Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inhibition of Chlamydia pneumoniae growth in HEp-2 cells pretreated with gamma interferon and tumor necrosis factor alpha

An in vitro culture system was used to study the effects of increasing concentrations of human cytokines on the intracellular replication of Chlamydia pneumoniae. HEp-2 cell monolayers, pretreated for 24 h with 200 U of human recombinant gamma interferon (IFN-gamma) per ml restricted the intracellular replication of C. pneumoniae. Tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha; 25 ng/ml) exhibited a synergistic effect with IFN-gamma by reducing the concentration of IFN-gamma necessary to restrict intracellular growth to 100 U/ml. The addition of 200 micrograms of tryptophan per ml significantly reversed the inhibitory effects of IFN-gamma and TNF-alpha, suggesting involvement of the indoleamine-2,3-dioxygenase pathway in the restriction process.
Prospective study of breast cancer incidence in women with a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation under surveillance with and without magnetic resonance imaging.

PURPOSE The sensitivity of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for breast cancer screening exceeds that of mammography. If MRI screening reduces mortality in women with a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation, it is expected that the incidence of advanced-stage breast cancers should be reduced in women undergoing MRI screening compared with those undergoing conventional screening. PATIENTS AND METHODS We followed 1,275 women with a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation for a mean of 3.2 years. In total, 445 women were enrolled in an MRI screening trial in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and 830 were in the comparison group. The cumulative incidences of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), early-stage, and late-stage breast cancers were estimated at 6 years in the cohorts. RESULTS There were 41 cases of breast cancer in the MRI-screened cohort (9.2%) and 76 cases in the comparison group (9.2%). The cumulative incidence of DCIS or stage I breast cancer at 6 years was 13.8% (95% CI, 9.1% to 18.5%) in the MRI-screened cohort and 7.2% (95% CI, 4.5% to 9.9%) in the comparison group (P = .01). The cumulative incidence of stages II to IV breast cancers was 1.9% (95% CI, 0.2% to 3.7%) in the MRI-screened cohort and 6.6% (95% CI, 3.8% to 9.3%) in the comparison group (P = .02). The adjusted hazard ratio for the development of stages II to IV breast cancer associated with MRI screening was 0.30 (95% CI, 0.12 to 0.72; P = .008). CONCLUSION Annual surveillance with MRI is associated with a significant reduction in the incidence of advanced-stage breast cancer in BRCA1 and BRCA2 carriers.
Immunohistochemical study of thyroid peroxidase in normal, hyperplastic, and neoplastic human thyroid tissues

An immunohistochemical study using two monoclonal antibodies (MoAb 30 and MoAb 47) against thyroid peroxidase (TPO) was performed on surgical specimens of human thyroid carcinoma (n = 65), adenoma (n = 70) and Graves' disease (n = 10). Normal adjacent thyroid tissue was used as positive control. Monoclonal antibody 30 reacted significantly with all adenoma and most carcinoma, whereas MoAb 47 reacted with 66 adenoma but only two carcinoma. Of the four adenomas that did not react with MoAb 47, three were of the fetal type. Both carcinoma reacting with MoAb 47 were of the well‐differentiated follicular type. These findings further confirm the hypothesis that thyroid carcinoma is associated with changes in the quantity and antigenic properties of TPO. Although the alterations in antigenic behavior revealed by MoAb 47 are not 100% specific, they may allow more accurate diagnosis of malignancy in thyroid tumors.
Dementia and use of psychotropic medication in non-'Elderly Mentally Infirm' nursing homes in South East England.

BACKGROUND There is concern about inappropriate use of psychotropic medication in nursing homes in the UK. Older people with advanced dementia, who might need such medication, are supposed to be admitted to specialist 'Elderly Mentally Infirm' homes. OBJECTIVES To estimate the prevalence of dementia and psychotropic medication use in UK non-Elderly Mentally Infirm homes. DESIGN a) Probability sample of non-elderly mentally infirm places in nursing-homes in South-East England then b) two-stage survey of a probability sample of residents in these places SETTING Non-Elderly Mentally Infirm nursing homes for older people in SE England. SUBJECTS Residents registered non-Elderly Mentally Infirm homes. METHODS Assessment using mini mental state examination for cognitive impairment, the Behave-AD for behavioural problems and the Cornell Scale for depression. Mini mental state examination scores were validated against independent psychiatric assessment in a sub-sample of residents. We gathered medication data from prescription sheets. RESULTS Of the 445 residents 74% assessed had probable clinical dementia. Of all the residents 38% had severe cognitive impairment, with a three-fold higher rate of behavioural disturbance than others. Psychotropic medication was strongly associated with cognitive impairment. Antipsychotic drugs were prescribed for only 15% of all residents. CONCLUSIONS If nearly three-quarters of non-Elderly Mentally Infirm nursing home residents have dementia, many with behavioural disturbance, then dementia care is not a 'specialist' area of nursing home care. This study offers no support for the hypothesis that use of antipsychotic drugs in nursing homes is excessive. Questions are raised about policy, staffing and training in nursing homes.
Fragmented Monitoring

Field data is an invaluable source of information for testers and developers because it witnesses how software systems operate in real environments, capturing scenarios and configurations relevant to end-users. Unfortunately, collecting traces might be resource-consuming and can significantly affect the user experience, for instance causing annoying slowdowns. Existing monitoring techniques can control the overhead introduced in the applications by reducing the amount of collected data, for instance by collecting each event only with a given probability. However, collecting fewer events limits the amount of information extracted from the field and may fail in providing a comprehensive picture of the behavior of a program. In this paper we present fragmented monitoring, a monitoring technique that addresses the issue of collecting information from the field without annoying users. The key idea of fragmented monitoring is to reduce the overhead by recording partial traces (fragments) instead of full traces, while annotating the beginning and the end of each fragment with state information. These annotations are exploited offline to derive traces that might be likely observed in the field and that could not be collected directly due to the overhead that would be introduced in a program.
Festival, Date and Limit Line: Predicting Vehicle Accident Rate in Beijing

Thousands of vehicle accidents happen every day in Beijing, leading to huge losses. Government traffic management bureau, hospitals, and insurance companies put massive manpower and material resources to deal with accidents. For more reasonable resource assignment, in this study we focus on the prediction of daily Vehicle Accident Rate (VAR), namely the percentage of vehicles with accidents. Specifically, we analyze how the variation of VAR correlates with the macroscopic features, like Chinese festival, date, tailnumber limit line etc., and develop the prediction model for VAR based on these features. Our analysis is based on the records of two-year accidents on the vehicles, which are insured by a local insurance giant in Beijing. Experiments show that the proposed model can predict the long-term VAR for at least three months in advance, with satisfactory results. Note also that our study is based on the local conditions in Beijing with Chinese characteristics. It not only helps government bureaus and insurance companies to operate more efficiently, but also helps to know many underlying characteristics of this China capital in a macroscopic per-
Morbidity associated with MDMA (ecstasy) abuse: A survey of emergency department admissions

Methods: We conducted a prospective, representative-sample nationwide study on morbidity related to 3,4, methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA; ‘ecstasy’) as determined from admissions to 5 geographically representative emergency departments (EDs) and from data from the poison information center (PIC). MDMArelated ED admissions were analyzed over a 7-month period and the records of all PIC calls were reviewed. Results: There were 52 (age 15—44 years, 32 males) ecstasy-related ED admissions during the study period. Most (68%) admissions presented to the ED at night, 52% on weekends and 44% consumed the drug at clubs and parties. Forty-six percent of the patients took between 1/2 to 3 tablets and 29 patients (56%) had taken ecstasy before. Twenty-two subjects (42%) reported poly-drug use. Fifteen subjects (29%) required hospitalization, six of them (11%) to the intensive care unit. The most common manifestations were restlessness, agitation, disorientation, shaking, high blood pressure, headache and loss of consciousness. More serious complications were hyperthermia, hyponatremia, rhabdomyolysis, brain edema and coma. Conclusion: The image of ecstasy as a safe party drug is spurious. The results of this study confirm that the drug bears real danger of physical harm and of behavioral, psychological and psychiatric disturbances.
Making User-Level VMM for Deterministic Parallelism Nonblocking and Efficient

Many parallel programs are intended to yield deterministic results, but unpredictable thread or process interleavings can lead to subtle bugs and nondeterminism. We proposed a producer-consumer virtual memory–Many parallel programs are intended to yield deterministic results, but unpredictable thread or process interleavings can lead to subtle bugs and nondeterminism. We proposed a producer-consumer virtual memory–SPMC–for efficient system-enforced deterministic parallelism, and prototyped the SPMC model and its software stack entirely in Linux user space, called DLinux. This paper summarizes the implementation policies and limitations in our previous DLinux. To reduce SPMC page fault overhead and suspend/resume overhead which severely degrade the performance of DLinux, we enhance the SPMC model with nonblocking test and direct read and write primitives. Based on the extended SPMC model, we improve the implementation of upper programming abstractions. Experimental results show that relative to the previous version, the new DLinux can improve the performance of NPB workloads up to 2.33X and 1.76X on 8 and 16 processes, respectively. For CG on 8 processes, its runtime relative to MPICH2 decreases from 4.12X to 1.77X. SPMC–for efficient system-enforced deterministic parallelism, and prototyped the SPMC model and its software stack entirely in Linux user space, called DLinux. This paper summarizes the implementation policies and limitations in our previous DLinux. To reduce SPMC page fault overhead and suspend/resume overhead which severely degrade the performance of DLinux, we enhance the SPMC model with nonblocking test and direct read and write primitives. Based on the extended SPMC model, we improve the implementation of upper programming abstractions. Experimental results show that relative to the previous version, the new DLinux can improve the performance of NPB workloads up to 2.33X and 1.76X on 8 and 16 processes, respectively. For CG on 8 processes, its runtime relative to MPICH2 decreases from 4.12X to 1.77X.
Caregiver input in English and Korean: use of nouns and verbs in book-reading and toy-play contexts

This study investigates structural and pragmatic aspects of caregiver input in English and Korean that relate to the early development of nouns and verbs. Twenty mothers in each language were asked to interact with their one-and-a-half-year-old children in two contexts: book-reading and toy-play. Overall, English-speaking mothers use more nouns than verbs, and focus more on objects than on actions. In contrast, Korean-speaking mothers provide a balanced treatment of nouns and verbs, and focus on objects and actions to a similar degree. A significant context effect indicates that whereas English-speaking mothers emphasize nouns in both contexts, Korean-speaking mothers do so only in the Books context. In the Toys context, they provide more verbs and focus more on actions. These data suggest that systematic comparisons of caregiver input within and across different contexts provide a richer and more accurate account of the variability that can occur across languages and cultures.
Targeting Antigen in Mature Dendritic Cells for Simultaneous Stimulation of CD4+ and CD8+ T Cells1

Due to their potent immunostimulatory capacity, dendritic cells (DC) have become the centerpiece of many vaccine regimens. Immature DC (DCimm) capture, process, and present Ags to CD4+ lymphocytes, which reciprocally activate DCimm through CD40, and the resulting mature DC (DCmat) loose phagocytic capacity, but acquire the ability to efficiently stimulate CD8+ lymphocytes. Recombinant vaccinia viruses (rVV) provide a rapid, easy, and efficient method to introduce Ags into DC, but we observed that rVV infection of DCimm results in blockade of DC maturation in response to all activation signals, including CD40L, monocyte-conditioned medium, LPS, TNF-α, and poly(I:C), and failure to induce a CD8+ response. By contrast, DCmat can be infected with rVV and induce a CD8+ response, but, having lost phagocytic activity, fail to process the Ag via the exogenous class II pathway. To overcome these limitations, we used the CMV protein pp65 as a model Ag and designed a gene containing the lysosomal-associated membrane protein 1 targeting sequence (Sig-pp65-LAMP1) to target pp65 to the class II compartment. DCmat infected with rVV-Sig-pp65-LAMP1 induced proliferation of pp65-specific CD4+ clones and efficiently induced a pp65-specific CD4+ response, suggesting that after DC maturation the intracellular processing machinery for class II remains intact for at least 16 h. Moreover, infection of DCmat with rVV-Sig-pp65-LAMP1 resulted in at least equivalent presentation to CD8+ cells as infection with rVV-pp65. These results demonstrate that despite rVV interference with DCimm maturation, a single targeting vector can deliver Ags to DCmat for the effective simultaneous stimulation of both CD4+ and CD8+ cells.
Perfiles de maestros en formación ante la enseñanza de las ciencias por indagación

Este articulo presenta la validacion de un cuestionario elaborado para analizar las creencias de los maestros en formacion sobre lo que necesitan saber para ensenar ciencias. El instrumento fue cumplimentado por 255 estudiantes del Grado en Magisterio de Educacion Primaria. La realizacion de un analisis factorial exploratorio y dos confirmatorios permitio la elaboracion de una escala mixta de cuatro factores con buenas propiedades. A partir de los resultados obtenidos, con la realizacion de un analisis de conglomerados se establecieron tres perfiles de maestros en formacion ante la ensenanza de las ciencias por indagacion.
Penetrance of monogenetic cardiac conduction diseases. A matter of conduction reserve?

Loss-of-function mutations in the SCN5a gene coding for the human Nav1.5 cardiac sodium channel, which lead to decreased peak sodium current, are associated with cardiac conduction defects (CCD), progressive cardiac conduction disease [1] or Brugada syndrome [2]. However, despite the strong linkage of sodium channel mutations to the disease in probands, the same mutation is often found in non-affected family members. The study by Tan and coworkers in this issue describes a SCN5a mutation leading to a C-terminal truncation (L1821fs/10) that was found in a patient with sick sinus syndrome, CCD and ventricular tachycardia [3]. This particular mutation was shown to lead to an almost complete loss of channel function and thus to haploinsufficiency of the peak sodium current. Interestingly, the samemutation was found in 6 family members of which 2 had very mild symptoms and 4 were completely asymptomatic. In genetic terms, this mutation shows incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity. Penetrance describes the extent to which the properties controlled by a gene, its phenotype,will be expressed. In case of high penetrance, the mutation or gene always leads to a certain phenotype. Conversely, if penetrance is low or incomplete, the mutation only sporadically leads to a detectable phenotype.
On guaranteed smooth scheduling for input-queued switches

Input-queued switches are used extensively in the design of high-speed routers. As switch speeds and sizes increase, the design of the switch scheduler becomes a primary challenge, because the time interval for the matching computations needed for determining switch configurations becomes very small. Possible alternatives in scheduler design include increasing the scheduling interval by using envelopes, and using a frame-based scheduler that guarantees fixed rates between input-output pairs. However, both these alternatives have significant jitter drawbacks: the jitter increases with the envelope size in the first alternative, and previously-known methods do not guarantee tight jitter bounds in the second. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach to switch scheduling. Traffic with tight jitter constraints is first scheduled using a frame-based scheduler that achieves low jitter bounds. Jitter-insensitive traffic is later scheduled using an envelope-based scheduler. The main contribution of this paper is a scheduler design for generating low-jitter schedules. The scheduler uses a rate matrix decomposition designed for low jitter and different from the minimum-bandwidth Birkhoff-Von Neumann (BV) decomposition. In addition to generating low-jitter schedules, this decomposition yields fewer switch configuration matrices (O(n)) than the BV decomposition (O(n2)), and so uses far less high-speed switch memory. We develop an efficient algorithm for decomposing the rate matrix and for scheduling the permutation matrices. We prove that our low-jitter algorithm has an O(log n) factor bound on its bandwidth consumption in comparison to the minimum-bandwidth BV decomposition. Experimentally, we find that the bandwidth increase in practice is much lower than the theoretical bound. We also prove several related perform
Interleukin 6 Signaling Regulates Promyelocytic Leukemia Protein Gene Expression in Human Normal and Cancer Cells*

Background: PML is a tumor suppressor involved in response to viral and genotoxic stress. Results: Depletion of IL6 siRNA-mediated knockdown of STAT3 or NEMO suppresses PML gene expression. Conclusion: PML is regulated via IL-6-dependent JAK-STAT3 and PI3K-NFκB signaling pathways in an autocrine/paracrine manner. Significance: Paracrine regulation of PML gene expression is a part of tissue adaptation to local stress. Tumor suppressor PML is induced under viral and genotoxic stresses by interferons and JAK-STAT signaling. However, the mechanism responsible for its cell type-specific regulation under non-stimulated conditions is poorly understood. To analyze the variation of PML expression, we utilized three human cell types, BJ fibroblasts and HeLa and U2OS cell lines, each with a distinct PML expression pattern. Analysis of JAK-STAT signaling in the three cell lines revealed differences in levels of activated STAT3 but not STAT1 correlating with PML mRNA and protein levels. RNAi-mediated knockdown of STAT3 decreased PML expression; both STAT3 level/activity and PML expression relied on IL6 secreted into culture media. We mapped the IL6-responsive sequence to an ISRE(−595/−628) element of the PML promoter. The PI3K/Akt/NFκB branch of IL6 signaling showed also cell-type dependence, being highest in BJ, intermediate in HeLa, and lowest in U2OS cells and correlated with IL6 secretion. RNAi-mediated knockdown of NEMO (NF-κ-B essential modulator), a key component of NFκB activation, suppressed NFκB targets LMP2 and IRF1 together with STAT3 and PML. Combined knockdown of STAT3 and NEMO did not further promote PML suppression, and it can be bypassed by exogenous IL6, indicating the NF-κB pathway acts upstream of JAK-STAT3 through induction of IL6. Our results indicate that the cell type-specific activity of IL6 signaling pathways governs PML expression under unperturbed growth conditions. As IL6 is induced in response to various viral and genotoxic stresses, this cytokine may regulate autocrine/paracrine induction of PML under these pathophysiological states as part of tissue adaptation to local stress.
Rice Milling Quality, Grain Dimensions, and Starch Branching as Affected by High Night Temperatures

ABSTRACT Important rice grain quality characteristics such as percentage of chalky rice kernels are affected by both high and low night temperatures and by different day and day/night temperature combinations. High nighttime temperatures have also been suspected of reducing rice milling quality including head rice yields. Experiments to confirm or refute this have not been reported. A controlled climate experiment was conducted. Conditions in the chambers were identical except between 2400 and 0500 hours (midnight and 5 am). For those times, two temperature treatments were imposed: 1) 18°C (low temperature treatment) and 2) 24°C (high temperature treatment). Two cultivars were tested: LaGrue and Cypress. The high temperature treatment reduced head rice yields compared with the low temperature treatment. Grain widths were reduced for the high temperature treatment compared with the low temperature treatment. There was no effect of temperature on grain length or thickness. Amylopectin chain lengths 13–24 we.
E2F4 Modulates Differentiation and Gene Expression in Hematopoietic Progenitor Cells during Commitment to the Lymphoid Lineage1

The E2F4 protein is involved in gene repression and cell cycle exit, and also has poorly understood effects in differentiation. We analyzed the impact of E2F4 deficiency on early steps in mouse hematopoietic development, and found defects in early hematopoietic progenitor cells that were propagated through common lymphoid precursors to the B and T lineages. In contrast, the defects in erythromyeloid precursor cells were self-correcting over time. This suggests that E2F4 is important in early stages of commitment to the lymphoid lineage. The E2F4-deficient progenitor cells showed reduced expression of several key lymphoid-lineage genes, and overexpression of two erythromyeloid lineage genes. However, we did not detect effects on cell proliferation. These findings emphasize the significance of E2F4 in controlling gene expression and cell fate.
Noise Reduction and Edge Enhancement Based on Band-Pass Epsilon-filter

Band-pass bilateral filter is an improved bilateral filter which does not have low-pass characteristics but has band-pass characteristics to enhance image contrast around edges. However, the computation time is relatively large due to Gaussian calculation in all pixels. To reduce the calculation cost, we look to a nonlinear filter called epsilon-filter and propose an advanced epsilon-filter which does not have low-pass charactersitics but has band-pass characteristics to enhance the image contrast around edge, namely band-pass epsilon-filter. Due to its simple design, the calculation cost is relatively small the same as epsilon-filter. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, we also report the results of some comparative experiments concerning the filter characteristics and computational cost.