Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Glutamate transporters are differentially expressed in the hippocampus during the early stages of one-day spatial learning task.

INTRODUCTION Uptake of glutamate in the hippocampus by specialized transporters appears to be important for the prevention of glutamate-induced neurotoxicity. However, the role of these transporters in synaptic plasticity and learning is still unclear. We examined the expression pattern of glutamate transporters at different stages of spatial learning using a one-day (three blocks) version of the Morris Water Maze. METHODS Male rats (Sprague Dawley, 3 months old) were divided into three groups (learner, swim control, or naïve control) and animals were sacrificed after the first, second, or third block of training. The hippocampi were immediately extracted and flash frozen for RNA analysis. Real time polymerase chain reaction was employed to examine the expression of glutamate transporter 1 (Glt-1), Glt1b, glutamate-aspartate transporter (GLAST) and excitatory amino acid carrier-1 (EAAC1) in whole hippocampi. RESULTS EAAC1 and GLAST RNA were downregulated in the learner and swimmer groups (compared to naïve) after the first two blocks of training during the one-day protocol but EAAC1 returned to control levels by the end of the third block. GLAST levels were upregulated by the third block of training. Glt-1b expression was downregulated during the second block of training but returned to control by the third block. CONCLUSIONS The observed decreases in glutamate transporter expression may be important during the early stages of spatial learning as a possible mechanism to enhance glutamatergic availability during critical stages of learning. However, similar decreases in glutamate transporter expression in both the learner and swimmer groups indicate that the observed differences may be task-induced. Additional experiments are currently underway to examine this possibility.
Visualizing Scientific Disciplines on the Web

A novel interface design approach is presented for navigating and exploring salient intellectual structures inherited in scientific literature. We describe the development of a 3-dimensional knowledge space based on domain modelling and analysis. This is a generic and extensible approach. It demonstrates the potential of a novel interface design metaphor for tracking research frontiers in scientific domains.
Piecewise linear spectral sequences

We study a class of orthonormal exponential bases for the space L 2 [0,1] and introduce the concept of spectral sequences. We characterize piecewise linear spectral sequences with the knot at 1/2 and investigate the non-continuity of the piecewise linear spectral sequences. From a special construction of a piecewise constant spectral sequence, the classical Walsh system is recovered.
Evaluating input graphical parameters for the training phase of designing an intelligent emotional vector deducing engine

This paper addresses graphical input evaluation problem from IAPS photos for the training phase of designing an intelligent emotional vector deducing engine, which would simplify the affective computer interfaces. The experiment results analyzed the contribution of input parameters for the training phase. This paper further addresses the affect of increasing the 4 added parameters, sums of edges, corners, regional maximums and regional minimums of affective photographs which proved to increase the training accuracy.
Hepatitis C virus infection, substance use and mental illness among homeless youth: a review

Objectives:Homeless youth are at a high risk of substance abuse, mental illness and blood-borne infections, such as hepatitis C. In this paper, we review the implications of these conditions, discuss the unique challenges faced by homeless youth, and explore potential strategies for harm reduction and intervention in this vulnerable population. Results:Interventions that combine youth-centered, service-based care, street outreach, case management, and motivational interviewing with integrated health services such as hepatitis A/B vaccination, and mental health and substance abuse programmes, are presented as innovative approaches to address the healthcare needs of homeless youth. Conclusion:Recommendations for age-appropriate interventions and further research are made.
On TCP performance in a heterogeneous network: a survey

Transmission media carrying Internet traffic present a wide range of characteristics, some of which, such as transmission errors, long end-to-end delay, and bandwidth asymmetry, may cause a degradation of the TCP performance. Many works have studied the performance of TCP over these media, most of which focus on a particular network type. In this work we study TCP performance independent of the type of network by considering the different possible characteristics of the connection path. We present the problems and the different proposed solutions. This study permits us to understand the limitations of the actual solutions and the required modifications to let TCP cope with a heterogeneous Internet on an end-to-end basis.
Studies in immunochemistry. 15. The specific polysaccharide of the dominant 'O' somatic antigen of Shigella dysenteriae.

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Hedge Funds: Risk and Return

From a database that is relatively free of bias, this article provides measures of the returns of hedge funds and of the distinctly nonnormal characteristics of the data. The results include risk-adjusted measures of performance and tests of the degree to which hedge funds live up to their claim of market neutrality. The substantial attrition of hedge funds is examined, the determinants of hedge fund demise are analyzed, and results of tests of return persistence are presented. The conclusion is that hedge funds are riskier and provide lower returns than is commonly supposed. Hedge funds have become an increasingly popular asset class since the early 1990s. The amount invested globally in hedge funds rose from approximately $50 billion in 1990 to approximately $1 trillion at the end of 2004. And because these funds characteristically use substantial leverage, they play a far more important role in the global security markets than the size of their net assets indicates. Market makers on the floor of the NYSE have estimated that during 2004, trades by hedge funds often accounted for more than half of the total daily number of shares changing hands. Moreover, investments in hedge funds have become an important part of the asset mix of institutions and even wealthy individual investors. Hedge funds are marketed as an “asset class” that provides generous returns during all stock market environments and thus serves as excellent diversification for an all-equity portfolio. This article reports our study of a reasonably comprehensive database of hedge fund returns. We examine the magnitude of two substantial biases that can influence measures of hedge fund performance in the data series—backfill bias and survivorship bias. We conclude that these biases may be far greater than has been estimated in previous studies. We examine not only the returns of hedge funds but also the distinctly nonnormal characteristics of the returns. We also investigate the substantial attrition of hedge funds, analyze the determinants of hedge fund demise, and provide the results of tests of return persistence. We show that the practice of voluntary reporting and the backfilling of only favorable past results can cause returns calculated from hedge fund databases to be biased upward. Moreover, the considerable attrition that characterizes the hedge fund industry results in substantial survivorship bias in the returns of indices composed of only currently existing funds. Correcting for such biases, we found that hedge funds have lower returns than is commonly supposed. Moreover, although the funds tend to exhibit low correlations with general equity indices and, therefore, are excellent diversifiers—hedge funds are extremely risky along another dimension: The cross-sectional variation and the range of individual hedge fund returns are far greater than they are for traditional asset classes. Thus, investors in hedge funds take on a substantial risk of selecting a dismally performing fund or, worse, a failing one.
Current treatments for patients with HBeAg‐positive chronic hepatitis B virus infection: a comparison focusing on HBeAg seroconversion

HBeAg seroconversion, in association with undetectable levels of hepatitis B virus DNA as determined by polymerase chain reaction, is an important goal in the treatment of patients with HBeAg‐positive chronic hepatitis B (CHB). Achievement of sustained HBeAg seroconversion at an early age (<40 years) is associated with a reduced incidence of hepatic complications, increased rates of HBsAg loss and seroconversion and improved survival rates, whether the seroconversion is spontaneous or treatment induced. Patients with HBeAg‐positive CHB who achieve sustained HBeAg seroconversion and complete 6–12 months of consolidation therapy are eligible for stopping therapy. In randomized clinical studies involving patients with HBeAg‐positive CHB, treatment with pegylated interferon (PegIFN)‐ α is associated with higher and more durable HBeAg seroconversion rates than are lamivudine and adefovir. More recently, newer generation oral nucleos(t)ide analogs (NAs) have become available. These include entecavir, telbivudine and tenofovir, and they demonstrate superior antiviral potency and efficacy. This review examines the importance of HBeAg seroconversion as an end point for therapy in the treatment of patients with HBeAg‐positive CHB, and examines the rates and durability of HBeAg seroconversion with PegIFN and oral NA therapy. The mechanisms for enhanced HBeAg seroconversion rates with new‐generation NAs are also discussed.
Regulation of cortical stability by RhoGEF3 in mitotic Sensory Organ Precursor cells in Drosophila

ABSTRACT In epithelia, mitotic cells round up and push against their neighbors to divide. Mitotic rounding results from increased assembly of F-actin and cortical recruitment of Myosin II, leading to increased cortical stability. Whether this process is developmentally regulated is not well known. Here, we examined the regulation of cortical stability in Sensory Organ Precursor cells (SOPs) in the Drosophila pupal notum. SOPs differed in apical shape and actomyosin dynamics from their epidermal neighbors prior to division, and appeared to have a more rigid cortex at mitosis. We identified RhoGEF3 as an actin regulator expressed at higher levels in SOPs, and showed that RhoGEF3 had in vitro GTPase Exchange Factor (GEF) activity for Cdc42. Additionally, RhoGEF3 genetically interacted with both Cdc42 and Rac1 when overexpressed in the fly eye. Using a null RhoGEF3 mutation generated by CRISPR-mediated homologous recombination, we showed using live imaging that the RhoGEF3 gene, despite being dispensable for normal development, contributed to cortical stability in dividing SOPs. We therefore suggest that cortical stability is developmentally regulated in dividing SOPs of the fly notum. Summary: RhoGEF3 is a developmentally regulated Cdc42 GEF that contributes to cortical stability during asymmetric divisions of Sensory Organ Precursor cells in Drosophila.
The Effects of Dynamic Transparency on Targeting Performance

Transparency can be used to increase the visibility of a user’s workspace in situations where the space is obscured by floating windows and tool palettes. Dynamic transparency takes this approach further by making components more transparent when the user’s cursor is far away. However, dynamic transparency may make palettes and floating windows more difficult to target. We carried out a study to test the effects of different types of dynamic transparency on targeting performance. We found that although targeting time does increase as targets become more transparent, the increases are small – often less than ten percent. Our study suggests reasonable maximum, minimum, and default transparency levels for designers of dynamic transparency schemes.
The Evolution of Affective States and Social Control

We present a research strategy to study the effects of various components in an agent architecture (e.g., feedback circuits that can implement various control states) on the dynamics of species interactions in a simulated environment. In particular, we discuss the consequences of behaviors elicited by affective states (like “hunger” or “fear”) for whole agent societies. Construing affective phenomena as processes implemented in part by the agent, but partly also resulting from the agent-environment interaction (including interactions with other agents), we report simulation results that suggest that certain affective states are very likely to evolve in competitive multi-species environments because they lead to behavior that is bene£cial at the society level. From this we conclude that further studies along the lines we suggest might reveal evolutionary trajectories from simple individual re¤ex-like agents to much more complex multi-agent societies, possibly also hinting at why relatively few species have developed a complex deliberative control system.
A framework for autonomous knowledge discovery from databases

This research evaluates the sufficiency of an agenda- and justification-based framework for fully autonomous discovery systems. The proposed framework provides a reasoning component for the autonomous selection of discovery tasks which ranks the tasks by their plausibility. A task's plausibility is computed from the interestingness of the items involved in the tasks and the strengths of justifications given for performing them. Heuristics are used to perform tasks and to propose new tasks. In addition, the framework is extremely modular, facilitating the extension of a discovery system. The framework's sufficiency was demonstrated by implementing it in a prototype system called HAMB and using it to make discoveries from the domain of experimental conditions that favor the growth of crystals of DNA-protein complexes and proteins for X-ray crystallographic studies. Details of the prototype's implementation, such as its interestingness function and its heuristics for performing, proposing, and justifying tasks, are reviewed, and results of evaluations of the framework and HAMB are presented and discussed.
Endothelial Nox4 NADPH Oxidase Enhances Vasodilatation and Reduces Blood Pressure In Vivo

Objective—Increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) production is involved in the pathophysiology of endothelial dysfunction. NADPH oxidase-4 (Nox4) is a ROS-generating enzyme expressed in the endothelium, levels of which increase in pathological settings. Recent studies indicate that it generates predominantly hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), but its role in vivo remains unclear. Methods and Results—We generated transgenic mice with endothelium-targeted Nox4 overexpression (Tg) to study the in vivo role of Nox4. Tg demonstrated significantly greater acetylcholine- or histamine-induced vasodilatation than wild-type littermates. This resulted from increased H2O2 production and H2O2-induced hyperpolarization but not altered nitric oxide bioactivity. Tg had lower systemic blood pressure than wild-type littermates, which was normalized by antioxidants. Conclusion—Endothelial Nox4 exerts potentially beneficial effects on vasodilator function and blood pressure that are attributable to H2O2 production. These effects contrast markedly with those reported for Nox1 and Nox2, which involve superoxide-mediated inactivation of nitric oxide. Our results suggest that therapeutic strategies to modulate ROS production in vascular disease may need to separately target individual Nox isoforms.
Sensory receptor diversity establishes a peripheral population code for stimulus duration at low intensities

SUMMARY Peripheral filtering is a fundamental mechanism for establishing frequency tuning in sensory systems. By contrast, detection of temporal features, such as duration, is generally thought to result from temporal coding in the periphery, followed by an analysis of peripheral response times within the central nervous system. We investigated how peripheral filtering properties affect the coding of stimulus duration in the electrosensory system of mormyrid fishes using behavioral and electrophysiological measures of duration tuning. We recorded from individual knollenorgans, the electrosensory receptors that mediate communication, and found correlated variation in frequency tuning and duration tuning, as predicted by a simple circuit model. In response to relatively high intensity stimuli, knollenorgans responded reliably with fixed latency spikes, consistent with a temporal code for stimulus duration. At near-threshold intensities, however, both the reliability and the temporal precision of responses decreased. Evoked potential recordings from the midbrain, as well as behavioral responses to electrosensory stimulation, revealed changes in sensitivity across the range of durations associated with the greatest variability in receptor sensitivity. Further, this range overlapped with the natural range of variation in species-specific communication signals, suggesting that peripheral duration tuning affects the coding of behaviorally relevant stimuli. We measured knollenorgan, midbrain and behavioral responses to natural communication signals and found that each of them were duration dependent. We conclude that at relatively low intensities for which temporal coding is ineffective, diversity among sensory receptors establishes a population code, in which duration is reflected in the population of responding knollenorgans.
Towards the UML evaluation using taxonomic patterns on meta-classes

In order to evaluate the design quality of the UML, understanding meta-classes is a key activity as they are the primary weapons by which the UML specifies the application domains. The paper introduces taxonomic patterns for clustering the UML meta-classes based on the observation of their evolution and fitness. The result sets of the patterns assist in finding the evidence of the concerns about the UML design and quality. It not only helps to find out problematic meta-classes, possible design defects of the UML and the inconsistency between the UML meta-models and the application domains; but also provides valuable information for guiding the development and evaluation of the UML. The work can be the basis of further quality analysis of the UML meta-models.
Two-Photon Antenna-Core Oxygen Probe with Enhanced Performance

Recent development of two-photon phosphorescence lifetime microscopy (2PLM) of oxygen enabled first noninvasive high-resolution measurements of tissue oxygenation in vivo in 3D, providing valuable physiological information. The so far developed two-photon-enhanced phosphorescent probes comprise antenna-core constructs, in which two-photon absorbing chromophores (antenna) capture and channel excitation energy to a phosphorescent core (metalloporphyrin) via intramolecular excitation energy transfer (EET). These probes allowed demonstration of the methods’ potential; however, they suffer from a number of limitations, such as partial loss of emissivity to competing triplet state deactivation pathways (e.g., electron transfer) and suboptimal sensitivity to oxygen, thereby limiting spatial and temporal resolution of the method. Here we present a new probe, PtTCHP-C307, designed to overcome these limitations. The key improvements include significant increase in the phosphorescence quantum yield, higher efficiency of the antenna-core energy transfer, minimized quenching of the phosphorescence by electron transfer and increased signal dynamic range. For the same excitation flux, the new probe is able to produce up to 6-fold higher signal output than previously reported molecules. Performance of PtTCHP-C307 was demonstrated in vivo in pO2 measurements through the intact mouse skull into the bone marrow, where all blood cells are made from hematopoietic stem cells.
On the deployment of a hybrid free-space optic/radio frequency (FSO/RF) mobile ad-hoc network

The hybrid free-space optics/radio frequency (FSO/RF) network paradigm promises new levels of throughput for sensor and mobile ad-hoc networks. However, several challenges must be addressed before such a network model can be realized. These include a means by which deployed robots can autonomously establish optical links over sufficiently long distances as well as the formulation of a mobile network architecture that can exploit high throughput FSO channels. In this paper, we offer solutions to these problems in the form of hierarchical link acquisition and routing protocols. The heart of our link acquisition system (LAS) is a vision-based alignment phase for locating robot link partners via high zoom camera systems. Identification is accomplished in real-time using a multi-resolution image representation and normalized intensity distribution (NID) as a similarity metric. Our routing protocol relies upon the hierarchical state routing (HSR) model adapted to the FSO/RF paradigm. Experimental results from a large set of link acquisition trials as well as a small scale FSO/RF deployment are provided to support our approach.
Downregulation of Carnitine Acyl-Carnitine Translocase by miRNAs 132 and 212 Amplifies Glucose-Stimulated Insulin Secretion

We previously demonstrated that micro-RNAs (miRNAs) 132 and 212 are differentially upregulated in response to obesity in two mouse strains that differ in their susceptibility to obesity-induced diabetes. Here we show the overexpression of miRNAs 132 and 212 enhances insulin secretion (IS) in response to glucose and other secretagogues including nonfuel stimuli. We determined that carnitine acyl-carnitine translocase (CACT; Slc25a20) is a direct target of these miRNAs. CACT is responsible for transporting long-chain acyl-carnitines into the mitochondria for β-oxidation. Small interfering RNA–mediated knockdown of CACT in β-cells led to the accumulation of fatty acyl-carnitines and enhanced IS. The addition of long-chain fatty acyl-carnitines promoted IS from rat insulinoma β-cells (INS-1) as well as primary mouse islets. The effect on INS-1 cells was augmented in response to suppression of CACT. A nonhydrolyzable ether analog of palmitoyl-carnitine stimulated IS, showing that β-oxidation of palmitoyl-carnitine is not required for its stimulation of IS. These studies establish a link between miRNA-dependent regulation of CACT and fatty acyl-carnitine–mediated regulation of IS.