Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Understanding the Pathophysiological Actions of Tau Oligomers: A Critical Review of Current Electrophysiological Approaches

Tau is a predominantly neuronal protein that is normally bound to microtubules, where it acts to modulate neuronal and axonal stability. In humans, pathological forms of tau are implicated in a range of diseases that are collectively known as tauopathies. Kinases and phosphatases are responsible for maintaining the correct balance of tau phosphorylation to enable axons to be both stable and labile enough to function properly. In the early stages of tauopathies, this balance is interrupted leading to dissociation of tau from microtubules. This leaves microtubules prone to damage and phosphorylated tau prone to aggregation. Initially, phosphorylated tau forms oligomers, then fibrils, and ultimately neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs). It is widely accepted that the initial soluble oligomeric forms of tau are probably the most pathologically relevant species but there is relatively little quantitative information to explain exactly what their toxic effects are at the individual neuron level. Electrophysiology provides a valuable tool to help uncover the mechanisms of action of tau oligomers on synaptic transmission within single neurons. Understanding the concentration-, time-, and neuronal compartment-dependent actions of soluble tau oligomers on neuronal and synaptic properties are essential to understanding how best to counteract its effects and to develop effective treatment strategies. Here, we briefly discuss the standard approaches used to elucidate these actions, focusing on the advantages and shortcomings of the experimental procedures. Subsequently, we will describe a new approach that addresses specific challenges with the current methods, thus allowing real-time toxicity evaluation at the single-neuron level.
Characterising the Influence of Genetics on Breast Muscle Myopathies in Broiler Chickens

This report provides the first estimates of the genetic basis of all key breast muscle myopathies (BMM) in broiler chickens [Deep pectoral myopathy, wooden breast, white striping and spaghetti breast] and their relationship with body weight and breast yield. Data from a pure bred high yielding commercial broiler line were analysed to estimate the genetic parameters using a multivariate animal model with the appropriate fixed effects and permanent environmental effect of the dam. Heritabilities of the BMM ranged from 0.04 to 0.25 and the genetic correlation of the BMM with body weight and breast yield ranged from -0.06 to 0.41. Here we highlight that the genetic variance of BMM accounts for a low proportion of the phenotypic variance and the BMM have a low genetic relationship with performance traits. The large contribution of residual variance to the phenotypic variance for the BBM was >71.5% which indicates the importance of the non-genetic effects on BMM. The data presented also show that the moderate to low genetic influence for the development of BMM can be used, through balanced selection, to reduce the myopathy incidence in the long term. The impact of genetic selection against BMM was tested empirically by comparing the incidence of WB and % breast yield of a commercial broiler with a high generation (HG) broiler. The HG broiler used represents 2 years of genetic improvement compared to the commercial broiler; the HG broiler had an 18.4% relative decrease in WB and a 1.02% relative increase in breast yield compared to the commercial broiler. This paper describes the relationship between the genetic and non-genetic factors influencing BMM highlighting the importance of understanding the non-genetic effects on myopathy incidence. It also shows that the genetic component of BMM can be reduced whilst at the same time improving breast yield as part of balanced breeding goals.
Targeting acid ceramidase inhibits YAP/TAZ signaling to reduce fibrosis in mice

Acid ceramidase inhibition promotes YAP/TAZ degradation to inactivate fibroblasts, decrease matrix stiffness, and reduce fibrosis in mice. Making a case for aCDase inhibition Activation of YAP/TAZ mechanosignaling promotes organ fibrosis. Here, Alsamman et al. investigated acid ceramidase (aCDase) inhibition as a way to reduce liver fibrosis. Ceramide promoted YAP/TAZ degradation to inactivate human hepatic stellate cells (HSCs), and liver fibrosis was reduced in mice deficient in aCDase in HSCs. A ceramide analog inhibited aCDase, promoted YAP degradation, and blocked the progression of liver fibrosis in mice and in rodent and human precision liver slice explants. This study demonstrates how aCDase inhibition alters mechanosignaling in fibrosis and identifies a potential therapeutic target. Hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) drive hepatic fibrosis. Therapies that inactivate HSCs have clinical potential as antifibrotic agents. We previously identified acid ceramidase (aCDase) as an antifibrotic target. We showed that tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs) reduce hepatic fibrosis by inhibiting aCDase and increasing the bioactive sphingolipid ceramide. We now demonstrate that targeting aCDase inhibits YAP/TAZ activity by potentiating its phosphorylation-mediated proteasomal degradation via the ubiquitin ligase adaptor protein β-TrCP. In mouse models of fibrosis, pharmacologic inhibition of aCDase or genetic knockout of aCDase in HSCs reduces fibrosis, stromal stiffness, and YAP/TAZ activity. In patients with advanced fibrosis, aCDase expression in HSCs is increased. Consistently, a signature of the genes most down-regulated by ceramide identifies patients with advanced fibrosis who could benefit from aCDase targeting. The findings implicate ceramide as a critical regulator of YAP/TAZ signaling and HSC activation and highlight aCDase as a therapeutic target for the treatment of fibrosis.
A Dyadic Study on Perceived Stress and Couple Adjustment During Pregnancy: The Mediating Role of Depressive Symptoms

Stress is associated with dyadic adjustment during transition to parenthood, but little is known about mechanisms underlying this link, particularly during prenatal period. This dyadic study explored the mediating role of depressive symptoms in the relationship between perceived stress and dyadic adjustment in expectant couples. One hundred and fourteen couples at the third trimester of pregnancy completed self-reports of perceived stress, depression, and dyadic adjustment. Results indicated that both parents’ perceived stress was associated with their own lower relationship satisfaction directly and indirectly, through their own higher depressive symptoms. Mothers’ perceived stress was also linked to higher fathers’ depressive symptoms, and thus also to lower fathers’ relationship satisfaction. Both parents’ perceived stress was only directly associated with their own dyadic consensus, and their own and their partners’ affectional expression. Findings suggest that interventions aimed at reducing expectant parents’ perceived stress could protect against depressive symptoms and promote the couple’s adjustment during pregnancy.
Investigating Passive Muscle Mechanics With Biaxial Stretch

Introduction The passive stiffness of skeletal muscle can drastically affect muscle function in vivo, such as the case for fibrotic tissue or patients with cerebral palsy. The two constituents of skeletal muscle that dominate passive stiffness are the intracellular protein titin and the collagenous extracellular matrix (ECM). However, efforts to correlate stiffness and measurements of specific muscle constituents have been mixed, and thus the complete mechanisms for changes to muscle stiffness remain unknown. We hypothesize that biaxial stretch can provide an improved approach to evaluating passive muscle stiffness. Methods We performed planar biaxial materials testing of passively stretched skeletal muscle and identified three previously published datasets of uniaxial materials testing. We developed and employed a constitutive model of passive skeletal muscle that includes aligned muscle fibers and dispersed ECM collagen fibers with a bimodal von Mises distribution. Parametric modeling studies and fits to experimental data (both biaxial and previously published) were completed. Results Biaxial data exhibited differences in time dependent behavior based on orientation (p < 0.0001), suggesting different mechanisms supporting load in the direction of muscle fibers (longitudinal) and in the perpendicular (transverse) directions. Model parametric studies and fits to experimental data exhibited the robustness of the model (<20% error) and how differences in tissue stiffness may not be observed in uniaxial longitudinal stretch, but are apparent in biaxial stretch. Conclusion This work presents novel materials testing data of passively stretched skeletal muscle and use of constitutive modeling and finite element analysis to explore the interaction between stiffness, constituent variability, and applied deformation in passive skeletal muscle. The results highlight the importance of biaxial stretch in evaluating muscle stiffness and in further considering the role of ECM collagen in modulating passive muscle stiffness.
Glycerol Is an Osmoprotectant in Two Antarctic Chlamydomonas Species From an Ice-Covered Saline Lake and Is Synthesized by an Unusual Bidomain Enzyme

Glycerol, a compatible solute, has previously been found to act as an osmoprotectant in some marine Chlamydomonas species and several species of Dunaliella from hypersaline ponds. Recently, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and Dunaliella salina were shown to make glycerol with an unusual bidomain enzyme, which appears to be unique to algae, that contains a phosphoserine phosphatase and glycerol-3-phosphate dehydrogenase. Here we report that two psychrophilic species of Chlamydomonas (C. spp. UWO241 and ICE-MDV) from Lake Bonney, Antarctica also produce high levels of glycerol to survive in the lake’s saline waters. Glycerol concentration increased linearly with salinity and at 1.3 M NaCl, exceeded 400 mM in C. sp. UWO241, the more salt-tolerant strain. We also show that both species expressed several isoforms of the bidomain enzyme. An analysis of one of the isoforms of C. sp. UWO241 showed that it was strongly upregulated by NaCl and is thus the likely source of glycerol. These results reveal another adaptation of the Lake Bonney Chlamydomonas species that allow them to survive in an extreme polar environment.
DECAF: Automatic, Adaptive De-bloating and Hardening of COTS Firmware

Once compromised, server ﬁrmware can surreptitiously and permanently take over a machine and any stack running thereon, with no hope for recovery, short of hardware-level intervention. To make things worse, modern ﬁrmware contains millions of lines of unnecessary code and hundreds of unnecessary modules as a result of a long ﬁrmware supply chain designed to optimize time-to-market and cost, but not security. As a result, off-the-shelf motherboards contain large, unnecessarily complex, closed-source vulnerability surfaces that can completely and irreversibly compromise systems. In this work, we address this problem by dramatically and automatically reducing the vulnerability surface. DECAF is an extensible platform for automatically pruning a wide class of commercial UEFI ﬁrmware. DECAF intelligently runs dynamic iterative surgery on UEFI ﬁrmware to remove a maximal amount of code with no regressive effects on the functionality and performance of higher layers in the stack (OS, applications). DECAF has successfully pruned over 70% of unnecessary, redundant, reachable ﬁrmware in leading server-grade moth-erboards with no effect on the upper layers, and increased resulting system performance and boot times.
Adsorption Properties of Sorbents Used for Air Cleaning in Protective Structures of Civil Protection

The theoretical model of air purification in the filter-absorber by means of the course of the adsorption process is considered in the article, attention is paid to the concept of "protective action". The defining role in the purification of air is played by adsorbents, which fill the absorber filters. Electron scanning microscopy and low-temperature nitrogen adsorption were used to study the adsorption properties of adsorbents and to show their different natural origin. Based on the obtained adsorption characteristics of the adsorbents, the conclusions about the protective action of the filter-absorber were made.
Machine Learning for Network Routing

Though currently a “hot topic”, over the past fifteen years [1][2], there has been significant work on the use of machine learning to design large scale computer-communication networks, motivated by the complexity of the systems that are being considered and the unpredictability of their workloads. A topic of great concern has been security [3] and novel techniques for detecting network attacks have been developed based on Machine Learning [8]. However the main challenge with Machine Learning methods in networks has concerned their compatibility with the Internet Protocol and with legacy systems, and a major step forward has come from the establishment of Software Defined Networks (SDN) [4] which delegate network routing to specific SDN routers [4]. SDN has become an industry standard for concentrating network management and routing decisions within specific SDN routers that download the selected paths periodically to network routers, which operate otherwise under the IP protocol. In this paper we describe our work on real-time control of Security and Privacy [7], Energy Consumption and QoS [6] of packet networks using Machine Learning based on the Cognitive Packet Network [9] principles and their application to the H2020 SerIoT Project [5].
Droplet: Decentralized Authorization and Access Control for Encrypted Data Streams

This paper presents Droplet , a decentralized data access con-trol service. Droplet enables data owners to securely and selectively share their encrypted data while guaranteeing data conﬁdentiality in the presence of unauthorized parties and compromised data servers. Droplet’s contribution lies in coupling two key ideas: (i) a cryptographically-enforced access control construction for encrypted data streams which enables users to deﬁne ﬁne-grained stream-speciﬁc access policies, and (ii) a decentralized authorization service that serves user-deﬁned access policies. In this paper, we present Droplet’s design, the reference implementation of Droplet, and the experimental results of three case-study applications deployed with Droplet: Fitbit activity tracker, Ava health tracker, and ECOviz smart meter dashboard, demonstrating Droplet’s applicability for secure sharing of IoT streams.
Apprentissage adaptatif de comportements éthiques

L'utilisation croissante d'algorithmes d'Intelligence Artificielle (IA) dans des applications impactant des humains requiert de doter ces systemes d'un comportement pouvant etre juge ethique selon des valeurs humaines. Bien que plusieurs approches existent, la question de l'adaptation au contexte, aux preferences et principes ethiques des utilisateurs, reste posee. Nous proposons de traiter cette question par l'Apprentissage par Renforcement Multi-Agent de tels comportements dans des situations differentes. Nous utilisons des tables de Q-Valeurs et des Cartes Auto-Organisatrices Dynamiques pour permettre l'apprentissage adaptatif de la representation de l'etat de l'environnement, ainsi que des fonctions de recompense pour guider l'ethique du comportement. Cette proposition est evaluee sur un simulateur de repartition d'energie dans des Smart Grids que nous avons developpe. Plusieurs fonctions de recompense visant a declencher des comportements ethiques sont evaluees. Les resultats montrent la capacite de s'adapter a differentes conditions. En sus des contributions sur le plan de l'adaptation ethique, nous comparons notre modele a d'autres approches d'apprentissage et montrons de meilleures performances par rapport a une approche d'Apprentissage Profond basee sur le modele Actor-Critic.
Use of okara (aqueous extract residue) in the diet of starter broilers

Abstract: Two experiments were carried out to determine the chemical composition of okara and to evaluate the performance and carcass yield of broilers fed diets containing increasing levels of okara. In experiment 1, a total of 72 21-d-old Cobb male broilers were distributed in an entirely randomized experimental design consisting of three treatments and four replicates of six birds each. The energy in okara was 2972 kcal of AME kg-1, with an apparent metabolizable energy (AME) coefficient of 60.72 (% dry matter). In experiment 2, a total of 840 male Cobb male chicks were distributed in an entirely randomized experimental design consisting of six treatments (0.0%, 2.5%, 5.0%, 7.5%, and 10% okara inclusion) and six replicates of 28 birds each. The inclusion of increasing levels of okara from 1 to 21 d of age linearly reduced (P < 0.05) weight gain and feed intake, without affecting (P > 0.05) feed conversion, carcass, breast, drumstick, and thigh yields at 42 d of age. Economic analysis indicated that a 10.0% inclusion level of okara in broiler diets during the starter phase produced the best economic results. Résumé : Deux expériences ont été effectuées pour déterminer la composition chimique de l'okara et d'en évaluer la performance et le rendement de la carcasse des poulets à griller nourris de diètes contenant des taux croissants d'okara. Dans la première expérience, un total de 72 poulets mâles à griller Cobb ont été distribués selon un plan expérimental complètement aléatoire de trois traitements et quatre réplicats de six poulets chacun. L'énergie dans l'okara était de 2972 kcal d'AME kg-1, avec un coefficient d' énergie métabolisable apparente (AME - « apparent metabolizable energy ») de 60,72 (% de matières sèches). Dans la deuxième expérience, un total de 840 poussins Cobb mâles ont été distribués selon un plan expérimental complètement aléatoire de six traitements (0,0 %, 2,5 %, 5,0 %, 7,5 % et 10 % d'okara) et six réplicats de 28 poulets chacun. L'incorporation de taux croissants d'okara des jours 1 à 21 d'âge a réduit de façon linéaire (P < 0,05) le gain de poids et l'ingestion d'aliments, sans effet (P > 0,05) sur l'indice de consommation, ni des rendements de la carcasse, de la poitrine, du pilon et de la cuisse au jour 42 d'âge. L'analyse économique a indiqué que le taux d'incorporation d'okara de 10,0 % dans les diètes de poulets à griller pendant la phase de démarrage produisait les meilleurs résultats économiques. [Traduit par la Rédaction]
The Bionomics of Brown Trout in a Dartmoor Stream

A brown trout population in an acid stream was investigated in terms of numbers, growth, reproduction and feeding; in addition the dynamics of the prey species was quantitatively examined. The stream studied, the Walla Brook, had a fluctuating pH of 5-9-6-8. It was subject to occasional severe flooding. The substrata varied from coarse boulders in the steep gradient zones to gravel and sand in the flats. Three sections of the stream of approximately 225-ft length were selected for an intensive study of their trout population. The analysis covered variation in size and type of food species, change in diet with age of fish and seasonal variation in the amount and type of food consumed. In addition the dry weight of each important food organism was measured. The observed rate of growth of the fish was calculated and correlated with the amount of food consumed and this provided estimates of the daily ration and hence the total annual consumption.
Étude de différentes configurations d'autoconsommation collective de l'énergie à l'échelle du quartier à l'aide de la simulation multi-agent

— We present a multi-level multi-agent simulation of collective energy self- consumption. The ﬁrst level of this model is a multi-agent simulation of human activity coupled with an energy simulation of the building, calculating the household’s energy consumption. The second level is a model of a group of households practising collective self-consumption of energy. We present a formalisation of this notion of grouping as well as diﬀerent organizations to exchange energy. Last, we study these diﬀerent organisations and show their strong impact on the distribution of energy when production is low compared to consumption.
An Analysis of Some of the Factors Influencing the Rate at Which Species Have Been Described

T HE growth of information concerning the classification of the North American fauna has received considerable attention in recent years in one of the graduate courses in Zoology in the University of Illinois. After considering the various factors and agencies influential in stimulating work in taxonomy, the writer has always wondered to what extent fortuitous circumstances might have been responsible for some of the golden eras of taxonomy commonly attributed to specific causes. It is not difficult to focus the attention so sharply on individual factors that the history of the subject loses its perspective in the restriction of attention to a few selected high spots. Each year, after the writer has lectured on the history of taxonomy, he has found himself wondering what kind of a curve might portray the rate at which new forms of life have been recognized for the country as a whole. A search of the literature failed to yield evidence that such a study had ever been published. Hence the excuse for the present paper which has as an object the analysis of the rate at which the North American fauna has been revealed to the world and the portrayal of that rate in the form of a graph. A number of zoologists with whom the writer has talked have expressed the opinion that the law of diminishing returns operates in the realm of taxonomy. In any restricted locality, if the concept of and criteria for species remain static, the time comes when all the forms of the region become known and cataloged. In spite of this ideal condition, there are very few regions for which a complete faunal list is available. There are many regions, even in our own country; where only the larger and more conspicuous forms of life have been given attention by the taxonomists. Among even those groups of animals which have been considered as well known by one generation, the species become fragmented or at least are split into subspecies on the basis of new criteria in the hands of a younger generation of specialists. While this condition has developed in practically every group of the animal kingdom, it has become especially apparent in several classes of the vertebrates, the arthropods, and the molluscs. Some recent investigators, failing to recognize the inevitable necessity of drawing progressively finer lines of distinction to reflect morphological and biological inequality, bemoan the passing of the Linnaean species concepts. Few of the persons voicing such lamentations have given enough thought to the problem to realize that in every group with a long nomenclatorial history most of the early specific characterizations are little more than generic diagnoses, demanding generous interpretation of vague limitations for the recognition of the described species and delimitation from other species not known to the original describer. The number of species and varieties described in the current litera-
Comparative assessment of vulnerability of smallholder livestock farmers to climate change in North-West Ghana

ABSTRACT This study examined the vulnerability of smallholder livestock farmers in North-West Ghana to climate change using data obtained from 200 livestock farmers obtained through the administration of a semi-structured questionnaire. The Livelihood Vulnerability Index (LVI) approach was used to examine the levels of vulnerability. The study compared the vulnerability between the Nandom district and the Lawra district. The empirical results revealed that livestock farmers are more vulnerable to climatic extremes in the Nandom district than the Lawra district. The study highlights the critical role of the government regarding education and construction of water resources, among others.