Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Essential fatty acids and early life programming in meat-type birds

Egg fat is of considerable importance in the nutrition of the developing chick as a source of energy and essential fatty acids such as linoleic (18:2 n-6) and α-linolenic (18:3 n-3) acids. During incubation, yolk lipids provide fatty acids that are utilized for energy, synthesis of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA)-rich membrane phospholipids, and eicosanoids by the embryo. Eicosanoids derived from n-6 fatty acid are more potent and pro-inflammatory than eicosanoids derived from n-3 fatty acids. Two models of early life programming as affected by n-3 PUFA are investigated. Egg PUFA enrichment through breeder hen diet (pre-hatch or in ovo) or early post-hatch (within first 5 hours) feeding is investigated. Early access to nutrients (pre- and early post-hatch) is important because in broiler hatchlings that are selected for rapid early growth much of the immune system development occurs early in life. However, the current industry practice of feeding breeding hens diets high in n-6 fatty acids, limits the supply of essential n-3 PUFA in the hatchling. Early access to n-3 PUFA through in ovo or early post-hatch diet led to: (1) increase in the retention of n-3 PUFA in cell membranes, (2) reduction in plasma non-esterified fatty acids, (3) reduced production of pro-inflammatory eicosanoids, (4) suppression of cell-mediated immunity, and (5) alteration in cyclooxygenase-2 protein expression. The effects of an early exposure persisted from 14 to 35 days in different tissues and cells. Given the fact that broiler birds are raised for 39 to 56 days, and that the effect of pre-hatch and early post-hatch nutrition persists for up to and over 36–47% of post-hatch life, using an early life programming approach will generate new knowledge about the role of maternal and early post-hatch diet in enhancing bird health and welfare.
The dorsal premotor cortex orchestrates concurrent speech and fingertapping movements

Human speech and hand use both involve highly specialized complex movement patterns. Whereas previous studies in detail characterized the cortical motor systems mediating speech and finger movements, the network that provides coordination of concurrent speech and hand movements so far is unknown. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the present study investigated differential cortical networks devoted to speech or fingertapping, and regions mediating integration of these complex movement patterns involving different effectors. The conjunction contrasts revealing regions activated both during sole fingertapping and sole repetitive articulation or reading aloud showed contralateral regions at the border of ventral and dorsal motor cortex. In contrast, the analyses revealing regions showing a higher level of fMRI activation for concurrent movements of both effectors compared with sole hand movements or repetitive articulation or reading aloud showed distinct premotor activations, which were situated dorsal and caudal to the areas activated across speech and fingertapping tasks. These results indicate that the premotor cortex (PMC) subserves coordination of concurrent speech with hand movements. This integrative motor region is not identical with the area that shows overlapping activations for speech and fingertapping. Thus, concurrent performance of these complex movement patterns involving different effectors requires, in addition to somatotopic motor cortex activation, orchestration subserved by a distinct PMC area.
Capacidad diagnóstica de la ecografía para detectar cáncer de endometrio en mujeres posmenopaúsicas sintomáticas y asintomáticas: experiencia de la Universidad Católica de Chile

RESUMEN Antecedentes: El 10% de las mujeres postmenopausicas con sangrado uterino anormal (SUA) tendran cancer de endometrio. Se recomienda efectuar una biopsia endometrial en toda mujer postmenopausica con SUA y grosor endometrial ecografico >5 mm. Estudios recientes sugieren que el uso de un valor menor (3 mm) mejora la capacidad diagnostica de la ecografia. En mujeres postmenopausicas asintomaticas se ha sugerido efectuar biopsia endometrial si se detecta un endometrio >11mm. Objetivo: Determinar la ca-pacidad diagnostica de la ecografia para detectar cancer de endometrio, utilizando los valores de corte de 3 y 5 mm en mujeres posmenopausicas sintomaticas y de 11 mm en mujeres postmenopausicas asintomati-cas. Metodo: Revision retrospectiva de biopsias de endometrio e historia clinica de mujeres atendidas en la Red de Salud UC (2007-2012). Resultados: Se analizo 132 casos, 63,6% presentaron SUA. Hubo 17 casos de cancer de endometrio (12,9%), con un grosor endometrial promedio de 18 mm, el 88% presento SUA. En mujeres sintomaticas la sensibilidad para el diagnostico de cancer de endometrio fue de 100% y de 93% para valores de corte 3 y 5 mm respectivamente. En mujeres asintomaticas, el punto de corte 11 mm, tuvo una sensibilidad de 50% y una especificidad de 65% para el diagnostico de cancer de endometrio.
Morse Things: A Design Inquiry into the Gap Between Things and Us

Applying a thing-centered, material speculation approach we designed the Morse Things to acknowledge and inquire into the gap between things and us. The Morse Things are sets of ceramic bowls and cups networked together to independently communicate through Morse code in an Internet of Things (IoT). We deployed the Morse Things in the households of six interaction design practitioners and researchers for six weeks. Following the deployment, we conducted a workshop to discuss the role of the Morse Things and ultimately the gap between things and people. We reflect on the nature of living with IoT things and discuss insights into the gap between things and humans that led to the idea of a new type of thing in the home that is neither human-centered technology nor non-digital artifacts.
Serum Sodium and Potassium Levels in Cerebro-vascular Accident Patients.

BACKGROUND We aim to assess serum sodium and potassium levels in patients with different types of cerebro-vascular accidents (CVA) in comparison to control group. METHODS A comparative cross-sectional study conducted on patients admitted to the emergency department from January to August 2012. Control group consisted of patients admitted to emergency department due to common cold, urinary tract infection, low back pain, cluster, and tension headache or migraine. Serum sodium and potassium levels were measured via standard laboratory methods. RESULTS There were 77 patients in control group and 78 in CVA group. Forty nine patients from the CVA group had ischemic CVA, 11 had hemorrhagic CVA and 18 suffered a transient ischemic attack (TIA). Serum sodium level in control group was significantly lower than in patients with TIA, ischemic CVA, and hemorrhagic CVA (P < 0.001). Serum potassium level in control group was higher than patients with TIA, ischemic CVA, and hemorrhagic CVA (P < 0.001). Patients with hemorrhagic CVA showed significantly lower serum potassium level than patients with TIA and ischemic CVA (P < 0.001). Correspondingly, it was observed that serum sodium to potassium ratio was higher in patients with TIA, ischemic CVA, and hemorrhagic CVA (P < 0.001). In patients with hemorrhagic CVA serum sodium to potassium ratio was higher when compared to patients with TIA and ischemic CVA (P < 0.001). CONCLUSION This study shows that higher serum sodium and lower serum potassium level may be associated with higher incidence of CVA. Further studies are paramount to elucidate the role of serum electrolyte levels in vascular events.
An Internalization Motif Is Created in the Cytoplasmic Domain of the Transferrin Receptor by Substitution of a Tyrosine at the First Position of a Predicted Tight Turn (*)

Receptors are internalized from the plasma membrane at 10 times the rate of bulk membrane. The predominant model for the motif that promotes rapid internalization proposes a requirement for a tyrosine located in the first position of a tight turn. In this report we show that an internalization motif can be created de novo by substituting a tyrosine for the first or last residues of a tetrapeptide GDNS (residues 31-34) that is predicted to form a tight turn within the cytoplasmic domain of the human transferrin receptor. These substitutions restore wild-type levels of internalization to transferrin receptors that are poorly internalized due to missense mutations in the native internalization motif. The introduction of a tyrosine at the first or last position of the GDNS tetrapeptide in a transferrin receptor containing an unmodified wild-type internalization motif significantly increases the internalization rate above that of the wild-type receptor. Our results indicate that a functional novel internalization motif can be created by placing specific aromatic amino acids within the overall structure of an existing β-turn in a cytoplasmic domain of a receptor.
Brown adipose tissue activation as measured by infrared thermography by mild anticipatory psychological stress in lean healthy females

What is the central question of this study? Does psychological stress, which is known to promote cortisol secretion, simultaneously activate brown adipose tissue function in healthy adult females? What is the main finding and its importance? One explanation for the pronounced differences in brown adipose tissue function between individuals lies in their responsiveness to psychological stress and, as such, should be taken into account when examining its in vivo stimulation.
LetGo: A Lightweight Continuous Framework for HPC Applications Under Failures

Requirements for reliability, low power consumption, and performance place complex and conflicting demands on the design of high-performance computing (HPC) systems. Fault-tolerance techniques such as checkpoint/restart (C/R) protect HPC applications against hardware faults. These techniques, however, have non negligible overheads particularly when the fault rate exposed by the hardware is high: it is estimated that in future HPC systems, up to 60% of the computational cycles/power will be used for fault tolerance. To mitigate the overall overhead of fault-tolerance techniques, we propose LetGo, an approach that attempts to continue the execution of a HPC application when crashes would otherwise occur. Our hypothesis is that a class of HPC applications have good enough intrinsic fault tolerance so that its possible to re-purpose the default mechanism that terminates an application once a crash-causing error is signalled, and instead attempt to repair the corrupted application state, and continue the application execution. This paper explores this hypothesis, and quantifies the impact of using this observation in the context of checkpoint/restart (C/R) mechanisms. Our fault-injection experiments using a suite of five HPC applications show that, on average, LetGo is able to elide 62% of the crashes encountered by applications, of which 80% result in correct output, while incurring a negligible performance overhead. As a result, when LetGo is used in conjunction with a C/R scheme, it enables significantly higher efficiency thereby leading to faster time to solution.
Integrating practical, regulatory and ethical strategies for enhancing farm animal welfare.

OBJECTIVE To provide an integrated view of relationships between assessment of animal welfare. societal expectations regarding animal welfare standards, the need for regulation, and two ethical strategies for promoting animal welfare, emphasising farm animals. APPROACH Ideas in relevant papers and key insights were outlined and illustrated, where appropriate, by New Zealand experience with different facets of the welfare management of farm animals. CONCLUSIONS An animal's welfare is good when its nutritional, environmental, health, behavioural and mental needs are met. Compromise may occur in one or more of these areas and is assessed by scientifically-informed best judgement using parameters validated by directed research and objective analysis in clinical and practical settings. There is a wide range of perceptions of what constitutes good and bad welfare in society, so that animal welfare standards cannot be left to individual preferences to determine. Rather, the promotion of animal welfare is seen as requiring central regulation, but managed in a way that allows for adjustments based on new scientific knowledge of animals' needs and changing societal perceptions of what is acceptable and unacceptable treatment of animals. Concepts of 'minimal welfare', representing the threshold of cruelty, and 'acceptable welfare', representing higher, more acceptable standards than those that merely avoid cruelty, are outlined. They are relevant to economic analyses, which deal with determinants of animal welfare standards based on financial costs and the desire of the public to feel broadly comfortable about the treatment of the animals that are used to serve their needs. Ethical strategies for promoting animal welfare can be divided broadly into the 'gold standard' approach and the 'incremental improvement' approach. The first defines the ideal that is to be required in a particular situation and will accept nothing less than that ideal, whereas the second aims to improve welfare in a step-wise fashion by setting a series of achievable goals, seeing each small advance as worthwhile progress towards the same ideal. 'Incremental improvement' is preferred. This also has application in veterinary practice where the professional commitment to maintain good welfare standards may at times conflict with financial constraints experienced by clients.
Multidrug-Resistant Enterococcus raffinosus From A Decubitus Ulcer: A Case Report

A case of decubitus ulcer infected with multidrug-resistant Enterococcus raffinosus is reported in this article. This is the first report of wound infection caused by an Enterococcus raffinosus isolate resistant to antibiotics other than β-lactams, gentamicin, and ciprofloxacin. This case adds to the knowledge base concerning the onset of antibiotic resistance in this uncommon species and confirms the emerging role of daptomycin as a promising alternative in therapy of severe difficult-to-treat enterococcal infections.
Redox status and protein binding of plasma homocysteine and other aminothiols in patients with early-onset peripheral vascular disease. Homocysteine and peripheral vascular disease.

Elevated total homocysteine (Hcy) in plasma is an independent risk factor for early-onset vascular disease in the coronary, cerebral, and peripheral arteries. Different forms of Hcy, and their relation to other aminothiols in plasma, have not been investigated in patients with vascular disease. We therefore investigated 65 patients (35 men and 30 women) operated on for peripheral arterial disease at < 50 years of age and 65 age- and sex-matched control subjects. Total, reduced, oxidized, and protein-bound Hcy, cysteine (Cys), and cysteinylglycine (CysGly) were measured 0 to 11 years (mean, 6 years) postoperatively, in the fasting state, and after a standard methionine loading dose that caused a transient increase in reduced, oxidized, and protein-bound Hcy. All forms of Hcy and Cys, except reduced Cys, were higher in fasting patients than fasting control subjects. A similar difference between the groups was observed after methionine loading. The levels of most Hcy forms both during fasting and after methionine loading were related to smoking, but multivariate analysis showed that the difference between patients and control subjects could not be explained by smoking alone. Notably, reduced Cys and the reduced/total ratio for Cys were significantly higher in control subjects than in patients, both during fasting and after methionine loading. In both groups, the redox status and protein binding of the various aminothiols in plasma were interactive, as demonstrated by positive correlations between their reduced/total ratios and by a decrease in protein-bound Cys when protein-bound Hcy was elevated during methionine loading. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Simple formulation of the two-channel Kondo model.

We reformulate the two-channel Kondo model to explicitly remove the unscattered charge degrees of freedom. This procedure permits us to move the non-Fermi liquid fixed point to infinite coupling where we can apply a perturbative strong-coupling expansion. The fixed point Hamiltonian involves a three-body Majorana zero mode whose scattering effects give rise to marginal self-energies. The compactified model is the N=3 member of a family of "O(N)" Kondo models that can be solved by semiclassical methods in the large $N$ limit. For odd $N$, {\em fermionic} "Kink" fluctuations about the $N=\infty$ mean-field theory generate a fermionic $N$-body bound-state which asymptotically decouples at low energies. For N=3, our semi-classical methods fully recover the non-Fermi liquid physics of the original two channel model. Using the same methods, we find that the corresponding O(3) Kondo lattice model develops a spin-gap and a gapless band of coherently propagating three-body bound-states. Its strong-coupling limit offers a rather interesting realization of marginal Fermi liquid behavior.
Mutagenesis of the Sindbis virus nsP1 protein: effects on methyltransferase activity and viral infectivity.

It has been suggested that four amino acids which are absolutely conserved in th nsP1 nonstructural proteins encoded by togaviruses and in the homologous proteins encoded by plant viruses in the Sindbis virus (SV) superfamily may constitute a "methyltransferase motif. " In the Sindbis virus nsP1 protein (540 amino acids) these four amino acids are represented by His39, Arg91, Asp94, and Tyr249. Earlier, in assays of methyltransferase (MTase) activity generated in SV-infected cells, we had shown that amino acid changes at positions 87 and 88 of SV nsP1 resulted in a 10-fold lower Km for S-adenosyl methionine, the methyl donor in MTase reactions. Using site-directed mutagenesis we now report the expression of nsP1 in Escherichia coli, and in the infectious clone of Sindbis virus, Toto/1101, in which His39, Arg91, Asp94, and Tyr249 were changed one at a time to Ala. We also expressed nsP1 with C-terminal deletions of varying size, as well as with internal deletions in the C-terminal portion of the protein, in E. coli. Changing His39, Arg91, Asp94, or Tyr249 to Ala led to a loss of both MTase activity and viral infectivity; however, changing Ile369 to Val, a conservative change in the carboxy-terminal half of nsP1, had no effect on either MTase activity or viral infectivity. With respect to the deleted forms of nsP1, a carboxy-terminal deletion of 48 amino acids was still compatible with MTase activity in vitro. However, larger deletions including those in which the amino acids between positions 442 and 492 were deleted abolished MTase activity.
Structural Analysis of the Capsular Polysaccharide from Campylobacter jejuni RM1221

The complete genome of Campylobacter jejuni strain RM1221 (Penner serotype HS:53) was reported recently and contains a novel capsular polysaccharide (CPS) biosynthesis locus. Cell‐surface carbohydrates such as CPS are known to be important for bacterial survival and often contribute to pathogenesis. In this study, we describe the complete structure of the CPS of C. jejuni RM1221, which was determined by using NMR spectroscopy, MS, and chemical methods. The CPS contains 6‐deoxy‐D‐manno‐heptose and D‐threo‐pent‐2‐ulose (D‐xylulose), two monosaccharides that are rarely found in bacterial polysaccharides. The CPS has a regular structure of a linear main chain of trisaccharide repeating units, composed of two α‐ and one β‐6‐deoxy‐D‐manno‐heptopyranose residues, which are linked through a phosphodiester linkage. Branching residues of xylulose are incorporated nonstoichiometrically: each trisaccharide repeating unit of the main chain bears no, one, or two xylulose residues. The xylulose glycosidic linkages are extremely acid labile, and it is not clear how they can be preserved under the acidic conditions of the gastrointestinal tract, where Campylobacter resides during infection. We have also shown that the CPS biosynthesis genes of C. jejuni RM1221 are conserved in other C. jejuni strains of the Penner serotype HS:53, including serotype HS:53 reference strain RM3435.
Generalized SVM technique for multiphase current source inverters

This paper introduces a generalized Space-Vector-Modulation (SVM) technique for n-phase Current-Source-Inverters (CSIs), where n is an odd number. Generally, for an n-phase CSI there are n<sup>2</sup> possible switching-states. Each state generates an output current space-vector. The resulted vectors are n(n − 1) active with (n − 1)/2 levels and n zero-vectors. These vectors are mapped in (n − 1)/2 subspace planes. Each plane is divided into 2n sectors with (n − 1) active- and n zero-vectors. The first-plane is called the fundamental-plane or αβ, while the others are called auxiliary-planes which are labeled by x<inf>1</inf>y<inf>1</inf>·x<inf>2</inf>y<inf>2</inf>··· etc. Two SVM methods are proposed based on the selected vectors. Moreover, generalized equations to determine the dwelling-times in both methods are proposed based on the ampere-second balance concept. In order to check the validity of the generalized-technique a case study for five-phase CSI fed an inductive-load is presented. A sample of simulation results is obtained to confirm the presented technique effectiveness.
A New Chaotic Electro-Mechanical Oscillator

In this paper, a new electro-mechanical chaotic oscillator is presented. The system is based on the motion of the metal tip of a beam in a double-well potential generated by two magnets, and works thanks to the vibrations generated in the flexible mechanical structure by two rotating coils that produce noise-like signals. As the source of vibration is internal, the system may be considered an autonomous oscillator. Chaotic motion is experimentally observed and verified with a mathematical model of the phenomenon.