Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Increase of resting muscle stiffness, a less considered component of age-related skeletal muscle impairment

Elderly people perform more slowly movements of everyday life as rising from a chair, walking, and climbing stairs. This is in the first place due to the loss of muscle contractile force which is even more pronounced than the loss of muscle mass. In addition, a secondary, but not negligible, component is the rigidity or increased stiffness which requires greater effort to produce the same movement and limits the range of motion of the joints. In this short review, we discuss the possible determinants of the limitations of joint mobility in healthy elderly, starting with the age-dependent alterations of the articular structure and focusing on the increased stiffness of the skeletal muscles. Thereafter, the possible mechanisms of the increased stiffness of the muscle-tendon complex are considered, among them changes in the muscle fibers, alterations of the connective tissue components, i.e., extracellular matrix (ECM), aponeurosis, tendon and fascia, and remodeling of the neural pattern of muscle activation that increases antagonist co-activation.
Assessing Complexity Among Patients With Tuberculosis in California, 1993–2016

Abstract Background Although the number of patients with active tuberculosis (TB) has decreased in the last 25 years, anecdotal reports suggest that the complexity of these patients has increased. However, this complexity and its components have never been quantified or defined. We therefore aimed to describe the complexity of patients with active TB in California during 1993–2016. Methods We analyzed data on patient comorbidities, clinical features, and demographics from the California Department of Public Health TB Registry. All adult patients who were alive at the time of TB diagnosis in California during 1993–2016 were included in the analyses. Factors deemed by an expert panel to increase complexity (ie, increased resources or expertise requirement for successful management) were analyzed and included the following: age >75 years, HIV infection, multidrug resistance (MDR), and extrapulmonary TB disease. Second, using additional information on other comorbidities available starting in 2010, we performed exploratory factor analysis on 25 variables in order to define the dimensions of complexity. Results Among the 67 512 patients analyzed, the proportion of patients with extrapulmonary disease, age >75 years, or MDR-TB each increased over the study period (P < .001), while the proportion of patients with HIV decreased. Furthermore, the proportion of patients with at least 1 factor of those increased, rising from 38.8% to 45.3% (P < .001) from 1993 to 2016. Dimensions of complexity identified in the exploratory factor analysis included the following: race/immigration, social features, elderly/institutionalized, advanced TB, comorbidity, and drug resistance risk. Conclusions In this first description of complexity in the setting of TB, we found that the complexity of patients with active TB has risen over the last 25 years in California. These findings suggest that despite the overall decline in active TB cases, effective management of more complex patients may require additional attention and resource investment.
EVALUATION OF CHEMICAL CHARACTERISTICS, RUMEN FERMENTATION AND DIGESTIBILITY OF VICIA SATIVA, LATHYRUS SATIVUS AND VICIA ERVILIA GRAIN BY IN VITRO METHODS

This experiment was carried out to determine and compare the chemical composition, digestibility and gas production of grain of Vicia sativa, Lathyrus sativus and Vicia ervilia cultivated in Ardabil province. Digestibility was estimated using in vitro methods. The gas production was recorded after 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24, 48, 72 and 96 h of incubation. Crude protein content of legume grains were in range of 23.89-29.34%/DM, NDF (31.12-36.63%/DM) and digestible dry matter (71.86-84.93%). Among the tested grains, the grain of Vicia ervilia had highest fermentation parameters, potential gas production and rate of gas production, Short Chain Fatty Acids and metabolizable energy that estimated as 80 mL in 200 mg sample, 0.103 mL h-1, 1.506 mmol, and 11.72 MJ/kg respectively and Vicia sativa grain had the lowest potential gas production (72.18 mL in 200 mg sample), rate of gas production (0.083 mL h-1), Short Chain Fatty Acid (1.313 mmol), and metabolizable energy (10.35 MJ/kg) content. The grain of Vicia ervilia, had higher nutritive value than other tested feeds due to its in vitro fermentation characteristics as well as chemical composition. It was concluded different test feeds had different chemical composition, in vitro digestibility, gas production and metabolizable energy which significantly affected the degradation parameters.
Clinical Candida albicans Vaginal Isolates and a Laboratory Strain Show Divergent Behaviors during Macrophage Interactions

Vulvovaginal candidiasis is one of the most common fungal infections in humans with Candida albicans as the major causative agent. This study is the first to compare clinical vaginal isolates of defined patient groups in their interaction with macrophages, highlighting the vastly different outcomes in comparison to a laboratory strain using commonly applied virulence-determining assays. ABSTRACT Typically, established lab strains are widely used to study host-pathogen interactions. However, to better reflect the infection process, the experimental use of clinical isolates has come more into focus. Here, we analyzed the interaction of multiple vaginal isolates of the opportunistic fungal pathogen Candida albicans, the most common cause of vulvovaginal candidiasis in women, with key players of the host immune system: macrophages. We tested several strains isolated from asymptomatic or symptomatic women with acute and recurrent infections. While all clinical strains showed a response similar to the commonly used lab strain SC5314 in various in vitro assays, they displayed remarkable differences during interaction with macrophages. This coincided with significantly reduced β-glucan exposure on the cell surface, which appeared to be a shared property among the tested vaginal strains for yeast extract/peptone/dextrose-grown cells, which is partly lost when the isolates faced vaginal niche-like nutrient conditions. However, macrophage damage, survival of phagocytosis, and filamentation capacities were highly strain-specific. These results highlight the high heterogeneity of C. albicans strains in host-pathogen interactions, which have to be taken into account to bridge the gap between laboratory-gained data and disease-related outcomes in an actual patient. IMPORTANCE Vulvovaginal candidiasis is one of the most common fungal infections in humans with Candida albicans as the major causative agent. This study is the first to compare clinical vaginal isolates of defined patient groups in their interaction with macrophages, highlighting the vastly different outcomes in comparison to a laboratory strain using commonly applied virulence-determining assays.
Effect of methotrexate treatment on the expression of epidermal-fatty acid-binding protein (E-FABP) and apolipoproteins in patients with psoriasis

Introduction Epidermal-fatty acid-binding protein (E-FABP) is a marker of transiently amplifying cells which are formed from stem cells in epidermis. Their role is an uptake of fatty acids and metabolism. Psoriatic keratinocytes overexpress E-FABPs, which leads to acanthosis and may explain the lipid’s disturbances in psoriasis. Aim Assessment of FABP and apolipoprotein expression in patients treated with methotrexate (MTX). Material and methods FABP expression in the lesional and perilesional psoriatic skin from 11 male patients compared to 5 healthy skin samples were evaluated by immunohistochemistry. FABP, apolipoprotein A1 (ApoA1) and B (ApoB) serum levels were assessed by ELISA. These parameters were evaluated before and after treatment with subcutaneous MTX (15 mg/wk for 12 weeks). Results Expression of E-FABP was lower in the control group than in the lesional and perilesional psoriatic skin, before and after treatment. After treatment the expression decreased in the lesional and perilesional skin. Serum E-FABP was higher in the control group (482.855 ±240.550 pg/ml) compared to patients, but not statistically significantly. After MTX treatment, a statistically significant reduction was observed in psoriatic patients. ApoA1 levels did not differ in the control and patients groups, both before and after treatment. In contrast, ApoB levels did not differ statistically between the control group (1447.126 ±311.11 ng/ml) and patients before treatment, while they were the lowest after treatment (1081.67 ±117.83 ng/ml vs. 808.306 ±103.72 ng/ml; p < 0.01). Conclusions Our study confirms the beneficial effect of MTX, not only as an anti-proliferative effect, but also reducing the cardiovascular risk by decreasing atherogenic ApoB.
Antennal Morphology of Diabrotica virgifera Adults (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae)

Scanning electron micrographs and serial longitudinal and cross sections of the western corn rootworm, Diabrotica virgifera LeConte , antennae revealed that the antennal structure of males and females was similar. However, the longer ♂ antennae have more sensilla and possess 6 types of sensilla on the terminal antennal segment not found on the terminal segment of ♀ antennae; the ultimate antennal segment of the female possesses 4 sensillar types not found on the comparable antennal segment of the male.
Tropical Rain Forests of the Far East.

Tropical rain forests of the Far East forest structure animals in the forest the forest environment - climate seasonal cycles in plants and animals seed dispersal to seedling establishment growth of seedlings into trees the ecological basis of rain-forest silviculture growth rates, forest yields and biomass inorganic nutrients and their cycling the forest environment - soils forest formations 1 - the dry-land rain forests forest formations 2 - the wet-land rain forests monsoon forest formations animal life and forest formations conifers in the forest variation within the tropical lowland evergreen rain forests and its causes mountain rain forests man and the tropical rain forest secondary forest and shifting cultivation looking ahead. Appendix: select list of publications containing descriptions of tropical rain forest in the countries of the Far East. Bibliography, index of plant names, general index.
Artificical Infection of Yellowtail with a Gastral Administration of Cultured Pasteurella piscicida Cells

It was found that yellowtails were readily infected with Pasteurella piscicida through the digestive tracts under an experimental condition. Healthy jevenile cultured yellowtails were used for experimentation. Newly isolated P.piscicida culture was stocked in a liquid nitrogen. container and was subcultivated just befboe use. A given quantity of the cells was put in a gelatin capsule together with some diets. The capsules were then administered directly to the stomack of the fish by means of a vinyle tube and piston rod. Groups of two or three fish were held in each 280 liter concrete tank with recircling and filtrating water system.All of the experimental fish were infected with the bacteria and died by the third to seventh day after administering the cells. Formation of white spots in the internal organs was observed in some victimes (Table 1 and 2). Recovery of P. piscicida from the blood of infected fish was investigated. Blood samples were serially taken from the fish by means of a syringe, introduced in Cuvier's tube, and living bacteria in the samples were counted by the plate method(Table 3). Recovery of P. piscicida from the digestive tracts of infected fish also was examined. The data obtained indicated that orally introduced bacteria were maintained in the intestine for long time(Table 4). Challenge of vaccinated yellowtail with a gastral administration of P. piscicida was tried. Experimental fish used were orally vaccinated with formalin-killed bacterin prepared from virulent P.piscicida broth-culture.The bacterin was given in a dose of 50 mg per fish per day for 21 days.The result suggested that oral vaccination with the killed bacterin was ineffective in the control of Pasteurelosis (Table 5).
Fast and flexible multilegged locomotion using learned centroidal dynamics

We present a flexible and efficient approach for generating multilegged locomotion. Our model-predictive control (MPC) system efficiently generates terrain-adaptive motions, as computed using a three-level planning approach. This leverages two commonly-used simplified dynamics models, an inverted pendulum on a cart model (IPC) and a centroidal dynamics model (CDM). Taken together, these ensure efficient computation and physical fidelity of the resulting motion. The final full-body motion is generated using a novel momentum-mapped inverse kinematics solver and is responsive to external pushes by using CDM forward dynamics. For additional efficiency and robustness, we then learn a predictive model that then replaces two of the intermediate steps. We demonstrate the rich capabilities of the method by applying it to monopeds, bipeds, and quadrupeds, and showing that it can generate a very broad range of motions at interactive rates, including banked variable-terrain walking and running, hurdles, jumps, leaps, stepping stones, monkey bars, implicit quadruped gait transitions, moon gravity, push-responses, and more.
A Modified Pre-plating Method for High-Yield and High-Purity Muscle Stem Cell Isolation From Human/Mouse Skeletal Muscle Tissues

Primary culture of skeletal muscle stem cells (MuSCs) is indispensable to study the dynamics of muscle regeneration and homeostasis. Here we describe the modified pre-plating method for isolating MuSCs in culture with greatly improved purity, yield, and procedure time. The protocol is based on the distinct adhesion characteristics of MuSCs. We reduced the procedure time to 2.5 days to obtain highly purified MuSCs through a newly employed re-plating step, which repeats incubation and cell-suspension. The re-plating step efficiently traps remaining fibroblastic cells, but not MuSCs, on a collagen-coated dish. Additionally, we confirmed that MuSCs can be isolated from small amounts of human/mouse muscle tissues, enabling us to perform experiments with amount-limited specimens. Thus, our method can be performed with basic laboratory equipment suitable for most facilities and without sophisticated MuSC handling techniques.
Use of an Exposome Approach to Understand the Effects of Exposures From the Natural, Built, and Social Environments on Cardio-Vascular Disease Onset, Progression, and Outcomes

Obesity, diabetes, and hypertension have increased by epidemic proportions in recent years among African Americans in comparison to Whites resulting in significant adverse cardiovascular disease (CVD) disparities. Today, African Americans are 30% more likely to die of heart disease than Whites and twice as likely to have a stroke. The causes of these disparities are not yet well-understood. Improved methods for identifying underlying risk factors is a critical first step toward reducing Black:White CVD disparities. This article will focus on environmental exposures in the external environment and how they can lead to changes at the cellular, molecular, and organ level to increase the personal risk for CVD and lead to population level CVD racial disparities. The external environment is defined in three broad domains: natural (air, water, land), built (places you live, work, and play) and social (social, demographic, economic, and political). We will describe how environmental exposures in the natural, built, and social environments “get under the skin” to affect gene expression though epigenetic, pan-omics, and related mechanisms that lead to increased risk for adverse CVD health outcomes and population level disparities. We also will examine the important role of metabolomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, genomics, and epigenomics in understanding how exposures in the natural, built, and social environments lead to CVD disparities with implications for clinical, public health, and policy interventions. In this review, we apply an exposome approach to Black:White CVD racial disparities. The exposome is a measure of all the exposures of an individual across the life course and the relationship of those exposures to health effects. The exposome represents the totality of exogenous (external) and endogenous (internal) exposures from conception onwards, simultaneously distinguishing, characterizing, and quantifying etiologic, mediating, moderating, and co-occurring risk and protective factors and their relationship to disease. Specifically, it assesses the biological mechanisms and underlying pathways through which chemical and non-chemical environmental exposures are associated with CVD onset, progression and outcomes. The exposome is a promising approach for understanding the complex relationships among environment, behavior, biology, genetics, and disease phenotypes that underlie population level, Black: White CVD disparities.
Mobile Internet Technologies, Ecological Momentary Assessment, and Intervention—Poison and Remedy for New Online Problematic Behaviors in ICD-11

1 Institute of Psychology, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University, Warsaw, Poland, 2 Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, 3 Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, 4 Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, Institute for Neural Computation, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA, United States, 5 Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
High Molecular Weight ACTH-Precursor Presence in a Metastatic Pancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumor Causing Severe Ectopic Cushing's Syndrome: A Case Report

Ectopic ACTH-secretion causing Cushing's syndrome is unusual and its diagnosis is frequently challenging. The presence of high-molecular-weight precursors throughout pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) translation by these tumors is often not reported. We present the case of a 49-year-old woman with a 3-month history of proximal muscular weakness, skin pigmentation, and weight loss. Upon initial evaluation, she had a full moon face, hirsutism, and a buffalo hump. Laboratory workup showed hyperglycemia, hypokalemia and metabolic alkalosis. ACTH, plasma cortisol, and urinary free cortisol levels were quite elevated. Serum cortisol levels were not suppressed on dexamethasone suppression testing. An octreo-SPECT scan showed enhanced nucleotide uptake in the liver and pancreas. Transendoscopic ultrasound-guided biopsy confirmed the diagnosis of a pancreatic ACTH-secreting neuroendocrine tumor (NET). Surgical excision of both pancreatic and liver lesions was carried out. Western blot analysis of the tumor and metastases revealed the presence of a high-molecular-weight precursor possibly POMC (at 30 kDa) but not ACTH (normally 4.5 kDa). ACTH-precursor secretion is more frequent in ectopic ACTH-secreting tumors compared with other causes of Cushing's syndrome. Hence, the measurement of such ACTH precursors warrants further evaluation, especially in the context of ACTH-dependent hypercortisolism.
Wavelet combined innovative trend analysis for precipitation data in the Euphrates-Tigris basin, Turkey

ABSTRACT In this study, annual and seasonal precipitation trend analysis was performed in the Euphrates-Tigris basin, Turkey, using innovative trend analysis (ITA) and discrete wavelet transformation. In this context, it was seen that there is a downward trend in winter, spring and annual precipitation, whereas precipitation has an increasing tendency in summer and autumn seasons, in the greater part of the basin. When annual and seasonal data were decomposed into wavelet components, the most significant trends were observed for high-periodic wavelet components, such as D3 (8-year), D4 (16-year) and D5 (32-year), where these components represent the periods of the precipitation data. Then, the relationship between North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and trend in precipitation was investigated. In this regard, it was found that there could be a significant relationship between the NAO and precipitation trends of the Euphrates-Tigris basin, especially in winter, based on the wavelet ITA.
Fast and scalable turbulent flow simulation with two-way coupling

Despite their cinematic appeal, turbulent flows involving fluid-solid coupling remain a computational challenge in animation. At the root of this current limitation is the numerical dispersion from which most accurate Navier-Stokes solvers suffer: proper coupling between fluid and solid often generates artificial dispersion in the form of local, parasitic trains of velocity oscillations, eventually leading to numerical instability. While successive improvements over the years have led to conservative and detail-preserving fluid integrators, the dispersive nature of these solvers is rarely discussed despite its dramatic impact on fluid-structure interaction. In this paper, we introduce a novel low-dissipation and low-dispersion fluid solver that can simulate two-way coupling in an efficient and scalable manner, even for turbulent flows. In sharp contrast with most current CG approaches, we construct our solver from a kinetic formulation of the flow derived from statistical mechanics. Unlike existing lattice Boltzmann solvers, our approach leverages high-order moment relaxations as a key to controlling both dissipation and dispersion of the resulting scheme. Moreover, we combine our new fluid solver with the immersed boundary method to easily handle fluid-solid coupling through time adaptive simulations. Our kinetic solver is highly parallelizable by nature, making it ideally suited for implementation on single- or multi-GPU computing platforms. Extensive comparisons with existing solvers on synthetic tests and real-life experiments are used to highlight the multiple advantages of our work over traditional and more recent approaches, in terms of accuracy, scalability, and efficiency.
A practical octree liquid simulator with adaptive surface resolution

We propose a new adaptive liquid simulation framework that achieves highly detailed behavior with reduced implementation complexity. Prior work has shown that spatially adaptive grids are efficient for simulating large-scale liquid scenarios, but in order to enable adaptivity along the liquid surface these methods require either expensive boundary-conforming (re-)meshing or elaborate treatments for second order accurate interface conditions. This complexity greatly increases the difficulty of implementation and maintainability, potentially making it infeasible for practitioners. We therefore present new algorithms for adaptive simulation that are comparatively easy to implement yet efficiently yield high quality results. First, we develop a novel staggered octree Poisson discretization for free surfaces that is second order in pressure and gives smooth surface motions even across octree T-junctions, without a power/Voronoi diagram construction. We augment this discretization with an adaptivity-compatible surface tension force that likewise supports T-junctions. Second, we propose a moving least squares strategy for level set and velocity interpolation that requires minimal knowledge of the local tree structure while blending near-seamlessly with standard trilinear interpolation in uniform regions. Finally, to maximally exploit the flexibility of our new surface-adaptive solver, we propose several novel extensions to sizing function design that enhance its effectiveness and flexibility. We perform a range of rigorous numerical experiments to evaluate the reliability and limitations of our method, as well as demonstrating it on several complex high-resolution liquid animation scenarios.