Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Drosophila neurogenic gene neuralized encodes a novel protein and is expressed in precursors of larval and adult neurons.

Neuralized belongs to a group of genes involved in neurogenesis in Drosophila. Loss of function mutations lead to an overproduction of neurons at the expense of epidermal tissues. We have cloned the neuralized locus and examined its expression pattern during development. Expression is initially observed during embryogenesis in the neurogenic ectoderm and later in neuroblasts. In addition, transcripts are also found in sensory precursor cells during imaginal disc development. Other tissues that express neuralized include the embryonic mesoderm and specific follicle cells in the ovary. The predicted neuralized gene product is a highly basic protein with a novel motif that bears some resemblance to those found in nucleic acid‐binding proteins. The first half of this motif has sequence similarity to the first half of a homeobox whereas the second half is similar to the helix‐turn‐helix structure of bacterial repressors.
On/off switchable electronic conduction in intercalated metal-organic frameworks

On/off switchable electronic conduction occurs in intercalated metal-organic framework formed by chemical lithiation and heating. The electrical properties of metal-organic frameworks (MOF) have attracted attention for MOF as electronic materials. We report on/off switchable electronic conduction behavior with thermal responsiveness in intercalated MOF (iMOF) with layered structure, 2,6-naphthalene dicarboxylate dilithium, which was previously reported as a reversible Li-intercalation electrode material. The I-V response of the intercalated sample, which was prepared using a chemically reductive lithiation agent, exhibits current flow with sufficiently high electronic conductivity, even though it displays insulating characteristics in the pristine state. Calculations of band structure and electron hopping conduction indicate that electronic conduction occurs in the two-dimensional π-stacking naphthalene layers when the band gap is decreased to 0.99 eV and because of the formation of an anisotropic electron hopping conduction pathway by Li intercalation. The structure exhibiting electronic conductivity remains stable up to 200°C and reverts to an insulating structure, without collapsing, at 400°C, offering the potential for a shutdown switch for battery safety during thermal runaway or for heat-responsive on/off switching electronic devices.
Role for highly regulated rep gene expression in adeno-associated virus vector production

Recent success achieving long-term in vivo gene transfer without a significant immune response by using adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors (X. Xiao, J. Li, and R. J. Samulski, J. Virol. 70:8098-8108, 1996) has encouraged further development of this vector for human gene therapy. Currently, studies focus on the generation of high-titer vectors by using the two-plasmid helper-vector system in adenovirus (Ad)-infected cells. To examine the effects of the AAV replication (rep) genes on recombinant AAV (rAAV) vector production, we have constructed a series of AAV helper plasmids that contain strong heterologous promoters in place of the endogenous p5 promoter. Although high-level rep gene expression was achieved, rAAV DNA failed to replicate in the absence of Ad infection. Moreover, unregulated overexpression of Rep78/68 led to substantially lower rAAV yields in the presence of Ad (10(4-5) versus 10(7-8)). In contrast, under similar conditions, reduced Rep78/68 expression resulted in much higher rAAV yields (10(9)). Molecular characterization showed that overexpression of the rep gene decreased rAAV DNA replication and severely inhibited capsid (cap) gene expression. Interestingly, a reduced rep level enhanced cap gene expression and supported normal rAAV DNA replication. These studies suggest a critical role for regulated rep gene expression in rAAV production and have facilitated the development of a new AAV helper plasmid that increases vector production eightfold over currently used constructs.
New Results on Stability and Stabilization of Networked Control Systems With Short Time-Varying Delay

New stability criteria and stabilization methods on networked control systems (NCSs) with short time-varying delay (STVD) are proposed in this paper. An NCS with STVD is transformed into a time-varying discrete time system. And then, this discrete time system is converted into a equivalent time-invariant system with norm-bounded uncertainties by using robust control techniques. Using this method, the conservatism of the stability condition caused by STVD can be reduced. Based on that, a single norm-bounded uncertainty is replaced by N norm-bounded uncertainties to further reduce conservatism. Theoretical analysis shows that when N is increased, the stability condition becomes less conservative. For a fixed sampling period, the obtained stability conditions explicitly depend on the upper and lower bounds of the time delay. The existence condition and design method for the controllers are also presented. Finally, three numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
ANNULATE LAMELLAE IN SARCOMA I CELLS

Annulate lamellae have been observed in eggs of marine invertebrates (1, 6, 12, 13, 18), rat spermatids (11, 17), crayfish spermatocytes (15), the amphibian pancreas (17), the adrenal cortex of the fetal rat (14), Sarcoma 37 cells (4), HeLa cells (5), Ehrlich and Yoshida ascites tumor cells (20), m ammary carcinoma cells of the rat (16), and cells of a chicken fibrosarcoma (3). Neither the origin nor the function of annulate lamellae has been established. In the present communication, annulate lamellae are demonstrated in Sarcoma I cells grown in susceptible and resistant strains of mice. A variation in structure of annulate lamellae in a cell from a tumor undergoing homograft rejection is described.
Consumer Health Information on the Internet

we applaud the intent of Fallis and Frické 1 in their recent attempt to provide the public with indicators of accuracy for health information on the Internet, we take exception to some of their methods and conclusions. The topic they have chosen to study is certainly an important one. There exists on the Internet a vast amount of health information , and much of it may be incorrect or easy to misinterpret. The authors' call for impartial valida-tors of such information should be cheered. Nevertheless, we have some methodological concerns with their recent study. The first concern involves their choice of clinical subject matter. The authors claim that managing childhood fever in the home was chosen " because there is a wide consensus among experts in this area. " 1 This issue is a point of significant contention among pedi-atricians. 2–4 Even the five topics covered in their methods are sure to spark many debates among health care professionals. 5–7 We consider it an important omission that the authors did not provide the " correct " answers or cite the experts who provide the consensus to the five topics set forth in the paper. We wonder how much of the information that was labeled inaccurate by the authors was merely a reflection of differences in practice. If this same topic were brought up in a pediatric journal, we believe that reaching a consensus on what is " correct " would be difficult. Without clear consensus, there can be no gold standard. Without a gold standard, there can be no measure of accuracy. The second concern is over the methodology used for selection of Web sites. The authors provide no criteria as to how they decided which 100 sites to analyze. Given the enormous number of possible sites, it would be critical to know who selected sites and how they decided which ones to select. Without such information, the study cannot be repeated or understood fully, nor can possible selection bias be ascertained. The third concern we have is the definition of " accurate " and " inaccurate " sites. The authors arbitrarily set the dividing line between accurate and inaccurate at the median of the sites' ratings. Although they did confirm their results using several different cutoffs , we are concerned with the use of these terms at all. Their accuracy scores range from 0.55 to 0.75, with the vast …
Active Chromatin around the Transcription Start Site DNA Methylation by Preservation of Unmethylated DNA and hTERT Is Expressed in Cancer Cell Lines Despite Promoter

hTERT, which encodes the catalytic subunit of telomerase and is expressed in most immortalized and cancer cells, has been reported to have increased DNA methylation in its promoter region in many cancers. This pattern is inconsistent with observations that DNA methylation of promoter CpG islands is typically associated with gene silencing. Here, we provide a comprehensive analysis of promoter DNA methylation, chromatin patterns, and expression of hTERT in cancer and immortalized cells. Methylation-specific PCR and bisulfite sequencing of the hTERT promoter in breast, lung, and colon cancer cells show that all cancer cell lines retain alleles with little or no methylation around the transcription start site despite being densely methylated in a region 600 bp upstream of the transcription start site. By real-time reverse transcription-PCR, all cancer cell lines express hTERT. Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) analysis reveals that both active (acetyl-H3K9 and dimethyl-H3K4) and inactive (trimethyl-H3K9 and trimethyl-H3K27) chromatin marks are present across the hTERT promoter. However, using a novel approach combining methylation analysis of ChIP DNA, we show that active chromatin marks are associated with unmethylated DNA, whereas inactive marks of chromatin are associated with methylated DNA in the region around the transcription start site. These results show that DNA methylation patterns of the hTERT promoter ( 150 to +150 around the transcription start) are consistent with the usual dynamics of gene expression in that the absence of methylation in this region and the association with active chromatin marks allow for the continued expression of hTERT . [Cancer Res 2007;67(1):194–201]
Stellar feedback efficiencies: supernovae versus stellar winds

The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 456(1): 710-730, February 2016, DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stv2699, published by Oxford University Press on behalf of MNRAS.
Exploring the relationship between luxury brand personality, store personality and consumer personality

This paper aims to gain a deeper understanding of luxury brand positioning in relation to brand personality, store personality and target consumer personality traits. In so doing, we hope to get a fuller explanation of brand perceptions within the market environment in which luxury transactions occur. Using a variety of secondary sources we undertook a content analysis of narratives from web pages of the Italian brand Tod’s as well as from consumer blogs relating to four Tod’s flagship stores. Our theoretical contribution enhances explanations of luxury consumption in terms of three value sources namely, (i) time (ii) social responsibility and (iii) knowledge. Managerially, we determine that consumer interaction with sales persons is critical to consumer experience of the brand based upon their understanding and expectation of the luxury it represents.
Recovery of stereo acuity in adults with amblyopia

Disruption of visual input to one eye during early development leads to marked functional impairments of vision, commonly referred to as amblyopia. A major consequence of amblyopia is the inability to encode binocular disparity information leading to impaired depth perception or stereo acuity. If amblyopia is treated early in life (before 4 years of age), then recovery of normal stereoscopic function is possible. Treatment is rarely undertaken later in life (adulthood) because declining levels of neural plasticity are thought to limit the effectiveness of standard treatments. Here, the authors show that a learning-based therapy, designed to exploit experience-dependent plastic mechanisms, can be used to recover stereoscopic visual function in adults with amblyopia. These cases challenge the long-held dogma that the critical period for visual development and the window for treating amblyopia are one and the same.
Alert aggregation in mobile ad hoc networks

In Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) for Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs), IDS agents using local detection engines alone may lead to undesirable performance due to the dynamic feature of MANETs. In this paper, we present a nonoverlapping Zone-based Intrusion Detection System (ZBIDS) for MANETs. Focusing on the protection of MANET routing protocols, we propose the collaboration mechanism of ZBIDS agents and an aggregation algorithm used by ZBIDS gateway nodes. The aggregation algorithm mainly utilizes the probability distribution of the $Source$ attribute in order to make the final decisions to generate alarms. We demonstrate that, by integrating the security related information from a wider area, the aggregation algorithm can reduce the false alarm ratio and improve the detection ratio. Also, the gateway nodes in ZBIDS can provide more diagnostic information by presenting a global view of attacks. We also present an alert data model conformed to Intrusion Detection Message Exchange Format (IDMEF) to facilitate the interoperability of IDS agents. Based on the routing disruption attack aimed at the Dynamic Source Routing protocol (DSR), we study the performance of ZBIDS at different mobility levels. Simulation results show that our system can achieve lower false positive ratio and higher detection ratio, compared to systems with local detection only.
Implications of plasma concentrations of adiponectin in patients with coronary artery disease

Objective: To investigate whether concentrations of plasma adiponectin constitute a significant coronary risk factor, with particular focus on the relation between plasma concentrations of adiponectin and the development of acute coronary syndrome (ACS). Subjects and methods: Plasma concentrations of adiponectin were measured in 123 patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) and in 17 control participants. Patients were divided into three groups according to condition type: acute myocardial infarction (AMI) group (n = 59), unstable angina pectoris (UAP) group (n = 28), and stable angina pectoris (SAP) group (n = 36). Results: Plasma concentrations of adiponectin correlated negatively with body mass index (r = −0.18, p < 0.05), serum triglyceride (r = −0.25, p < 0.01), and fasting glucose concentrations (r = −0.21, p < 0.05), but correlated positively with age (r = 0.26, p < 0.01), high density lipoprotein cholesterol concentrations (r = 0.35, p < 0.01), and low density lipoprotein particle size (r = 0.37, p < 0.01). Plasma concentrations of adiponectin in patients with ACS, in both the AMI and UAP groups, were significantly lower than those in patients with SAP and in the control group (ACS, 6.5 (3.0) μg/ml; SAP, 11.3 (5.9) μg/ml; control 12.8 (4.3) μg/ml; p < 0.01). Additionally, plasma concentrations of adiponectin in patients with CAD (7.9 (4.6) μg/ml, p < 0.01) were significantly lower than in the control group. There were, however, no significant differences between patients with SAP and the control group (p = 0.36). Multiple logistic regression analysis showed that smoking, fasting glucose concentration, and low log adiponectin concentration correlated independently with the development of an ACS. Conclusions: The findings suggest that measurement of plasma concentrations of adiponectin may be of use for assessing the risk of CAD and may be related to the development of ACS.
Learning to Co-Generate Object Proposals with a Deep Structured Network

Generating object proposals has become a key component of modern object detection pipelines. However, most existing methods generate the object candidates independently of each other. In this paper, we present an approach to co-generating object proposals in multiple images, thus leveraging the collective power of multiple object candidates. In particular, we introduce a deep structured network that jointly predicts the objectness scores and the bounding box locations of multiple object candidates. Our deep structured network consists of a fully-connected Conditional Random Field built on top of a set of deep Convolutional Neural Networks, which learn features to model both the individual object candidates and the similarity between multiple candidates. To train our deep structured network, we develop an end-to-end learning algorithm that, by unrolling the CRF inference procedure, lets us backpropagate the loss gradient throughout the entire structured network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on two benchmark datasets, showing significant improvement over state-of-the-art object proposal algorithms.
Protective Behavioral Strategy Subtypes as Moderators of the Relationship Between Alcohol Consumption and Alcohol-Related Problems

Protective Behavioral Strategy Subtypes As Moderators of the Relationship between Alcohol Consumption and Alcohol-Related Problems Benjamin A. Kite Old Dominion University, 2013 Director: James M. Henson Protective behavioral strategy (or drinking control strategy) use is widely regarded as an effective tool for reducing negative consequences from consuming alcohol (Martens et al., 2005; Martens et al., 2008). Research has shown that frequent protective behavioral strategy use buffers the relationship between alcohol consumption and alcohol-related problems (Borden et al., 2011), and that gender moderates this effect (Benton et al., 2004); however. The present research was used to expand on previous research showing that protective behavioral strategy use can buffer the relationship between alcohol consumption and alcohol-related problems. Further, the assessment of protective behavioral strategy use across gender was also evaluated. Three hundred and thirteen undergraduate college students were sampled to participate in this study. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that gender differences exist in the measurement of protective behavioral strategy use with a popular measure of the construct. Regression analysis showed that a certain type of protective behavioral strategies moderates the relationship between alcohol consumption and alcohol-related problems. Further, there was no effect of gender on the moderating effect. The results of the present study improve the understanding of the relationship between protective behavioral strategy use and alcohol-related problems and can ultimately improve information for prevention efforts. This thesis is dedicated to my fiancee, Jessica Bodkins. Thank you for your support during my academic pursuits.
Breaking the Mold and Picking up the Pieces: Rights of Parenthood and Parentage in Nontraditional Families

The past few decades have shown us myriad ways to form a family. Married couples and their biological offspring no longer define the dominant model, nor do they constitute the majority of domestic arrangements. But while contemporary culture tends to applaud social diversity, we cannot be certain that novel, highly individualized family formation is always consonant with child well-being. Further, courts and legislatures have been slow to acknowledge and accommodate domestic diversity. When judges and lawmakers do confer parental rights on a particular class of individuals, the results are not always equitable or even logical. The era of the traditional nuclear family may be past, but the task of legitimating, recognizing, and strengthening new parent–child bonds is just beginning. Key Points For The Family Court Community Even in light of its decreasing relevance, the nuclear family model continues to shape our perception of what a family should look like. The presence of a biological tie between parent and child is not always dispositive of parental rights. Despite the prevalence of nontraditional family forms, the notion of de facto parenthood continues to be hotly contested. Stepparent families are America's fastest growing domestic arrangement. Yet, courts and legislatures are slow to accord legal status to nonbiological coparents, whether married or cohabiting. The use of assisted reproductive technology is on the rise among same-sex couples as well as infertile couples and single parents. These families are greatly in need of legal definition and validation in order to function and survive as families.
The evolutionary origins of beneficial alleles during the repeated adaptation of garter snakes to deadly prey

Where do the genetic variants underlying adaptive change come from? Are currently adaptive alleles recruited by selection from standing genetic variation within populations, moved through introgression from other populations, or do they arise as novel mutations? Here, we examine the molecular basis of repeated adaptation to the toxin of deadly prey in 3 species of garter snakes (Thamnophis) to determine whether adaptation has evolved through novel mutations, sieving of existing variation, or transmission of beneficial alleles across species. Functional amino acid substitutions in the skeletal muscle sodium channel (Nav1.4) are largely responsible for the physiological resistance of garter snakes to tetrodotoxin found in their newt (Taricha) prey. Phylogenetic analyses reject the hypotheses that the unique resistance alleles observed in multiple Thamnophis species were present before the split of these lineages, or that alleles were shared among species through occasional hybridization events. Our results demonstrate that adaptive evolution has occurred independently multiple times in garter snakes via the de novo acquisition of beneficial mutations.
Safety and Efficacy of Glucomannan for Weight Loss in Overweight and Moderately Obese Adults

Background. Few safe and effective dietary supplements are available to promote weight loss. We evaluated the safety and efficacy of glucomannan, a water-soluble fiber supplement, for achieving weight loss in overweight and moderately obese individuals consuming self-selected diets. Methods. Participants were randomly assigned to take 1.33 grams of glucomannan or identically looking placebo capsules with 236.6 mL (8 ounces) of water one hour before breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 8 weeks. The primary efficacy outcome was change in body weight after 8 weeks. Other efficacy outcomes were changes in body composition, hunger/fullness, and lipid and glucose concentrations. Safety outcomes included gastrointestinal symptoms/tolerance and serum liver enzymes and creatinine levels. Results. A total of 53 participants (18–65 years of age; BMI 25–35 kg/m2) were enrolled and randomized. The two groups did not differ with respect to baseline characteristics and compliance with the study supplement. At 8 weeks, there was no significant difference between the glucomannan and placebo groups in amount of weight loss (−.40 ± .06 and −.43 ± .07, resp.) or other efficacy outcomes or in any of the safety outcomes. Conclusions. Glucomannan supplements administered over 8 weeks were well tolerated but did not promote weight loss or significantly alter body composition, hunger/fullness, or lipid and glucose parameters. This trial is registered with NCT00613600.