Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Poisson–Boltzmann theory of charged colloids: limits of the cell model for salty suspensions

Thermodynamic properties of charge-stabilized colloidal suspensions and polyelectrolyte solutions are commonly modelled by implementing the mean-field Poisson–Boltzmann (PB) theory within a cell model. This approach models a bulk system by a single macroion, together with counterions and salt ions, confined to a symmetrically shaped, electroneutral cell. While easing numerical solution of the nonlinear PB equation, the cell model neglects microion-induced interactions and correlations between macroions, precluding modelling of macroion ordering phenomena. An alternative approach, which avoids the artificial constraints of cell geometry, exploits the mapping of a macroion–microion mixture onto a one-component model of pseudo-macroions governed by effective interparticle interactions. In practice, effective-interaction models are usually based on linear-screening approximations, which can accurately describe strong nonlinear screening only by incorporating an effective (renormalized) macroion charge. Combining charge renormalization and linearized PB theories, in both the cell model and an effective-interaction (cell-free) model, we compute osmotic pressures of highly charged colloids and monovalent microions, in Donnan equilibrium with a salt reservoir, over a range of concentrations. By comparing predictions with primitive model simulation data for salt-free suspensions, and with predictions from nonlinear PB theory for salty suspensions, we chart the limits of both the cell model and linear-screening approximations in modelling bulk thermodynamic properties. Up to moderately strong electrostatic couplings, the cell model proves accurate for predicting osmotic pressures of deionized (counterion-dominated) suspensions. With increasing salt concentration, however, the relative contribution of macroion interactions to the osmotic pressure grows, leading predictions from the cell and effective-interaction models to deviate. No evidence is found for a liquid–vapour phase instability driven by monovalent microions. These results may guide applications of PB theory to colloidal suspensions and other soft materials.
Change in lung tumor volume as a biomarker of treatment response: a critical review of the evidence.

SPECIFIC AIM To review the evidence indicating that volumetric image analysis of computed tomography scans meets specifications for qualification as a biomarker in clinical trials or the management of individual patients with lung cancer. METHODS Claims of value were broken down into questions about technical feasibility, accuracy, the precision of measurement, sensitivity, the correlations with health outcomes, and the risks of producing misleading information. For each claim, the pertinent literature was reviewed. RESULTS Technical feasibility has now been shown, but only in limited contexts. Accuracy has been demonstrated, but only for tumors with favorable anatomical features. Measurement error still makes the assessment of change in small nodules precarious in diagnostic settings unless rigorous image acquisition and analysis procedures are followed. Precision is sufficient in some larger masses to make volumetrics a sensitive biomarker. In a few trials, correlations with clinical outcomes have been higher for volumetric-based measures than for unidimensional or bidimensional diameters. Value in clinical practice settings and clinical trials has been suggested, but not proven. CONCLUSION The weight of the evidence indicates there are circumstances in which volumetric image analysis adds value to clinical trial science and the practice of medicine.
Transient Receptor Potential Channel A1 Is Directly Gated by Calcium Ions*

Members of the superfamily of transient receptor potential (TRP) channels are proposed to play important roles in sensory physiology. As an excitatory ion channel TRPA1 is robustly activated by pungent irritants in mustard and garlic and is suggested to mediate the inflammatory actions of environmental irritants and proalgesic agents. Here, we demonstrate that, in addition to pungent natural compounds, Ca2+ directly gates heterologously expressed TRPA1 in whole-cell and excised-patch recordings with an apparent EC50 of 905 nm. Pharmacological experiments and site-directed mutagenesis indicate that the N-terminal EF-hand calcium-binding domain of the channel is involved in Ca2+-dependent activation. Furthermore, we determine Ca2+ as prerequisite for icilin activity on TRPA1.
Parameters affecting the judgment task while summarizing documents

Due to the instability in user agreement, necessity for improvements in document summary generation has paid huge attention. This paper, presents improvements to document summarization by analyzing the sentence position and recommendations of sentences from other sentences for making an efficient document summarizer. As we know humans are good in summarizing the contents, we have made few studies to improve the efficiency of our system much closer to user selection (manual summaries). This article focuses only on providing improvements for news articles. We have attempted to obtain summaries much closer or equal to manually generated summaries and the results obtained were promising. We also, show that term frequency approach combined with position weight gives better results, while adding node weight with the above feature yield results that were significantly better than the former approach. The paper also, illustrates some studies on some common evaluation criterion to generate a unique summary by various users. The results were also, compared with commercially existing Microsoft summarizer. The results produced by us were better as compared to the existing summarizers.
One-Year Trajectories of Care and Resource Utilization for Recipients of Prolonged Mechanical Ventilation

BACKGROUND Growing numbers of critically ill patients receive prolonged mechanical ventilation. Little is known about the patterns of care as patients transition from acute care hospitals to postacute care facilities or about the associated resource utilization. OBJECTIVE To describe 1-year trajectories of care and resource utilization for patients receiving prolonged mechanical ventilation. DESIGN 1-year prospective cohort study. SETTING 5 intensive care units at Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina. PARTICIPANTS 126 patients receiving prolonged mechanical ventilation (defined as ventilation for >or=4 days with tracheostomy placement or ventilation for >or=21 days without tracheostomy), as well as their 126 surrogates and 54 intensive care unit physicians, enrolled consecutively over 1 year. MEASUREMENTS Patients and surrogates were interviewed in the hospital, as well as 3 and 12 months after discharge, to determine patient survival, functional status, and facility type and duration of postdischarge care. Physicians were interviewed in the hospital to elicit prognoses. Institutional billing records were used to assign costs for acute care, outpatient care, and interfacility transportation. Medicare claims data were used to assign costs for postacute care. RESULTS 103 (82%) hospital survivors had 457 separate transitions in postdischarge care location (median, 4 transitions [interquartile range, 3 to 5 transitions]), including 68 patients (67%) who were readmitted at least once. Patients spent an average of 74% (95% CI, 68% to 80%) of all days alive in a hospital or postacute care facility or receiving home health care. At 1 year, 11 patients (9%) had a good outcome (alive with no functional dependency), 33 (26%) had a fair outcome (alive with moderate dependency), and 82 (65%) had a poor outcome (either alive with complete functional dependency [4 patients; 21%] or dead [56 patients; 44%]). Patients with poor outcomes were older, had more comorbid conditions, and were more frequently discharged to a postacute care facility than patients with either fair or good outcomes (P < 0.05 for all). The mean cost per patient was $306,135 (SD, $285,467), and total cohort cost was $38.1 million, for an estimated $3.5 million per independently functioning survivor at 1 year. LIMITATION The results of this single-center study may not be applicable to other centers. CONCLUSION Patients receiving prolonged mechanical ventilation have multiple transitions of care, resulting in substantial health care costs and persistent, profound disability. The optimism of surrogate decision makers should be balanced by discussions of these outcomes when considering a course of prolonged life support. PRIMARY FUNDING SOURCE None.
UK GPs' and practice nurses' views of continuity of care for patients with type 2 diabetes.

BACKGROUND Continuity of care is widely regarded as a core value of primary care. Type 2 diabetes is a common chronic disease with major health, social and economic impacts. Primary health care professionals in many countries are involved in the management of patients with type 2 diabetes, but their perspectives on continuity remain neglected in research. OBJECTIVE To explore UK GPs' and nurses' experiences of continuity of care for patients with type 2 diabetes in primary care settings. METHODS Semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with 16 GPs and 18 practice nurses who manage patients with type 2 diabetes recruited from 20 practices with various organizational structures in Leeds, UK. RESULTS Three types of continuities were identified: relational continuity from the same health care professional, team continuity from a group of health care professionals and cross-boundary continuity across primary-secondary care settings. Relational continuity was influenced by the quality of the patient-health care professional relationship, policy of the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK (new General Medical Services contract), walk-in centres, the behaviour of receptionists and the structure and systems of the practice. Team and cross-boundary continuities were influenced by the relationship between team members and by effective communication. Relational continuity contributed to more 'personal care', but the usual health care professional might know less about diabetes. Team continuity was important in providing 'physical care', but patients could be confused by conflicting advice from different professionals. Cross-boundary continuity helps to provide 'expert advice', but is dependent upon effective communication. CONCLUSION GPs and practice nurses dealing with patients with type 2 diabetes identified three types of continuities, each influenced by several factors. Relational continuity deals better with psychosocial care while team continuity promotes better physical care; therefore, imposing one type of continuity may inhibit good diabetic care. Cross-boundary continuity between primary and secondary care is fundamental to contemporary diabetic services and ways should be found to achieve more effective communication.
A second special issue of Standards In Genomic Sciences from the Genomic Standards Consortium

Face-to-face meetings play a central role in the birth and maturation of communities. Intensive workshops filled with presentations, discussions and working group meetings have always been at the heart of the activities of the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC). Such work-driven meetings are a key way in which the GSC fulfils its mission. Similarly, meeting reports provide a key mechanism for preserving and disseminating the consensus built at such meetings as they describe the range of speakers and participants present, topics covered and key outcomes and priorities agreed upon by the community. This issue contains a total of nine meeting reports, all from workshops held between April and December 2010. The first four describe GSC sponsored events. The first overviews the GSC 9 workshop at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in April 2010 [1]. This pivotal meeting in the history of the GSC was the first attempt to organize an open registration meeting (with registration fees) and drew over 90 participants, the largest GSC meeting to date. The second report overviews the GSC 10 workshop held at Argonne National Labs in October of 2010 that focused on the M5 project [2]. The next two reports describe “Metagenomics, Metadata and MetaAnalysis” (M3) workshops held at the Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology [3] and the International Society for Microbial Ecology meetings [4], respectively in 2010. Such satellite meetings allow the GSC to introduce the consensus-products of the GSC to a wider audience and also to collect essential feedback on what the community needs. As of the GSC 8 workshop, all GSC presentations have also been recorded and uploaded to the SCIVEE site. The GSC is planning its next two workshops at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton, UK in April 2011 and at the Max-Plank Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany in September 2011. This issue also contains the first five meeting reports in SIGS contributed by external communities. The first describes a workshop held by the wider genomic annotation community as a step towards organizing a “Critical Assessment of Functional Annotation Experiment” (CAFAE) competition [5]. The next two describe the birth and early efforts to co-ordinate a megasequencing project called the Earth Microbiome Project (EMP) [6,7]. The fourth is the inaugural meeting of the BioSharing community [8]. The fifth describes the second workshop of the “Minimum Information about a Biological or Biomedical” (MIBBI) initiative [9]. The GSC is pleased to be an active member of all of these projects. We sincerely hope this special issue of meeting reports will pave the way for meeting report contributions from a wider range of related communities dedicated to creating and maintaining consensus-driven science.
Effect of isolated and combined strength and endurance training on strength endurance of kho kho players

The purpose of the study is to examine the effect of isolated and combined strength and endurance training on strength endurance of Kho Kho players. To achieve the purpose of this study, sixty men kho kho players studying in various colleges affiliated to Acharya Nagarjuna University, Nagarjuna Nagar, Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, India during the academic year 2014-2015 was selected as subjects. The subjects were selected in the age group of 18 to 22 years and they were randomly assigned into four equal groups of 15 each. Experimental group-I performed strength training, experimental group-II performed endurance training, experimental group-III performed combined strength and endurance training and group-IV was acted as control. The strength endurance was selected as dependent variable. The research design of the study was random group design. The data collected from the experimental and control groups on selected dependent variable was statistically analyzed by paired ‘t’ test to find out the significant differences if any between the pre and post test. Further, percentage of changes was calculated to find out the chances in selected dependent variables due to the impact of experimental treatment. In order to nullify the initial mean differences the data collected from the four groups prior to and post experimentation on selected dependent variables were statistically analyzed to find out the significant difference if any, by applying the analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). Since, four groups were involved, whenever the obtained ‘F’ ratio value in the adjusted post test mean was found to be significant, the Scheffe’s test was applied as post hoc test to determine the paired mean differences, if any. The result of the study reveals that due to the effect of isolated and combined strength and endurance training the strength endurance of the subjects is significantly improved. The result of the study also produced 11.91% of improvement due to strength training, 20.76% of improvement due to endurance training and 25.79% of improvement due to combined training.
How a Disparity in Text Input Speed Affects the Quality of Interaction in Chat

In computer-mediated text-based synchronous communication such as online chatting, a difference in typing speed can have a significant effect on the quality of interaction. In this paper, we present an empirical user study in a modelled multitasking scenario in which the user has two main tasks: (1) finding answers to scripted questions in reference material and (2) asking two experts another set of questions via online chat. We controlled the answering time so that the "fast" expert entered text at 40 words per minute while the "slow" expert typed at half that rate. We report the subjective reflections of the users on chat interaction. Our main findings suggest that multitasking changes user expectations and perceptions of the chat partner.
Regional or National Poverty Lines? The Case of Uganda in the 1990s

Absolute poverty lines are often derived from the cost of obtaining sufficient calories. Where staples vary across regions, such poverty lines may differ depending on whether they are set using national or regional food baskets. Regional poverty lines are open to the objection that they may be contaminated by income effects. This paper explores this issue by focusing on Uganda, a country where widening spatial inequalities in the 1990s have caused concern. Conflicting results from earlier studies have suggested that the spatial pattern of poverty in Uganda is very sensitive to whether national or regional food baskets are used in setting poverty lines. We confirm this suggestion by comparing the spatial profile of poverty in 1993 using national and regional poverty lines. However, since the regions consuming the more expensive staple sources of calories are also those with higher incomes, using simple regional poverty lines is problematic. Instead, a method of setting regional poverty lines is considered that adjusts for income differentials between regions. Even with this adjustment, the use of regional food baskets implies markedly different spatial profile of poverty in Uganda to the use of a national food basket. It is argued that a preference for regional or national poverty lines depends on how one conceives of welfare. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.
Cutaneous granulomatous reaction from mesotherapy.

Mesotherapy is a procedure that involves the injection of substances into the dermis and subcutaneous tissue for medical or esthetic problems. Although mesotherapy is gaining popularity in most countries, there is limited knowledge about its efficacy and safety. The products used in mesotherapy are a combination of herbal and allopathic medicines, and their mechanism of action is unknown or doubtful, although some adverse reactions after mesotherapy injections have been reported in literature. We report a new case of cutaneous granulomatous reaction that occurred after mesotherapy.
Quercetin inhibits collagen‐stimulated platelet activation through inhibition of multiple components of the glycoprotein VI signaling pathway

Summary. Background: The regulation of platelet function by pharmacological agents that modulate platelet signaling has proven a successful approach to the prevention of thrombosis. A variety of molecules present in the diet have been shown to inhibit platelet activation, including the antioxidant quercetin. Objectives: In this report we investigate the molecular mechanisms through which quercetin inhibits collagen‐stimulated platelet aggregation. Methods: The effect of quercetin on platelet aggregation, intracellular calcium release, whole cell tyrosine phosphorylation and intracellular signaling events including tyrosine phosphorylation and kinase activity of proteins involved in the collagen‐stimulated glycoprotein (GP) signaling pathway were investigated. Results: We report that quercetin inhibits collagen‐stimulated whole cell protein tyrosine phosphorylation and intracellular mobilization of calcium, in a concentration‐dependent manner. Quercetin was also found to inhibit various events in signaling generated by the collagen receptor GPVI. This includes collagen‐stimulated tyrosine phosphorylation of the Fc receptor γ‐chain, Syk, LAT and phospholipase Cγ2. Inhibition of phosphorylation of the Fc receptor γ‐chain suggests that quercetin inhibits early signaling events following stimulation of platelets with collagen. The activity of the kinases that phosphorylate the Fc receptor γ‐chain, Fyn and Lyn, as well as the tyrosine kinase Syk and phosphoinositide 3‐kinase was also inhibited by quercetin in a concentration‐dependent manner, both in whole cells and in isolation. Conclusions: The present results provide a molecular basis for the inhibition by quercetin of collagen‐stimulated platelet activation, through inhibition of multiple components of the GPVI signaling pathway, and may begin to explain the proposed health benefits of high quercetin intake.
Leakage from stapled low anastomosis after total mesorectal excision for carcinoma of the rectum

Over 14 years 276 patients with rectal cancer underwent surgery; 219 who underwent low anterior resection of the rectum with total mesorectal excision were studied. There were 24 (11·0 per cent) major anastomotic leaks associated with peritonitis or a pelvic collection and 14 (6·4 per cent) minor leaks that were asymptomatic and detected by contrast enema. All major leaks occurred at an anastomotic height of less than 6cm (P = 0·08). The abdominoperineal excision rate was 9·1 per cent. Major leaks were associated with failure to defunction in 11 of 62 patients and with a defunctioning colostomy in 13 of 157 (P = 0·03). Of the 24 patients with major leaks seven developed peritonitis, one with a defunctioned anastomosis (P = 0·002), and three died (P = 0·02). Use of the sigmoid colon led to major leakage in seven of 32 patients compared with 17 of 187 when the splenic flexure was employed (P = 0·05). There was no increase in the local recurrence rate but only nine patients with major leakage and a temporary stoma have had these closed. Key technical factors incude: a clean dry pelvie cavity, pulsatile colonic blood supply, suction drainage started during closure and mobilization of ample tissue to fill the pelvic space.
Secondary radiation measurements for particle therapy applications: nuclear fragmentation produced by 4He ion beams in a PMMA target

Nowadays there is a growing interest in particle therapy treatments exploiting light ion beams against tumors due to their enhanced relative biological effectiveness and high space selectivity. In particular promising results are obtained by the use of 4He projectiles. Unlike the treatments performed using protons, the beam ions can undergo a fragmentation process when interacting with the atomic nuclei in the patient body. In this paper the results of measurements performed at the Heidelberg Ion-Beam Therapy center are reported. For the first time the absolute fluxes and the energy spectra of the fragments—protons, deuterons, and tritons—produced by 4He ion beams of 102, 125 and 145 MeV u−1 energies on a poly-methyl methacrylate target were evaluated at different angles. The obtained results are particularly relevant in view of the necessary optimization and review of the treatment planning software being developed for clinical use of 4He beams in clinical routine and the relative bench-marking of Monte Carlo algorithm predictions.