Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mitogen activated protein kinase plays a significant role in metaphase II arrest, spindle morphology, and maintenance of maturation promoting factor activity in bovine oocytes

Mammalian oocytes are arrested at the G2/M transition of the first meiotic division from which, after reaching full size and subsequent to an LH surge, they undergo final maturation. Oocyte maturation, which involves germinal vesicle breakdown, progression through metaphase I (MI), and arrest at MII, is triggered and regulated by the coordinated action of two kinases, maturation promoting factor (MPF) and mitogen activated protein kinase (MAPK). The importance of the role of MPF in mammalian oocyte maturation is well established, while the role of MAPK, although well understood in mouse oocytes, has not been fully elucidated in oocytes of large domestic species, especially bovine oocytes. Here we show that injection of MKP‐1 mRNA, which encodes a dual specificity MAPK phosphatase, into germinal vesicle stage bovine oocytes prevents the activation of MAPK during maturation. Despite the lack of MAPK activity, MKP‐1‐injected oocytes resume and progress through meiosis, although they are unable to arrest at MII stage and, by 22–26‐hour post‐maturation, exhibit decondensed pronucleus‐like chromatin, a clear sign of parthenogenetic activation. MKP‐1‐injected bovine oocytes exhibit normal activation of MPF activity; however, by 18‐hour post‐maturation, MPF activity starts to decline and by 22–26 hr MPF activity is absent. MKP‐1‐injected oocytes also show disorganized MII spindles with poorly aligned chromosomes. In summary, our results demonstrate that in bovine oocytes MAPK activity is required for MII arrest, maintenance of MPF activity, and spindle organization. Mol. Reprod. Dev. 59:106–114, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
On the design of sliding mode static output feedback controllers for systems with time-varying delay

This paper considers the development of output feedback controllers for uncertain systems which are subject to time-varying delays. The existence problem is solved via a static output feedback formulation using a descriptor approach. Linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) are used to obtain the parameters of the switching function. The paper provides conditions in terms of the system structure for a stable reduced-order sliding motion to exist and a solution to the reachability problem is proposed. A numerical example from the literature illustrates the proposed method.
Implications of CI therapy for visual deficit training

We address here the question of whether the techniques of Constraint Induced (CI) therapy, a family of treatments that has been employed in the rehabilitation of movement and language after brain damage might apply to the rehabilitation of such visual deficits as unilateral spatial neglect and visual field deficits. CI therapy has been used successfully for the upper and lower extremities after chronic stroke, cerebral palsy (CP), multiple sclerosis (MS), other central nervous system (CNS) degenerative conditions, resection of motor areas of the brain, focal hand dystonia, and aphasia. Treatments making use of similar methods have proven efficacious for amblyopia. The CI therapy approach consists of four major components: intensive training, training by shaping, a “transfer package” to facilitate the transfer of gains from the treatment setting to everyday activities, and strong discouragement of compensatory strategies. CI therapy is said to be effective because it overcomes learned nonuse, a learned inhibition of movement that follows injury to the CNS. In addition, CI therapy produces substantial increases in the gray matter of motor areas on both sides of the brain. We propose here that these mechanisms are examples of more general processes: learned nonuse being considered parallel to sensory nonuse following damage to sensory areas of the brain, with both having in common diminished neural connections (DNCs) in the nervous system as an underlying mechanism. CI therapy would achieve its therapeutic effect by strengthening the DNCs. Use-dependent cortical reorganization is considered to be an example of the more general neuroplastic mechanism of brain structure repurposing. If the mechanisms involved in these broader categories are involved in each of the deficits being considered, then it may be the principles underlying efficacious treatment in each case may be similar. The lessons learned during CI therapy research might then prove useful for the treatment of visual deficits.
Scientific research is a moral duty

Biomedical research is so important that there is a positive moral obligation to pursue it and to participate in it Science is under attack. In Europe, America, and Australasia in particular, scientists are objects of suspicion and are on the defensive.i “Frankenstein science”5–8 is a phrase never far from the lips of those who take exception to some aspect of science or indeed some supposed abuse by scientists. We should not, however, forget the powerful obligation there is to undertake, support, and participate in scientific research, particularly biomedical research, and the powerful moral imperative that underpins these obligations. Now it is more imperative than ever to articulate and explain these obligations and to do so is the subject and the object of this paper. Let me present the question in its starkest form: is there a moral obligation to undertake, support and even to participate in serious scientific research? If there is, does that obligation require not only that beneficial research be undertaken but also that “we”, as individuals and “we” as societies be willing to support and even participate in research where necessary? Thus far the overwhelming answer given to this question has been “no”, and research has almost universally been treated with suspicion and even hostility by the vast majority of all those concerned with the ethics and regulation of research. The so called “precautionary approach”9 sums up this attitude, requiring dangers to be considered more likely and more serious than benefits, and assuming that no sane person would or should participate in research unless they had a pressing personal reason for so doing, or unless they were motivated by a totally impersonal altruism. International agreements and protocols—for example, the Declaration of Helsinki 10 and the CIOMS Guidelines 11—have been directed principally at …
Improved control of exogenous attention in action video game players

Action video game players (VGPs) have demonstrated a number of attentional advantages over non-players. Here, we propose that many of those benefits might be underpinned by improved control over exogenous (i.e., stimulus-driven) attention. To test this we used an anti-cueing task, in which a sudden-onset cue indicated that the target would likely appear in a separate location on the opposite side of the fixation point. When the time between the cue onset and the target onset was short (40 ms), non-players (nVGPs) showed a typical exogenous attention effect. Their response times were faster to targets presented at the cued (but less probable) location compared with the opposite (more probable) location. VGPs, however, were less likely to have their attention drawn to the location of the cue. When the onset asynchrony was long (600 ms), VGPs and nVGPs were equally able to endogenously shift their attention to the likely (opposite) target location. In order to rule out processing-speed differences as an explanation for this result, we also tested VGPs and nVGPs on an attentional blink (AB) task. In a version of the AB task that minimized demands on task switching and iconic memory, VGPs and nVGPs did not differ in second target identification performance (i.e., VGPs had the same magnitude of AB as nVGPs), suggesting that the anti-cueing results were due to flexible control over exogenous attention rather than to more general speed-of-processing differences.
Design and Development of a Composite Dome for Experimental Characterization of Material Permeability

This paper presents the design and development of a carbon fiber reinforced plastic dome, including a description of the dome fabrication, method for sealing penetrations in the dome, and a summary of the planned test series. This dome will be used for the experimental permeability characterization and leakage validation of composite vessels pressurized using liquid hydrogen and liquid nitrogen at the Cryostat Test Facility at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). The preliminary design of the dome was completed using membrane shell analysis. Due to the configuration of the test setup, the dome will experience some flexural stresses and stress concentrations in addition to membrane stresses. Also, a potential buckling condition exists for the dome due to external pressure during the leak testing of the cryostat facility lines. Thus, a finite element analysis was conducted to assess the overall strength and stability of the dome for each required test condition. Based on these results, additional plies of composite reinforcement material were applied to local regions on the dome to alleviate stress concentrations and limit deflections. The dome design includes a circular opening in the center for the installation of a polar boss, which introduces a geometric discontinuity that causes high stresses in the region near the hole. To attenuate these high stresses, a reinforcement system was designed using analytical and finite element analyses. The development of a low leakage polar boss system is also investigated.
Bag of face recognition systems based on holistic approaches

This paper presents a comprehensive experimental study on face recognition to prove that holistic approaches are more robust than geometric and local approaches in order to address the problem of which method holistic or geometric can assist to face recognition. This work is done based on the motivation to integrate soft biometric traits into face recognition systems using same computing. A bag of features extraction and classification combined with each other to find the most appropriate technique that can enhance face recognition task. The experimental study shows that the texture information is discriminant in facial images representation, Gabor filter is more useful than Local Binary Pattern, a space dimensionality reduction using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is very interesting to increase recognition rates. The fusion between Gabor, PCA or LDA and Multi class Support Vector Machines (SVM) ranks top the list of all other combinations.These techniques will be performed later to integrate soft biometrics.
TumorsHormone-independent Grunder Strain Mouse Mammary Comparison of Estrogen Receptors in Hormone-dependent and Updated Version

Hormone-dependent (HD) Grunder strain mouse mammary carcino mas contain a 65-kDa estrogen receptor (ER) with minor amounts of 50and 35-kDa components which apparently still contain the intact hormone-binding (COOH-terminal) domain. When the HD tumors lose their hormonal dependence during serial transplantation, the hormoneindependent (HI) transplants show an increase in 50and 35-kDa com ponents relative to 65-kDa ER. In HI transplants of three of five tumor lines studied (TS1 85, 86, and 106), the 65-kDa receptor was entirely replaced by 50and 35-kDa receptors, whereas in the two other lines (TS1 101 and 104) there usually were about equal amounts of 65and 50-kDa ERs. No difference was found between ERs of HD and HI tumors in affinity for estradiol, steroid specificity, or immunoreactivity for the monoclonal antibody JS34/32. Estrogen stimulation of HI tumors did not increase the concentration of progesterone receptor in the tumor tissue, indicating that ER in these tumors was not functional in enhancing progesterone receptor. Incubation of 65-kDa ER with HI tumor cytosol or combined homogenization of HD and HI tumor tissue did not cause degradation of 65-kDa ER. a-Chymotrypsin-like protease activity generally was lower in HI than in HD tumor cytosols, indicating that the lower molecular size of ER in HI tumors cannot be attributed to the increased level of this protease activity.
Schedule generation and reconfiguration for parallel machines

The authors present a methodology for scheduling independent jobs with due dates on identical parallel machines. The jobs have different levels of importance and various processing times on the machines, and the objective is to minimize the total weighted job tardiness of the schedule. Since the problem is NP-hard, the goal is not to obtain the optimal schedule. Rather, an efficient near-optimal algorithm based on Lagrangian relaxation is presented. A nice feature of this approach is that it provides a lower bound on the cost, which can be used as a measure of suboptimality. On most problems tested, results are within 1% of the optima and have reasonable CPU times. Furthermore, the method provides job interaction information, which is then used to provide quick answers to 'what if' questions, to reconfigure the schedule to accommodate dynamic changes, and also to schedule jobs. <<ETX>>
Hierarchical Motion Planning in Topological Representations

Motion can be described in alternative represen- tations, including joint configuration or end-effector spaces, but also more complex topological representations that imply a change of Voronoi bias, metric or topology of the motion space. Certain types of robot interaction problems, e.g. wrapping around an object, can suitably be described by so-called writhe and interaction mesh representations. However, considering mo- tion synthesis solely in topological spaces is insufficient since it does not cater for additional tasks and constraints in other representations. In this paper we propose methods to combine and exploit different representations for motion synthesis, with specific emphasis on generalization of motion to novel situations. Our approach is formulated in the framework of optimal con- trol as an approximate inference problem, which allows for a direct extension of the graphical model to incorporate multiple representations. Motion generalization is similarly performed by projecting motion from topological to joint configuration space. We demonstrate the benefits of our methods on problems where direct path finding in joint configuration space is extremely hard whereas local optimal control exploiting a representation with different topology can efficiently find optimal trajectories. Further, we illustrate the successful online motion generalization to dynamic environments on challenging, real world problems.
Precision control of eluted activity from a Sr/Rb generator for cardiac positron emission tomography

A rubidium-82 (/sup 82/Rb) elution system is described for use with clinical positron emission tomography. The system is self-calibrating with 1.4% repeatability, independent of generator activity and elution flow rate. Saline flow is switched between a /sup 82/Sr//sup 82/Rb generator and a bypass line to achieve a constant activity elution of /sup 82/Rb. In the present study, pulse width modulation (PWM) of a solenoid valve is compared to simple threshold control as a means to simulate a proportional valve. A predictive-corrective control algorithm is developed which produces a constant activity elution within the constraints of long feedback delay and short elution time. Accurate constant-activity elutions of 10-70% of the total generator activity were demonstrated using the threshold comparison control. The adaptive-corrective control of the PWM valve provided a substantial improvement in precision of the steady-state output.
An efficient voltage scaling algorithm for complex SoCs with few number of voltage modes

Increasing demand for larger high-performance applications requires developing more complex systems with hundreds of processing cores on a single chip. To allow dynamic voltage scaling in each on-chip core individually, many on-chip voltage regulators must be used. However, the limitations in implementation of on-chip inductors can reduce the efficiency, accuracy and the number of voltage modes generated by regulators. Therefore the future voltage scheduling algorithms must be efficient, even in the presence of few voltage modes; and fast, in order to handle complex applications. Techniques proposed to date need many fine-grained voltage modes to produce energy efficient results and their quality degrades significantly as the number of modes decreases. This paper presents a new technique called Adaptive Stochastic Gradient Voltage and Task Scheduling (ASG-VTS) that quickly generates very energy efficient results irrespective of the number of available voltage modes. The results of comparing our algorithm to the most efficient approaches (RVS and EE-GLSA) show that in the presence of only four valid modes, the ASG-VTS saves up to 26% and 33% more energy. On the other hand, other approaches require at least ten modes to reach the same level of energy saving that ASG-VTS achieves with only four modes. Therefore our algorithm can also be used to explore and minimize the number of required voltage levels in the system.
A Cross-Layer Architecture of Wireless Sensor Networks for Target Tracking

We propose the Low Energy Self-Organizing Protocol (LESOP) for target tracking in dense wireless sensor networks. A cross-layer design perspective is adopted in LESOP for high protocol efficiency, where direct interactions between the Application layer and the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer are exploited. Unlike the classical Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) paradigm of communication networks, the Transport and Network layers are excluded in LESOP to simplify the protocol stack. A lightweight yet efficient target localization algorithm is proposed and implemented, and a Quality of Service (QoS) knob is found to control the tradeoff between the tracking error and the network energy consumption. Furthermore, LESOP serves as the first example in demonstrating the migration from the OSI paradigm to the Embedded Wireless Interconnect (EWI) architecture platform, a two-layer efficient architecture proposed here for wireless sensor networks
Dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI parameters as biomarkers for the effect of vatalanib in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer.

AIMS To assess the utility of dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI parameters in the demonstration of early antiangiogenic effects and as prognostic biomarkers in second-line treatment of advanced-stage non-small-cell lung cancer with vatalanib. PATIENTS & METHODS The transfer constant (K(trans)) and the initial area under the contrast concentration-time curve at 60 s (AUC60) were assessed in 46 patients. Changes were compared with response evaluation from computed tomography imaging and Response Evaluation Criteria In Solid Tumors guidelines. RESULTS Statistically significant mean reductions in K(trans) (38.4%; p < 0.0001) and AUC60 (24.9%; p < 0.0001) were found at day 2. After 12 weeks, 16 patients (35%) demonstrated stable disease and 30 (65%) demonstrated progressive disease. No statistically significant differences in day 2 K(trans) and AUC60 reductions between stable disease and progressive disease patients were found. CONCLUSION Dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI can demonstrate a statistically significant reduction in vascular parameters of non-small-cell lung cancer, but does not predict patient outcome.
An AQM routing control for reducing congestion in communication networks

The paper deals with the design of a routing control scheme based on active queue management (AQM). Starting with the packet data network model introduced recently (Fuks, H. and Lawniczak, A.T., Mathematics and Computers in Simulation, vol.51, p.103-19, 1999; Manfredi, S. et al., IEEE Symp. on Circuits and Systems, 2004), we propose a dynamic routing strategy based both on distance and router queue length. The effectiveness, in terms of throughput and packet delivery time, of the proposed routing control algorithm is shown by simulations on a simplified packet data network model. It is given analytical estimates of the critical load leading to the onset of congestion and the worsening of network performance. The estimates are shown to be in agreement with the numerical simulations. Then we validate the proposed AQM-routing in realistic scenarios using the NS-2 network simulator which takes into account also the effects of discretization and the nonlinear nature of communication protocols and traffic.
Performance analysis of MAX-SINR algorithm under CSI mismatch

With interference alignment (IA), the achievable degrees of freedom (DoF) in wireless networks can be linearly scaled up with the number of users. However, to attain full DoF, the availability of perfect network channel state information (CSI) is mandatory, which impedes the practical deployment of IA since only partial network CSI may be accessible. In this paper, we investigate the effect of CSI mismatch on the performance of maximum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (Max-SINR) algorithm. We show that while with perfect CSI, Max-SINR outperforms interference leakage minimization algorithms, with the presence of CSI mismatch, its comparative improvement becomes negligible. We then propose an adaptive Max-SINR which can notably improve the performance of original Max-SINR under CSI mismatch.
Experimental investigations on photoelectric and triboelectric charging of dust

Experiments are performed pertaining to the charging of single dust particles in space due to three effects: (1) photoemission, (2) the collection of electrons from a photoemissive surface, and (3) triboelectric charging. The particles tested are 90 -106 mm in diameter and include JSC-1 (lunar regolith simulant) and JSC-Mars-1 (Martian regolith simulant). Isolated conducting grains (Zn, Cu, and graphite) illuminated by ultraviolet light reach a positive equilibrium floating potential (a few volts) that depends upon the work function of the particle. Conducting grains dropped past a photoemitting surface attain a negative floating potential for which the sum of the emitted and collected currents is zero. Nonconducting grains (glass, SiC, and the regolith simulants) have a large initial triboelectric charging potential (up to 615 V) with a distribution approximately centered on zero. The nonconducting grains are weak photoemitters, and they attain a negative floating potential when dropped past a photoemitting surface. Our experimental results show that for silicate planetary regolith analogs, triboelectric charging may be the dominant charging process and will therefore play an important role in the subsequent behavior of dust grains released from planetary surfaces.