Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Alcohol use and behaviors in women long-distance race participants reporting a history of bulimia and/or anorexia nervosa.

OBJECTIVE To describe the relationship between a reported a history of an eating disorder, a history of problem alcohol behavior and current alcohol consumption in women long-distance runners. DESIGN Survey. SETTING General community. PARTICIPANTS Women participating in a 20-mile road race (n = 398) and age-matched non-exercising women enrolled in a family practice health maintenance organization (n = 121) (mean age, 37.1 +/- 9.4 years). INTERVENTION Not applicable. MEASURES Responses to questions relating to 1) a past history of an eating disorder; 2) weight; 3) running and exercise habits; 4) drinking behaviors using alcoholism screening tests; 5) quantity-frequency data of the previous two week alcohol consumption. RESULTS Ten percent of racers and 4.1% of controls reported a history of an eating disorder. Those racers reporting a history of bulimia nervosa without anorexia were more likely to report feeling guilty about their drinking, drunk-driving arrests, an elevated score on an alcoholism screening test (suggestive of problem drinking), alcoholism, and seeking help for problem drinking than other racers or the control population without a history of an eating disorder. However, bulimic racers did not report either increased current alcohol consumption or occasions of drinking, including binge drinking (five or more drinks in one episode). CONCLUSIONS Women racers reporting a history of bulimia nervosa are more likely to report a history of problem behaviors with alcohol but not differences in current alcohol consumptions from that reported by other women racers or women without a history of an eating disorder from the control population.
Syllable Timing and Pausing: Evidence from Cantonese

We examined the relationship between the acoustic duration of syllables and the silent pauses that follow them in Cantonese. The results showed that at major syntactic junctures, acoustic plus silent pause durations were quite similar for a number of different syllable types whose acoustic durations differed substantially. In addition, it appeared that CV: syllables, which had the longest acoustic duration of all syllable types that were examined, were also the least likely to have silent pauses after them. These results suggest that cross-language differences between the probability that silent pauses are used at major syntactic junctures might potentially be explained by the accuracy at which timing slots can be assigned for syllables, rather than more complex explanations that have been proposed.
Markov Decision Process-Based Switching Algorithm for Sustainable Rechargeable Wireless Sensor Networks

In a tree-based wireless sensor network (WSN), a tree structure rooted at sink node is usually created for efficient data collection. Recently, the use of solar harvesting technologies for rechargeable sensor nodes is evolving. Moreover, in a tree-based rechargeable WSN, the nodes that belong to different routes will have different energy dissipation due to unequal harvested-energy and utilized-energy. Network sustainability and energy efficiency are important issues in a tree-based rechargeable sensor network. In this paper, a Markov decision process-based switching algorithm has been designed for a sustainable data collection tree while reducing energy consumption in the network. Furthermore, an analysis of energy consumption has been performed using a real-time sensor traffic pattern. A prediction model has been adopted to estimate the harvesting energy (based on solar power) for the rechargeable sensor nodes. In this paper, the state of each node is defined based on different independent energy levels. The state of each node may change with time depending on harvested-energy and utilized-energy. The proposed Markov decision process approach finds the optimal switching policy for sensor nodes, which switch from one parent to another based on energy levels to preserve sustainability. A detailed theoretical analysis has been performed along with simulation results to show the efficacy of the proposed approach.
FUZZGY: A hybrid model for credit card fraud detection

In this paper, we propose a model to detect credit card frauds that can occur in various payment channels. This model is designed to determine the suspicious degree of fraudulent merchant transactions. In our model, fuzzy expert system provides the anomaly degree which clarifies how the new transaction is abnormal in comparison with historical pattern of merchant transactions. The fraud tendency weight is obtained by employing Fogg behavioral analysis. Therefore, this model is called FUZZGY. The fuzzy expert system applies fuzzy rules which effectively use merchant historical activities. These rules are applied to identify any logical contradiction between merchant current activities with trend of her historical ones. The Fuzzy rules are preferred rather than crisp ones because the ambiguous concept of suspicious activity should be considered. Moreover, analyzing the merchant behavior provides valuable information. In fact, it is necessary to evaluate her tendency to make any kind of fraudulent activities. Therefore, Fogg behavioral model is used to describe merchant behavior in two different but related dimensions: motivation and ability to make a fraud. With this model, fraud tendency weight is calculated for each merchant. At the end, suspicious degree of incoming transactions is computed by the FUZZGY model. With successful results which were achieved by testing the FUZZGY in lottery fraud case study, the FUZZGY can be considered as a useful model for credit card fraud detection.
Anaerobic Degradation of 2-Methylnaphthalene by a Sulfate-Reducing Enrichment Culture

ABSTRACT Anaerobic degradation of 2-methylnaphthalene was investigated with a sulfate-reducing enrichment culture. Metabolite analyses revealed two groups of degradation products. The first group comprised two succinic acid adducts which were identified as naphthyl-2-methyl-succinic acid and naphthyl-2-methylene-succinic acid by comparison with chemically synthesized reference compounds. Naphthyl-2-methyl-succinic acid accumulated to 0.5 μM in culture supernatants. Production of naphthyl-2-methyl-succinic acid was analyzed in enzyme assays with dense cell suspensions. The conversion of 2-methylnaphthalene to naphthyl-2-methyl-succinic acid was detected at a specific activity of 0.020 ± 0.003 nmol min−1 mg of protein−1 only in the presence of cells and fumarate. We conclude that under anaerobic conditions 2-methylnaphthalene is activated by fumarate addition to the methyl group, as is the case in anaerobic toluene degradation. The second group of metabolites comprised 2-naphthoic acid and reduced 2-naphthoic acid derivatives, including 5,6,7,8-tetrahydro-2-naphthoic acid, octahydro-2-naphthoic acid, and decahydro-2-naphthoic acid. These compounds were also identified in an earlier study as products of anaerobic naphthalene degradation with the same enrichment culture. A pathway for anaerobic degradation of 2-methylnaphthalene analogous to that for anaerobic toluene degradation is proposed.
The immunocheckpoints in modern oncology: the next 15 years

The notion that the immune system can act as a key factor in controlling cancer cell proliferation and thus its stimulation may be an important resource for cancer therapy has long been known. Tumors can elude the immune system by deploying proteins that shut down the immune response by binding to specific surface receptors on immune cells. Several promising strategies have been designed to overcome cancer cells’ ability to suppress the immune surveillance. Immune checkpoint molecules that block cytotoxic T-lymphocyte associated antigen-4 (ipilimumab) or the programmed death-1/programmed death-ligand 1 axis (i.e., nivolumab and pembrolizumab) promote antitumor immunity, reactivating T-cell proliferation and activity. This efficient strategy currently represents one of the major oncological breakthroughs, with impressive clinically durable responses observed in cancer patients, particularly in melanoma, renal cell carcinoma, NSCLC and more recently in bladder cancer patients. Fifteen years ago, we replaced the IL-2 and INF-α for molecular targeted therapies. Today, we believe that immune therapy will represent the future, perhaps as part of a combination of different therapeutic strategies that act synergistically in each tumor and individual patient.
Automated Program Analysis for Novice Programmers

This paper describes how to adapt a static code analyzer to provide feedback novice programmers and their teachers. Current analyzers have been built to give feedback to experienced programmers who work on software projects or systems. The type of feedback and the type of analysis of these tools focusses on mistakes that are relevant within that context, and help with debugging software system. When teaching novice programmers this type of advice is often not particularly useful. It would be instead more useful to use these techniques to identify problem in the understanding of students of important programming concepts. This paper first explores in what respect static analyzers support the learning and teaching of programming, and what can be implemented based on existing static analysis technology. It presents an extension of static analyzer PMD to create feedback that is more valuable to novice programmers. To answer the question if these techniques are able to find conceptual mistakes that are characteristic for novice programmers make, we ran it over a number of student projects, and compared these results with publicly available mature software projects.
The influence of immobilization and stretch on protein turnover of rat skeletal muscle.

1. Changes in muscle size have been studied as a function of time after immobilization and in relation to the functional length of the muscle. 2. When immobilized in a shortened position the soleus and extensor digitorum longus muscles underwent atrophy, showing net losses of tissue protein. This atrophy appears to be caused by decreases in protein synthesis and increases in protein break‐down. Average rates of protein synthesis and degradation were measured in immobilized and unrestrained control muscles by sensitive in vitro methods. 3. When the two muscles were held in a lengthened position they grew compared with internal controls. This rapid growth was primarily due to increased rats of protein synthesis, which possibly arise from a more active involvement of ribosomes in translation. In keeping with these situations of growth, DNA synthesis, DNA and RNA concentrations were found to be higher in the immobilized tissues. 4. Passive stretch and the development of isometric tension via the stretch reflux are suggested as factors stimulating protein synthesis, and hence inducing the growth of muscles held in the lengthened state. Probably neither of these factors will be experienced appreciably in the shortened position of restraint, and the lower level of activity in these immobilized muscles leads to their atrophy.
Scalable high performance de-duplication backup via hash join

Apart from high space efficiency, other demanding requirements for enterprise de-duplication backup are high performance, high scalability, and availability for large-scale distributed environments. The main challenge is reducing the significant disk input/output (I/O) overhead as a result of constantly accessing the disk to identify duplicate chunks. Existing inline de-duplication approaches mainly rely on duplicate locality to avoid disk bottleneck, thus suffering from degradation under poor duplicate locality workload. This paper presents Chunkfarm, a post-processing de-duplication backup system designed to improve capacity, throughput, and scalability for de-duplication. Chunkfarm performs de-duplication backup using the hash join algorithm, which turns the notoriously random and small disk I/Os of fingerprint lookups and updates into large sequential disk I/Os, hence achieving high write throughput not influenced by workload locality. More importantly, by decentralizing fingerprint lookup and update, Chunkfarm supports a cluster of servers to perform de-duplication backup in parallel; it hence is conducive to distributed implementation and thus applicable to large-scale and distributed storage systems.
How Old Is the Most Recent Ancestor of Two Copies of an Allele?

An important clue to the evolutionary history of an allele is the structure of the neighboring region of the genome, which we term the genomic background of the allele. Consider two copies of the allele. How similar we expect their genomic background to be is strongly influenced by the age of their most recent common ancestor (MRCA). We apply diffusion theory, first used by Motoo Kimura as a tool for predicting the changes in allele frequencies over time and developed by him in many articles in this journal, to prove a variety of new results on the age of the MRCA under the simplest demographic assumptions. In particular, we show that the expected age of the MRCA of two copies of an allele with population frequency f is just 2Nf generations, where N is the effective population size. Our results are a first step in running exact coalescent simulations, where we also simulate the history of the population frequency of an allele.
The Arabidopsis Transcription Factor MYB77 Modulates Auxin Signal Transduction[W]

Auxin is a key plant hormone that regulates plant development, apical dominance, and growth-related tropisms, such as phototropism and gravitropism. In this study, we report a new Arabidopsis thaliana transcription factor, MYB77, that is involved in auxin response. In MYB77 knockout plants, we found that auxin-responsive gene expression was greatly attenuated. Lateral root density in the MYB77 knockout was lower than the wild type at low concentrations of indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) and also under low nutrient conditions. MYB77 interacts with auxin response factors (ARFs) in vitro through the C terminus (domains III and IV) of ARFs and the activation domain of MYB77. A synergistic genetic interaction was demonstrated between MYB77 and ARF7 that resulted in a strong reduction in lateral root numbers. Experiments with protoplasts confirmed that the coexpression of MYB77 and an ARF C terminus enhance reporter gene expression. R2R3 MYB transcription factors have not been previously implicated in regulating the expression of auxin-inducible genes. Also it was previously unknown that ARFs interact with proteins other than those in the Aux/IAA family via conserved domains. The interaction between MYB77 and ARFs defines a new type of combinatorial transcriptional control in plants. This newly defined transcription factor interaction is part of the plant cells' repertoire for modulating response to auxin, thereby controlling lateral root growth and development under changing environmental conditions.
Rational Design of an Active Avidin Monomer*

Homotetrameric chicken avidin that binds four molecules of biotin was converted to a monomeric form (monoavidin) by mutations of two interface residues: tryptophan 110 in the 1 → 2 interface was mutated to lysine and asparagine 54 in the 1 → 4 interface was converted to alanine. The affinity for biotin binding of the mutant decreased from K d ∼10−15 m of the wild-type tetramer to K d ∼10−7 m, which was studied by an optical biosensor IAsys and by a fluorescence spectroscopical method in solution. The binding was completely reversible. Conversion of the tetramer to a monomer results in increased sensitivity to proteinase K digestion. The antigenic properties of the mutated protein were changed, such that monoavidin was only partially recognized by a polyclonal antibody whereas two different monoclonal antibodies entirely failed to recognize the avidin monomer. This new monomeric avidin, which binds biotin reversibly, may be useful for applications both in vitro and in vivo. It may also shed light on the effect of intersubunit interactions on the binding of ligands.
Toward understanding the functional relevance of white matter deficits in bipolar disorder.

understanding how neural systems go awry in psychiatric disorders. advanced imaging methods go beyond the study of isolated brain areas, probing the connections within neural networks. Diffusion imaging (DI) assesses white matter (WM) microstructure, us about the physical state of these connections (the wiring within a system). DI published in bipolar disorder (BD) in the most commonly reporting lower fractional anisotropy (FA) in a range of different brain areas. issue of JAMA Psychiatry an important contribution to the DI literature in a study with a large enough sample to address 2 important questions in DI BD research: where WM deficits are most consistent and how abnormalities vary across subtypes of BD. In report findings from the largest sample to date using advanced methods to examine WM integrity in an international sample of 118 patients with BD and 86 healthy control individuals across 3 countries. This study used a standard DI acquisition on identical 3-T platforms, with application of a q-ball model for analysis followed by tractography to delineate 22 WM tracts. The authors examined generalized FA (GFA; similar to diffusion tensor imaging’s FA) within these tracts between patients with BD and healthy control individuals. Replicating and extending previous smaller studies, they confirmed lower GFA in the corpus callosum, cingulum, and arcuate fasciculus in patients with BD. Furthermore, they compared how GFA differed in subgroups of patients with BD with vs without psychosis, finding lower GFA in the body of the corpus callosum in the patients with psychosis. This finding makes intuitive sense: the patient group with more severe psychopathology showed a more severe biological abnormality. biological abnormalities are associated with risk for illness and are present before illness onset. A multiple-hit principle more general to psychopathology may apply, in which when less extensive deficits occur, they represent vulnerabilities that can be overcome by using other strengths in the system, but that when more extensive aberrations occur, they impact network dynamics sufficiently to impair function.
Phylogeny and Identification of Pantoea Species and Typing of Pantoea agglomerans Strains by Multilocus Gene Sequencing

ABSTRACT Pantoea agglomerans and other Pantoea species cause infections in humans and are also pathogenic to plants, but the diversity of Pantoea strains and their possible association with hosts and disease remain poorly known, and identification of Pantoea species is difficult. We characterized 36 Pantoea strains, including 28 strains of diverse origins initially identified as P. agglomerans, by multilocus gene sequencing based on six protein-coding genes, by biochemical tests, and by antimicrobial susceptibility testing. Phylogenetic analysis and comparison with other species of Enterobacteriaceae revealed that the genus Pantoea is highly diverse. Most strains initially identified as P. agglomerans by use of API 20E strips belonged to a compact sequence cluster together with the type strain, but other strains belonged to diverse phylogenetic branches corresponding to other species of Pantoea or Enterobacteriaceae and to probable novel species. Biochemical characteristics such as fosfomycin resistance and utilization of d-tartrate could differentiate P. agglomerans from other Pantoea species. All 20 strains of P. agglomerans could be distinguished by multilocus sequence typing, revealing the very high discrimination power of this method for strain typing and population structure in this species, which is subdivided into two phylogenetic groups. PCR detection of the repA gene, associated with pathogenicity in plants, was positive in all clinical strains of P. agglomerans, suggesting that clinical and plant-associated strains do not form distinct populations. We provide a multilocus gene sequencing method that is a powerful tool for Pantoea species delineation and identification and for strain tracking.
Mortality in women with turner syndrome in Great Britain: a national cohort study.

CONTEXT Turner syndrome is characterized by complete or partial X chromosome monosomy. It is associated with substantial morbidity, but mortality risks and causes of death are not well described. OBJECTIVES Our objective was to investigate mortality and causes of death in women with Turner syndrome. DESIGN AND SETTING We constructed a cohort of women diagnosed with Turner syndrome at almost all cytogenetic centers in Great Britain and followed them for mortality. PATIENTS A total of 3,439 women diagnosed between 1959-2002 were followed to the end of 2006. OUTCOME MEASURES Standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) and absolute excess risks were evaluated. RESULTS In total, 296 deaths occurred. Mortality was significantly raised overall [SMR = 3.0; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 2.7-3.4] and was raised for nearly all major causes of death. Circulatory disease accounted for 41% of excess mortality, with greatest SMRs for aortic aneurysm (SMR = 23.6; 95% CI = 13.8-37.8) and aortic valve disease (SMR = 17.9; 95% CI = 4.9-46.0), but SMRs were also raised for other circulatory conditions. Other major contributors to raised mortality included congenital cardiac anomalies, diabetes, epilepsy, liver disease, noninfectious enteritis and colitis, renal and ureteric disease, and pneumonia. Absolute excess risks of death were considerably greater at older than younger ages. CONCLUSIONS Mortality in women with Turner syndrome is 3-fold higher than in the general population, is raised for almost all major causes of death, and is raised at all ages, with the greatest excess mortality in older adulthood. These risks need consideration in follow-up and counseling of patients and add to reasons for continued follow-up and preventive measures in adult, not just pediatric, care.
Ehrlichia chaffeensis and Anaplasma phagocytophilum Lack Genes for Lipid A Biosynthesis and Incorporate Cholesterol for Their Survival

ABSTRACT Ehrlichia chaffeensis and Anaplasma phagocytophilum are agents of human monocytic and granulocytic ehrlichioses, respectively. They are extremely sensitive to mechanical stress and are pleomorphic gram-negative bacteria. Membrane incorporation of cholesterol from the eukaryotic host is known to be essential for other fragile and pleomorphic bacteria and mycoplasmas that lack a cell wall. Thus, we tested whether cholesterol is required for E. chaffeensis and A. phagocytophilum. Using a freeze fracture technique and biochemical analysis, these bacteria were found to contain significant levels of membrane cholesterol. These bacteria lack genes for cholesterol biosynthesis or modification. However, host cell-free bacteria had the ability to take up directly exogenous cholesterol or NBD-cholesterol, a fluorescent cholesterol derivative. Treatment of the bacteria with cholesterol extraction reagent methyl-β-cyclodextrin caused their ultrastructural changes. Furthermore, pretreatment of the bacteria with methyl-β-cyclodextrin or NBD-cholesterol deprived these bacteria of the ability to infect leukocytes, thus killing these obligate intracellular bacteria. Analysis of E. chaffeensis and A. phagocytophilum genome sequences revealed that these bacteria lack all genes for the biosynthesis of lipid A and most genes for the biosynthesis of peptidoglycan, which confer structural strength to gram-negative bacteria. Taken together, these results suggest that human ehrlichiosis agents became cholesterol dependent due to the loss of these genes. As the first report of gram-negative bacteria incorporating cholesterol for survival, these findings offer insight into the unique nature of their parasitism and imply that cholesterol is important in the control of human ehrlichioses.