Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Morroniside Improves Microvascular Functional Integrity of the Neurovascular Unit after Cerebral Ischemia

Treating the vascular elements within the neurovascular unit is essential for protecting and repairing the brain after stroke. Acute injury on endothelial systems results in the disruption of blood-brain barrier (BBB), while post-ischemic angiogenesis plays an important role in delayed functional recovery. Here, we considered alterations in microvessel integrity to be targets for brain recovery, and tested the natural compound morroniside as a therapeutic approach to restore the vascular elements of injured tissue in a rat model of focal cerebral ischemia. Sprague-Dawley rats were subjected to middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) model, and morroniside was then administered intragastrically once a day at doses of 30, 90, and 270 mg/kg. BBB integrity and associated factors were analyzed to identify cerebrovascular permeability 3 days after MCAO. The recruitment of endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), the expression of angiogenic factors and the new vessel formation in the peri-infarct cortex of rats were examined 7 days after MCAO to identify the angiogenesis. We demonstrated that at 3 days post-ischemia, morroniside preserved neurovascular unit function by ameliorating BBB injury. By 7 days post-ischemia, morroniside amplified angiogenesis, in part by enhancing endothelial progenitor cell proliferation and expression of angiogenic factors. Morever, the increase in the amount of vWF+ vessels induced by ischemia could be extended to 28 days after administration of morroniside, indicating the crucial role of morroniside in angiogenesis during the chronic phase. Taken together, our findings suggested that morroniside might offer a novel therapeutic approach for promoting microvascular integrity recovery and provide a thoroughly new direction for stroke therapy.
Adaptive Neural Network Control of Robot Based on a Unified Objective Bound

In the conventional adaptive neural network control of robotic manipulator, the desired position of robot end effector is specified as a point or trajectory. In addition, it is usually difficult to guarantee the transient performance of adaptive neural network control system due to the initialization error of the weight of neural network. In this paper, a new control formulation is proposed for the adaptive neural network control of robotic manipulator, which unifies existing neural network control tasks such as setpoint control, trajectory tracking control, and trajectory tracking control with prescribed performance bound. The proposed method also includes a new adaptive neural network control scheme where the objective for the robot end effector can be specified as a dynamic region, instead of the desired position or trajectory. The stability of the closed-loop system is analyzed using Lyapunov-like analysis. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach and the energy-saving property of the proposed neural network controller with dynamic region.
Friendship Quality and School Achievement: A Longitudinal Analysis During Primary School

This study examined the longitudinal relationship between friendship quality (positive and negative) and school achievement among 228 school-age children (51% girls, M = 8.09, SD = 0.41). A three-wave cross-lagged analysis was used to determine the direction of influence between these domains across school years. Findings revealed that: (a) school achievement in second grade decreased negative friendship quality in third grade; (b) school achievement in second grade predicted positive friendship quality in third grade; (c) positive friendship quality in third grade predicted school achievement in fourth grade. The protective role of school achievement against peer relationship impairment and the reciprocal relationship between positive friendship quality and school achievement were underlined. Implications for educational practices for Italian primary schools are discussed.
Mozart Effect and its clinical applications: a review.

Recent research efforts examining the effects on the brain of listening to music have discovered that music, with specific characteristics, is able to improve cognitive and learning capacity. Recent studies have demonstrated that music, in particular some musical compositions (such as those of W. A. Mozart and J. S. Bach), has a notable role not only in cognitive disturbances, but also in the treatment of several syndromes and diseases, either by rehabilitating or by stimulating cerebral synaptic plasticity. The Mozart Effect was described for the first time in 1993. Subsequently, other studies with similar designs were made. This review summarizes the recent scientific literature on the Mozart Effect. More studies are needed, in order to define specific protocols in which music helps clinicians in recuperating patients and in improving their quality of life.
Preclinical Characterization and In Vivo Efficacy of GSK8853, a Small-Molecule Inhibitor of the Hepatitis C Virus NS4B Protein

ABSTRACT The hepatitis C virus (HCV) NS4B protein is an antiviral therapeutic target for which small-molecule inhibitors have not been shown to exhibit in vivo efficacy. We describe here the in vitro and in vivo antiviral activity of GSK8853, an imidazo[1,2-a]pyrimidine inhibitor that binds NS4B protein. GSK8853 was active against multiple HCV genotypes and developed in vitro resistance mutations in both genotype 1a and genotype 1b replicons localized to the region of NS4B encoding amino acids 94 to 105. A 20-day in vitro treatment of replicons with GSK8853 resulted in a 2-log drop in replicon RNA levels, with no resistance mutation breakthrough. Chimeric replicons containing NS4B sequences matching known virus isolates showed similar responses to a compound with genotype 1a sequences but altered efficacy with genotype 1b sequences, likely corresponding to the presence of known resistance polymorphs in those isolates. In vivo efficacy was tested in a humanized-mouse model of HCV infection, and the results showed a 3-log drop in viral RNA loads over a 7-day period. Analysis of the virus remaining at the end of in vivo treatment revealed resistance mutations encoding amino acid changes that had not been identified by in vitro studies, including NS4B N56I and N99H. Our findings provide an in vivo proof of concept for HCV inhibitors targeting NS4B and demonstrate both the promise and potential pitfalls of developing NS4B inhibitors.
End to end study of the Chinese salinity mission

The Ocean Salinity (OS) Satellite mission of the State Oceanic Administration of China dedicates to an “all-weather” estimate of high-quality global SSS and to reduce geophysical errors due to surface roughness and sea surface temperature from space. The payload of this mission has the capability of L/C/K multi-frequency passive and L-band active measurement, and can implement the simultaneously remote sensing of SSS, SST, WS and atmospheric parameters. The OS Satellite data processing prototype software has been developed to simulate the instrument and to generate Level 0 to Level 2 data. Based on the prototype software, the end to end study of the OS Satellite mission is performed and the errors of simultaneous retrieval of multiparameters are analyzed and noises level and stability requirement of instruments are estimated.
ASSESSMENT OF PSYCHOPATHOLOGICAL PROFILE IN APPLICANTS FOR COSMETIC SURGERY

Introduction: According to previous studies, frequency of psychological symptoms or disorders among applicants for cosmetic surgery is more than normal population. The aim of the present study is to compare psychopathological profile of applicants for plastic surgery with normal population. Materials and Methods: In this cross sectional, case- control study, samples were selected through convenient sampling; 50 subjects who were between 18 to 45 years old, were selected among applicants for cosmetic surgery and compared with 50 matched controls. The subjects were assessed with Millon Clinical Multi-axial Inventory-III that has 175 true-false questions. MANOVA was used to compare two groups. Results: Results demonstrated that group of applicants for cosmetic surgery, gothigh scores in depressed, histrionic, narcissistic, compulsive, masochism, borderline and schizotypal scales of personality profile; They got also high scores in anxiety, somatoform, alcoholism, thought disorder and major depression scales (among clinical symptom and severe symptom indexes) (P<0.05). Conclusion: Applicants for plastic surgery have some differences in clinical personality profile and show some clinical psychiatric symptoms, comparing with control group. These symptoms and personality characters may affect them, seeking help by cosmetic surgery. Therefore pre-operative psychological assessment could help to assess clinical and personality profile and identify any personality or psychiatric disorder in these patients. It is helpful for these patients to be referred for psychological assessment before surgery.
INVITED ARTICLE THE EFFECTS OF ETHNICITY, FAMILIES AND CULTURE ON ENTREPRENEURIAL EXPERIENCE: AN EXTENSION OF SUSTAINABLE FAMILY BUSINESS THEORY

Entrepreneurs have been traditionally epitomized as rugged individuals garnering creative forces of innovation and technology. Applying this traditional, limited, and narrow view of entrepreneurship to ethnic firm creation and growth is to ignore or discount core cultural values of the ethnic contexts in which these firms operate. It is no longer possible to depend solely on human capital theory and household characteristic descriptions to understand the complex and interdependent relationships between the ethnic-owning family, its firm, and the community context in which the firm operates. This paper addresses the complex dynamic of ethnic firms with three purposes: (a) to provide a cultural context for the three ethnic groups composing the National Minority Business Owner Study; (b) to extend the Sustainable Family Business Theory, a dynamic, behaviorally-based, multi-dimensional family firm theory, by clarifying how it accommodates ethnic firm complexities within their cultural context, and (c) to derive implications for research, education and consulting with worldwide applications.
The Illusion of Mirrors: Velázquez's Las Meninas

There have been dozens of interpretations of Las Meninas but most critics assume that either the Royal couple, or their portrait in the Velazquez's large canvas shown in the picture, is actually reflected on a back mirror. I shall provide evidence, however, to support the view that this mirror never existed. And there is no evidence whatsoever that the double portrait was ever painted. In view of these facts I shall make a new proposal about the way the picture was painted and about the painter's intentions. I shall show evidence that the king was adamant that he did not want his portrait painted, since he did not want to show his age (he was more than double the age of his queen). It is thus reasonable to assume that Velázquez, in order to assuage the King's qualms, created the mirror, thus allowing him to produce a very diffuse picture of the royal couple, where no evidence of aging could possibly be discerned.
Ritualized ethnic identity: Asian Indian immigrants in the southern plains

ABSTRACT This study examines identity construction among first-generation Asian Indian immigrants who reside in the Southern Plains region of the United States. Employing structural ritualization theory this study focuses on how three types of ritualized behaviors - regional-ethnic, pan-ethnic, and host - play a crucial role in constructing “multi-ritual” ethnic identity of Indian immigrants. In determining the rank or overall importance of ritualized symbolic practices (RSPs) we argue that the higher the rank of a practice, the greater its impact on the cognitions and behaviors of immigrants. The results of this qualitative study indicate that in the process of ethnic identity formation, Indian immigrants negotiate with their distinctive pan-Indian RSPs, retain and alter their regional-Indian RSPs, and bring their ethnicity into the mainstream society. This study contributes to the micro-sociological analysis of ethnic identity and enhances our empirical understanding of an understudied Asian Indian immigrant community.
Power Electronics for Renewable Energy Systems, Transportation and Industrial Applications [Book News]

15) “Cognitive Radio Sensor Networks in Industrial Applications” by A. Ozan Bicen and Ozgur B. Akan 16) “Industrial WSN Standards,” by Tomas Lennvall, Krister Landernäs, Mikael Gidlund, and Johan Åkerberg. All the chapters are easy to read, and hundreds of references are provided at the end of each chapter. A table of contents, lists of figures and tables, a preface, and an index are also included. Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks: Applications, Protocols, and Standards is a valuable tool for students, practicing engineers, researchers, entrepreneurs and scientists working in the areas of sensor networks and devices, industrial computer and sensor networks, instrumentation, and electrical and computer engineering.
Ear Recognition by means of a Rotation Invariant Descriptor

Iannarelli's studies showed that ear shape can be considered a biometric identifier able to authenticate people as well as more established biometrics like face or voice, for instance. However, very few researches can be found in literature about ear recognition. In most cases techniques already working in other biometric fields, such as PCA (principal component analysis), are applied to ear. Eigen-ears provide high recognition rate only in closely controlled conditions. Indeed, even a slight amount of rotation can cause a significant drop in system performance and in unattended systems rotations occur very frequently. In this paper, we propose the use of a rotation invariant descriptor, namely GFD (generic Fourier descriptor), to extract meaningful features from ear images. This descriptor results to be quite robust to both ear rotations and illumination changes. Experimental results confirm the superiority of this approach even compared to Eigen-ears
Weighted fuzzy clustering on subsets of variables

A fuzzy clustering method considering weights of variable-based dissimilarities over objects in the subspace of the objectpsilas space is proposed. In order to estimate the weights, we propose two methods. One is a method in which a conventional fuzzy clustering method is directly used for the variable-based dissimilarity data. The other is to use a new objective function. Exploiting the weights, we define a dissimilarity assigned with the significance of each variable for the classification and reduce the number of variables. We can implement a fuzzy clustering method under the intrinsically weighted classification structure on the subspace of data. Several numerical examples show the improved performance and the applicability of our proposed method.
Do humans identify efficient strategies in structured peer-to-peer systems?

In the last years, distributed coordinator-free systems, e.g., peer-to-peer systems (P2P systems), have attracted much interest among researchers and practitioners. In these systems it is difficult to motivate participants to cooperate. To this end, researchers have proposed various incentive mechanisms. In this paper we are interested in the following question: Do human beings indeed use the strategies that are rational in presence of the incentive mechanism? As humans control the agents in distributed coordinator-free systems, e.g., the peers in peer-to-peer systems, answering this question is essential. We conduct human experiments in the context of structured P2P systems to answer it. This paper shows that humans tend to find it difficult to resort to the strategies expected by the system designer.
Cyanobacteria: A Precious Bio-resource in Agriculture, Ecosystem, and Environmental Sustainability

Keeping in view, the challenges concerning agro-ecosystem and environment, the recent developments in biotechnology offers a more reliable approach to address the food security for future generations and also resolve the complex environmental problems. Several unique features of cyanobacteria such as oxygenic photosynthesis, high biomass yield, growth on non-arable lands and a wide variety of water sources (contaminated and polluted waters), generation of useful by-products and bio-fuels, enhancing the soil fertility and reducing green house gas emissions, have collectively offered these bio-agents as the precious bio-resource for sustainable development. Cyanobacterial biomass is the effective bio-fertilizer source to improve soil physico-chemical characteristics such as water-holding capacity and mineral nutrient status of the degraded lands. The unique characteristics of cyanobacteria include their ubiquity presence, short generation time and capability to fix the atmospheric N2. Similar to other prokaryotic bacteria, the cyanobacteria are increasingly applied as bio-inoculants for improving soil fertility and environmental quality. Genetically engineered cyanobacteria have been devised with the novel genes for the production of a number of bio-fuels such as bio-diesel, bio-hydrogen, bio-methane, synga, and therefore, open new avenues for the generation of bio-fuels in the economically sustainable manner. This review is an effort to enlist the valuable information about the qualities of cyanobacteria and their potential role in solving the agricultural and environmental problems for the future welfare of the planet.
Intraarticular gene transfer of thrombospondin‐1 suppresses the disease progression of experimental osteoarthritis

In osteoarthritis, angiogenesis, which occurs in the osteochondral junction and synovium, may accelerate inflammation and contribute to the severity of the disease. We used anterior cruciate ligament‐transection (ACLT) to investigate the therapeutic effect of an angiogenesis inhibitor, thrombospondin‐1 (TSP‐1), in a rat model of osteoarthritis. Osteoarthritis was induced in Wistar rats in the knee of one hind leg. After ACLT, AdTSP‐1 (adenoviral vector encoding mouse TSP‐1) was intraarticularly injected into the knee joints. Transgene expression, angiogenesis, and inflammatory responses in the knee joints were examined. They were also assessed morphologically, radiographically, and histologically for manifestations of disease. The levels of TSP‐1 peaked on day 3 and were substantially maintained for at least 9 days after AdTSP‐1 infection. Adenovirus‐mediated gene expression was detected in the synovial membrane and chondrocytes. TSP‐1 gene transfer induced transforming growth factor‐β (TGF‐β) production, but it reduced microvessel density, macrophage infiltration, and interleukin‐1β (IL‐1β) levels. Gross morphological and histopathological examinations revealed that rats treated with AdTSP‐1 had less severe osteoarthritis than controls. In vivo adenovirus‐mediated TSP‐1 gene transfer significantly reduced microvessel density, inflammation, and suppressed the progression of osteoarthritis. This study provides potential applications of TSP‐1 gene delivery for treating osteoarthritis. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Orthop Res 28:1300–1306, 2010
RECfusion: Automatic Video Curation Driven by Visual Content Popularity

The proliferation of mobile devices and the diffusion of social media have changed the communication paradigm of people that share multimedia data by allowing new interaction models (e.g., social networks). In social events (e.g., concerts), the automatic video understanding goal includes the interpretation of which visual contents are the most popular. The popularity of a visual content depends on how many people are looking at that scene, and therefore it could be obtained through the "visual consensus" among multiple video streams acquired by the different users devices. In this work we present RECfusion, a system able to automatically create a single video from multiple video sources by taking into account the popularity of the acquired scenes. The frames composing the final popular video are selected from the different video streams by considering those visual scenes which are pointed and recorded by the highest number of users' devices. Results on two benchmark datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system.
T-Cell Receptor Binding Affects the Dynamics of the Peptide/MHC-I Complex

The recognition of peptide/MHC by T-cell receptors is one of the most important interactions in the adaptive immune system. A large number of computational studies have investigated the structural dynamics of this interaction. However, to date only limited attention has been paid to differences between the dynamics of peptide/MHC with the T-cell receptor bound and unbound. Here we present the first large-scale molecular dynamics simulation study of this type investigating HLA-B*08:01 in complex with the Epstein-Barr virus peptide FLRGRAYGL and all possible single-point mutations (n = 172). All of the simulations were performed with and without the LC 13 T-cell receptor for a simulation time of 100 ns, yielding 344 simulations and a total simulation time of 34 400 ns. Our study is 2 orders of magnitude larger than the average T-cell receptor/peptide/MHC molecular dynamics simulation study. This data set provides reliable insights into alterations of the peptide/MHC-I dynamics caused by the presence of the T-cell receptor. We found that simulations in the presence of T-cell receptors have more hydrogen bonds between the peptide and MHC, altered flexibility patterns in the MHC helices and the peptide, a lower MHC groove width range, and altered solvent-accessible surface areas. This indicates that without a T-cell receptor the MHC binding groove can open and close, while the presence of the T-cell receptor inhibits these breathing-like motions.
The So-Called 'External Partners' in the Groups of Corporations: A Model of Presentation in the Consolidated Statements

This paper studies, on the one hand, theories set out around the consideration of the external partners in the consolidated information and on the other hand, financial models that discuss the convenience of the separation or not of the different elements that form part of the liabilities of the balance sheet of the companies. A Model is proposed, the External Partners Model, which financially argues a certain presentation and processing of such and that, in our opinion, facilitates the analysis of the consolidated financial statements. This model is based on two hypotheses: (1) the economic and financial variables are not independent and (2) the value of the company depends, among other factors, of the type of sources that constitute their capital. These two hypotheses will imply that a separation should be included in the consolidated balance sheet between equity and liabilities as they are different sources of capital and then its separation will give relevant information to its users.