dominant and consistent, but this is not the case for the immediate effects.