Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Focus : Knee Arthroplasty Evidence-based Medicine in Orthopedics

Corrosion at the femoral head-stem taper interface has recently re-emerged as a clinical concern in total hip arthroplasty. In severe cases, the metal debris and metal ions released can cause adverse tissue reactions, even with MoP components. Prior studies regarding head-neck taper corrosion were based largely on cobalt-chrome alloy femoral ball heads. Less is known about taper corrosion with ceramic femoral ball heads. Our research group recently conducted several retrieval studies to investigate the role ceramics play in taper corrosion. We asked • whether ceramic ball heads result in less taper corrosion than CoCr ball heads; • what device and patient factors influence taper fretting corrosion; • whether the mechanism of taper fretting corrosion in ceramic ball heads differs from that in CoCr heads; • what is the difference in taper angle clearance and contact location between ceramic and CoCr ball heads; • does taper angle clearance influence the severity of fretting corrosion; • what is the prevalence of fretting corrosion in retrieved adaptor sleeves; and • what device and patient factors influence the sleeve fretting corrosion? Since 2000, we have retrieved more than 3,000 THA components from revision surgery as part of a multi-institutional, IRB approved retrieval program. From these, 50 ceramic femoral head-stem pairs were matched with 50 CoCr femoral headstem pairs based on implantation time, lateral offset, stem design, and flexural rigidity. Additionally, we analyzed 35 titanium sleeves that were used in conjunction with a ceramic femoral head. All of the components were inspected for evidence of fretting and corrosion using a visual scoring technique based on severity and extent. Taper angle and clearance were assessed using a high-resolution roundness machine. Predictors: stem alloy and flexural rigidity Fretting and corrosion scores were lower for the stems in the ceramic ball head cohort. We observed dark corrosion deposits outside the headDaniel MacDonald, Research Associate of the Implant Research Center at Drexel University’s School of Biomedical Engineering, Science, and Health Systems, Philadelphia, USA, was awarded the Heinz Mittelmeier Research Award 2014. The award, which is endowed with 5,000 Euros, was presented by Fritz-Uwe Niethard, MD, at the German Congress of Orthopaedics and Traumatology (DKOU) on 29. October 2014. McDonald is specialized in analyzing implant performance and material degradation in artificial hip and knee joints under clinically relevant conditions. He has investigated the role of ceramic materials in reducing the amount of corrosion observed in modular junctions in total hip arthroplasty and received the honor for his study entitled "What Factors Influence Fretting Corrosion in Total Hip Arthroplasty with Ceramic Heads? " Figure 1: Heinz-Mittelmeier Scientific Award laureate 2014 Daniel MacDonald, Philadelphia, USA, presenting his results at DKOU 2014 in Berlin (© Starface)
Internal representations, external representations and ergonomics: towards a theoretical integration

Ergonomics is concerned with how humans interact with systems to perform tasks that achieve goals. This interaction requires thought processes that construct and manipulate mental representations of situations to enable the selection of task-oriented actions having predicted outcomes. Mental representations are, then, central to task performance and therefore ergonomics. The present review assesses the current state of knowledge regarding the nature of mental representations, focusing particularly on: (1) the vast range of existing terminology that underpins discussions about representational constructs; (2) the important role of memory in understanding mental representation; (3) the tight coupling between external and internal representations during task performance. The review concludes by proposing an integrated framework that shows how key proposals concerning mental and external representations from leading theorists can be brought together to complement one another.
A DLC-Punch Array to Fabricate the Micro-Textured Aluminum Sheet for Boiling Heat Transfer Control

A diamond-like carbon (DLC) film, coated on an SKD11 (alloy tool steel) substrate, was shaped by plasma oxidation to form an assembly of DLC macro-pillars and to be used as a DLC-punch array that is micro-embossed into aluminum sheets. First, the SKD11 steel die substrate was prepared and DLC-coated to have a film thickness of 10 μm. This DLC coating worked as a punch material. The two-dimensional micro-patterns were printed onto this DLC film by maskless lithography. The unprinted DLC films were selectively removed by plasma oxidation to leave the three-dimensional DLC-punch array on the SKD11 substrate. Each DLC punch had a head of 3.5 μm × 3.5 μm and a height of 8 μm. This DLC-punch array was fixed into the cassette die set for a micro-embossing process using a table-top servo-stamper. Furthermore, through numerically controlled micro-embossing, an alignment of rectangular punches was transcribed into a micro-cavity array in the aluminum sheet. The single micro-cavity had a bottom surface of 3.2 μm × 3.2 μm and an average depth of 7.5 μm. A heat-transfer experiment in boiling water was also performed to investigate the effect of micro-cavity texture on bubbling behavior and the boiling curve.
Intrinsic subthreshold oscillations extend the influence of inhibitory synaptic inputs on cortical pyramidal neurons

Fast inhibitory synaptic inputs, which cause conductance changes that typically last for 10–100 ms, participate in the generation and maintenance of cortical rhythms. We show here that these fast events can have influences that outlast the duration of the synaptic potentials by interacting with subthreshold membrane potential oscillations. Inhibitory postsynaptic potentials (IPSPs) in cortical neurons in vitro shifted the oscillatory phase for several seconds. The phase shift caused by two IPSPs or two current pulses summed non‐linearly. Cholinergic neuromodulation increased the power of the oscillations and decreased the magnitude of the phase shifts. These results show that the intrinsic conductances of cortical pyramidal neurons can carry information about inhibitory inputs and can extend the integration window for synaptic input.
Identification of the Novel Role of CD24 as an Oncogenesis Regulator and Therapeutic Target for Triple-Negative Breast Cancer

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is the most aggressive breast cancer subtype, with unfavorable prognosis and 5-year survival. The purpose of this study was to investigate the underlying mechanisms involved in TNBC progression. We determined that CD24 expression was elevated in highly lung and lymph node metastatic TNBC cells. CD24 depletion inhibited primary tumor growth and lymph node and lung metastasis and reduced the number of blood and lymphatic vessels in the tumor microenvironment. CD24 knockdown impaired EGFR/Met-mediated signaling and reduced lymphangiogenesis- and angiogenesis-related molecules, including vascular endothelial growth factors A and C, by promoting EGFR and Met protein instability via the lysosomal degradation pathway. CD24 monoclonal antibody treatment reduced lung metastasis and prolonged the survival in a lung metastasis mouse model. Clinical analyses revealed that the CD24high/METhigh “double-positive” signature identified a subset of TNBC patients with worst outcomes. We conclude that CD24 could be a therapeutic target by itself and in combination with the Met expression could be a good prognostic biomarker for TNBC patients.
Essential Oils as Repellents against Arthropods

The development of effective and safe repellents against arthropods is very important, because there are no effective vaccines against arthropod-borne viruses (arboviruses) and parasites. Arboviruses and parasites are transmitted to humans from arthropods, and mosquitoes are the most common arthropods associated with dengue, malaria, and yellow fever. Enormous efforts have been made to develop effective repellents against arthropods, and thus far synthetic repellents have been widely used. However, the use of synthetic repellents has raised several concerns in terms of environmental and human health risks and safety. Thus, plant essential oils (EOs) have been widely used as an alternative to synthetic repellents. In this review, we briefly introduce and summarize recent studies that have investigated EOs as insect repellents. Current technology and research trends to develop effective and safe repellents from plant EOs are also described in this review.
Supplementary Appendix to: Walking crowds on a shaky surface: Stable walkers discover Millennium bridge oscillations with and without pedestrian synchrony

Independent of the literature on pedestrian-induced bridge oscillations, numerous previous studies have considered the mechanics of bipedal walking and running, some focusing on energetics and some focusing on stability and control [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15]. Further mathematical models proposed with the motivation of understanding interactions with a bridge include mathematical abstractions of human locomotion [16, 17], linear inverted pendulums which assume that humans stay nearly vertical [18, 19] and more complicated walkers with springs and dampers that use ad-hoc external forces to maintain stability [20]. The inverted pendulum model used here is just one of many such models, but we feel that it provides a better approximation to actual human motion while remaining computationally tractable.
Female choice and the benefits of mate guarding by male mallards

Abstract Pair formation and breeding in many species of waterfowl are separated both temporally and spatially. Most studies of female choice in this group have focused on male characteristics at the time of pairing, with less attention given to how mate choice affects breeding season outcomes. In this study I compared pairing success, male plasma testosterone level and mate-guarding ability of male mallards, Anas platyrhynchos , in two experiments. In the first experiment females and males were group housed with equal sex ratios, thus allowing all of these males to pair. At the same time, an equal number of males was housed in groups without access to females and remained unpaired. In this experiment testosterone levels of paired and unpaired males during autumn (baseline) and spring (breeding) did not differ, indicating that the process of pair formation and breeding does not cause elevated spring testosterone levels in males. However, testosterone did temporarily decrease in paired males during the winter (pair formation) season. In the second experiment groups were male biased, allowing only half of the males to pair. Here paired males had significantly higher testosterone levels than unpaired males during the breeding season, but not during the preceding autumn. Together the results of these experiments indicate that successful pair formation predicts but does not alter male testosterone level during the breeding season. I also found that females paired to males with high levels of testosterone were missing fewer feathers due to forced copulation attempts by nonmates, suggesting that females may choose males based on their mate-guarding abilities. Copyright 2002 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved .
Addressing word-order Divergence in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation for extremely Low Resource Languages

Transfer learning approaches for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) train a NMT model on an assisting language-target language pair (parent model) which is later fine-tuned for the source language-target language pair of interest (child model), with the target language being the same. In many cases, the assisting language has a different word order from the source language. We show that divergent word order adversely limits the benefits from transfer learning when little to no parallel corpus between the source and target language is available. To bridge this divergence, we propose to pre-order the assisting language sentences to match the word order of the source language and train the parent model. Our experiments on many language pairs show that bridging the word order gap leads to significant improvement in the translation quality in extremely low-resource scenarios.
NK Cells in HIV-1 Infection: From Basic Science to Vaccine Strategies

NK cells play a key role in immune response against HIV infection. These cells can destroy infected cells and contribute to adequate and strong adaptive immune responses, by acting on dendritic, T, B, and even epithelial cells. Increased NK cell activity reflected by higher cytotoxic capacity, IFN-γ and chemokines (CCL3, CCL4, and CCL5) production, has been associated with resistance to HIV infection and delayed AIDS progression, demonstrating the importance of these cells in the antiviral response. Recently, a subpopulation of NK cells with adaptive characteristics has been described and associated with lower HIV viremia and control of infection. These evidences, together with some degree of protection shown in vaccine trials based on boosting NK cell activity, suggest that these cells can be a feasible option for new treatment and vaccination strategies to overcome limitations that, classical vaccination approaches, might have for this virus. This review is focus on the NK cells role during the immune response against HIV, including all the effector mechanisms associated to these cells; in addition, changes including phenotypic, functional and frequency modifications during HIV infection will be pointed, highlighting opportunities to vaccine development based in NK cells effector functions.
MicroRNA-30a as a candidate underlying sex-specific differences in neonatal hyperoxic lung injury: implications for BPD.

Premature male neonates are at a greater risk of developing bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD). The reasons underlying sexually dimorphic outcomes in premature neonates are not known. The role of miRNAs in mediating sex biases in BPD is understudied. Analysis of the pulmonary transcriptome revealed that a large percentage of angiogenesis-related differentially expressed genes are miR-30a targets. We tested the hypothesis that there is differential expression of miR-30a in vivo and in vitro in neonatal human pulmonary microvascular endothelial cells (HPMECs) upon exposure to hyperoxia. Neonatal male and female mice (C57BL/6) were exposed to hyperoxia [95% fraction of inspired oxygen (FiO2), postnatal day ( PND) 1-5] and euthanized on PND 7 and 21. HPMECs (18-24-wk gestation donors) were subjected to hyperoxia (95% O2 and 5% CO2) or normoxia (air and 5% CO2) up to 72 h. miR-30a expression was increased in both males and females in the acute phase ( PND 7) after hyperoxia exposure. However, at PND 21 (recovery phase), female mice showed significantly higher miR-30a expression in the lungs compared with male mice. Female HPMECs showed greater expression of miR-30a in vitro upon exposure to hyperoxia. Delta-like ligand 4 (Dll4) was an miR-30a target in HPMECs and showed sex-specific differential expression. miR-30a increased angiogenic sprouting in vitro in female HPMECs. Lastly, we show decreased expression of miR-30a and increased expression of DLL4 in human BPD lung samples compared with controls. These results support the hypothesis that miR-30a could, in part, contribute to the sex-specific molecular mechanisms in play that lead to the sexual dimorphism in BPD.
Reproductive character displacement of female mate choice in the grey treefrog, Hyla chrysoscelis


A hygroscopic character, i.e. the ability to take up and retain water, is given seeds, bulbs and plants during arid growing conditions and to cut leafy vegetables, cut trees, cut flowers and the like after being cut by the method of applying a material in powder or solution form selected from the group comprising magnesium carbonate, sodium citrate, magnesium chloride, magnesium pyrophosphate and citric acid, with magnesium carbonate being preferred.
Distribuição espacial e temporal dos casos de tuberculose pulmonar em municípios do estado de São Paulo,2007 a 2013

Introduction: Tuberculosis (TB) is still a prominent disease in public health, having remained as international emergencies since 1993, due to the high number of infected by the causative bacillus, and due to a presentation as a leading cause of death in planet. Objectives: To describe a spatial and temporal distribution of cases of pulmonary TB (TBp) in the São Paulo state between 2007 and 2013 and to evaluate its relationship with and indicator of socioeconomic and demographic conditions. Method: This is an ecological study, whose information is obtained in the databases of the Information System of Notifiable Diseases, Department of Informatics of the Unified Health System of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). The cases of TBp were georeferenced from the codes of the municipalities of residence of the patients. Incidence, time and space were calculated, and thematic maps were produced, identifying areas of greater and lesser risk of the occurrence of the disease. The incidence of TBp was related to socioeconomic and demographic indicators through spatial regression. Statistical analyzes used the Prais-Winsten method, scanning statistics and latent Gaussian Bayesian model. Results: A total of 77.390 cases of TBp were reported in patients, disregarding cases in prison inmates or co infection with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. The incidence rate for the entire study period was 26.8 cases / 100,000 population-years. As total incidence rates, male and female presented stationarity between 2007 and 2013. Men and people between 15 and 59 years old presented an excess risk. The municipalities of the Metropolitan São Paulo and Litoral Sul Paulista mesoregions presented, in general and in all the years of study, high probabilities that their standardized incidence ratios (RIP) were larger than one unit and part of them constitute one Agglomerate of high risk for occurrence of TBp. Municipalities in the mesoregions of Presidente Prudente, Bauru and Marília showed an increasing temporal trend of incidence in relation to the rest of ESP municipalities. Municipalities with low income, schooling and longevity presented a risk of occurrence of TBp 25.0% higher than municipalities with high income and high and medium schooling and longevity. Conclusion: The incidence rates between 2007 and 2013 showed stationarity and higher values for men and people between 15 and 59 years. Municipalities with high risk for occurrence of TBp and municipalities were identified, although with average risks for TBp, with an increasing tendency of incidence. Municipalities with worse socioeconomic and demographic conditions were found to be at greater risk for the occurrence of the disease.
Early Influence of Affective Context on Emotion Perception: EPN or Early-N400?

Recent studies have shown that affective context influences the processing of emotional images at early stages. Yet, the mechanisms underlying the emotional modulation of early sensory processing have not been totally elucidated. Emotional information plays a relevant role modulating several cognitive processes such as perception (Vuilleumier et al., 2004), attention (Vuilleumier, 2005; Yiend, 2010), memory (Kensinger, 2009), semantic integration (Egidi and Nusbaum, 2012), and social cognition (Forgas, 2001; Gross, 2002; Batty and Taylor, 2003). Emotions are supported by dynamic interactions among neuronal networks, linking emotional processing centers (e.g., amygdala, hippocampus), with noticeable connections to early sensory areas (Pessoa, 2008). These influences have been characterized through the modulation of two different Event Related Potentials (ERPs): (a) the Early Posterior Negativity (EPN) (Hietanen andAstikainen, 2013), related with the amount of attentional resources to facilitate the early selective perceptual processing of emotional stimuli (Junghöfer et al., 2001; Schupp et al., 2003); and (b) the early-N400 (DiéguezRisco et al., 2015; Dozolme et al., 2015), classically related with the contextual influence on the effort to integrate incoming information in semantic processing (Kutas and Federmeier, 2011). Here, we discuss that the variations in latency, topography, and amplitude reported in these previous studies as an early-N400 component, fit better with those modulations observed in the EPN component, suggesting that affective context influences the allocation of attentional resources for emotional stimuli processing at early stages of perception.
Development and validation of a new method for indirect estimation of neonatal, infant, and child mortality trends using summary birth histories

Background The addition of neonatal (NN) mortality targets in the Sustainable Development Goals highlights the increased need for age-specific quantification of mortality trends, detail that is not provided by summary birth histories (SBHs). Several methods exist to indirectly estimate trends in under-5 mortality from SBHs; however, efforts to monitor mortality trends in important age groups such as the first month and first year of life have yet to utilize the vast amount of SBH data available from household surveys and censuses. Methods and findings We analyzed 243 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 76 countries, which collected both complete and SBHs from 8.5 million children from 2.3 million mothers to develop a new empirically based method to indirectly estimate time trends in age-specific mortality. We used complete birth history (CBH) data to train a discrete hazards generalized additive model in order to predict individual hazard functions for children based on individual-, mother-, and country-year-level covariates. Individual-level predictions were aggregated over time by assigning probability weights to potential birth years from mothers from SBH data. Age-specific estimates were evaluated in three ways: using cross-validation, using an external database of an additional 243 non-DHS census and survey data sources, and comparing overall under-5 mortality to existing indirect methods. Our model was able to closely approximate trends in age-specific child mortality. Depending on age, the model was able to explain between 80% and 95% of the variation in the validation data. Bias was close to zero in every age, with median relative errors spanning from 0.96 to 1.09. For trends in all under-5s, performance was comparable to the methods used for the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study and significantly better than the standard indirect (Brass) method, especially in the 5 years preceding a survey. For the 15 years preceding surveys, the new method and GBD methods could explain more than 95% of the variation in the validation data for under-5s, whereas the standard indirect variants tested could only explain up to 88%. External validation using census and survey data found close agreement with concurrent direct estimates of mortality in the NN and infant age groups. As a predictive method based on empirical data, one limitation is that potential issues in these training data could be reflected in the resulting application of the method out of sample. Conclusions This new method for estimating child mortality produces results that are comparable to current best methods for indirect estimation of under-5 mortality while additionally producing age-specific estimates. Use of such methods allows researchers to utilize a massive amount of SBH data for estimation of trends in NN and infant mortality. Systematic application of these methods could further improve the evidence base for monitoring of trends and inequalities in age-specific child mortality.