Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Endogenous Pyrogen Release from Rabbit Blood Cells Incubated in vitro with Parainfluenza Virus

Rabbit blood cells incubated in vitro with purified parainfluenza-5 virus (DA strain) released a rapidly acting pyrogen. Spleen and lymph node cells were inactive. The pyrogen resembled in behavior a pyrogen extracted from granulocytic exudates. Similar cells in the blood are believed to be activated by virus in vivo to produce the circulating endogenous pyrogen that mediates virus-induced fever.
Effect of Zoledronic Acid Application on Different Graft Materials in Calvarial Bone Defect Models. An Experimental Analysis.

OBJECTIVE To determine the effect of zoledronic acid on graft materials in bone calvarial defects. STUDY DESIGN Eighty adult (12 weeks) Sprague-Dawley male rats weighing from 300-350 g were divided into groups: calvarial defect, calvarial defect + synthetic graft, and calvarial defect + xenograft. All groups received zoledronate intravenously for a week after surgery and were sacrificed at either 6 or 12 weeks after their operation. The rat calvariae were fixed in 10% neutral buffered formalin before decalcification in 10% ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid for 20 days. Calvarial bone samples were then dehydrated and processed for embedding in paraffin wax. Sections 5 μm thick were stained with hematoxylin and eosin and examined by light microscopy. RESULTS The effects of zoledronic acid, a third-generation nitrogen-containing bisphosphonate, on different graft materials in rats with critical-size calvarial defects were analyzed and compared. Significantly less graft resorption was identified in zoledronic acid-treated rats that had received a xenograft than in either the untreated rats or those with a synthetic graft. In the xenograft group primary ossification was visible at week 12, and the graft had entered the bone to a greater extent than in the other experimental groups or in the control group. Osseous structures were also observed more clearly in this group than in the others. CONCLUSION Zoledronic acid histopathologic bone graft stimulates bone formation. Zoledronic acid may be considered among the therapeutic methods available to improve the bone formation process in calvarial bone formation.
Live Attenuated Influenza Vaccine contains Substantial and Unexpected Amounts of Defective Viral Genomic RNA

The live attenuated influenza vaccine FluMist® was withdrawn in the USA by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after its failure to provide adequate protective immunity during 2013–2016. The vaccine uses attenuated core type A and type B viruses, reconfigured each year to express the two major surface antigens of the currently circulating viruses. Here Fluenz™ Tetra, the European version of this vaccine, was examined directly for defective-interfering (DI) viral RNAs. DI RNAs are deleted versions of the infectious virus genome, and have powerful biological properties including attenuation of infection, reduction of infectious virus yield, and stimulation of some immune responses. Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction followed by cloning and sequencing showed that Fluenz™ vaccine contains unexpected and substantial amounts of DI RNA arising from both its influenza A and influenza B components, with 87 different DI RNA sequences identified. Flu A DI RNAs from segment 3 replaced the majority of the genomic full-length segment 3, thus compromising its infectivity. DI RNAs arise during vaccine production and non-infectious DI virus replaces infectious virus pro rata so that fewer doses of the vaccine can be made. Instead the vaccine carries a large amount of non-infectious but biologically active DI virus. The presence of DI RNAs could significantly reduce the multiplication in the respiratory tract of the vaccine leading to reduced immunizing efficacy and could also stimulate the host antiviral responses, further depressing vaccine multiplication. The role of DI viruses in the performance of this and other vaccines requires further investigation.
Integrin signaling cascades are operational in adult hippocampal synapses and modulate NMDA receptor physiology

Integrin class adhesion proteins are concentrated at adult brain synapses. Whether synaptic integrins engage kinase signaling cascades has not been determined, but is a question of importance to ideas about integrin involvement in functional synaptic plasticity. Accordingly, synaptoneurosomes from adult rat brain were used to test if matrix ligands activate integrin‐associated tyrosine kinases, and if integrin signaling targets include NMDA‐class glutamate neurotransmitter receptors. The integrin ligand peptide Gly‐Arg‐Gly‐Asp‐Ser‐Pro (GRGDSP) induced rapid (within 5 min) and robust increases in tyrosine phosphorylation of focal adhesion kinase, proline‐rich tyrosine kinase 2 and Src family kinases. Increases were similarly induced by the native ligand fibronectin, blocked with neutralizing antibodies to β1 integrin, and not obtained with control peptides, indicating that kinase activation was integrin‐mediated. Both GRGDSP and fibronectin caused rapid Src kinase‐dependent increases in tyrosine phosphorylation of NMDA receptor subunits NR2A and NR2B in synaptoneurosomes and acute hippocampal slices. Tests of the physiological significance of the latter result showed that ligand treatment caused a rapid and β1 integrin‐dependent increase in NMDA receptor‐mediated synaptic responses. These results provide the first evidence that, in adult brain, synaptic integrins activate local kinase cascades with potent effects on the operation of nearby neurotransmitter receptors implicated in synaptic plasticity.
Expression of human telomerase reverse transcriptase and cyclin‐D1 in olfactory neuroblastoma

Olfactory neuroblastoma is an uncommon neoplasm. Typically, these tumors are indolent with long‐standing symptomatology, but the fact that the lesions are indeed malignant has been proven by the repeated demonstration that they can metastasize to distant organs. Suitable prognostic factors are lacking and therapeutic strategy still remains controversial. Expression of human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) is associated with most human malignancies and high levels have been correlated with poor prognosis in many cancers. In comparison, overexpression of cyclin‐D1 occurs in several malignancies and has been associated with aggressive tumor behavior and poorer prognosis. In this study, we collected 16 olfactory neuroblastomas from the Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital. The aim was to investigate the value of immunoexpression of hTERT and cyclin‐D1 in correlation with clinicopathologic features of olfactory neuroblastoma. Low and high cyclin‐D1 expression was found in 6 and 10 cases, respectively. For hTERT, low and high protein expression was detected in 5 and 11 tumors, respectively. Cyclin‐D1 expression was not correlated with selected parameters. However, high hTERT expression was significantly correlated with high Kadish stage. In conclusion, high hTERT expression can be considered a potential indicator of aggressive olfactory neuroblastoma.
Association of family stress with natural killer cell activity and the frequency of illnesses in children.

OBJECTIVE To examine prospective associations between chronic stress in the parent-child and family systems and subsequent rates of illnesses and the activity of natural killer (NK) cells in children. DESIGN Prospective cohort study. SETTING The Golisano Children's Hospital at Strong, Rochester, NY, from July 1, 2001, to June 30, 2003. PARTICIPANTS One hundred sixty-nine socioeconomically and racially diverse children (aged 5-10 years) and their parents. Parents completed measures of their psychiatric symptoms and stress in the family every 6 months. Children's blood samples were obtained for NK cytotoxicity assays every 6 months. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Parent-reported total child illnesses and febrile illnesses and results of NK cell cytotoxicity assays. We estimated adjusted illness rate ratios and adjusted mean differences in NK activity. RESULTS Elevated parental psychiatric symptoms occurring with family stressors were associated with more total illnesses (rate ratio, 1.11; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.00-1.22) and febrile illnesses (rate ratio, 1.36; 95% CI, 1.13-1.64) in children. Natural killer cell function was enhanced in children whose parents reported more chronic stress (estimate, 0.15; 95% CI, 0.05-0.26). Natural killer cell function was not associated with short-term changes in stress. Stress-illness relationships were not associated with stress-related alterations in NK cell function. CONCLUSIONS Chronic family stress was associated with increased illnesses in children. Unlike older adults, children living with elevated chronic stress had enhanced rather than decreased NK cytotoxicity, suggesting chronic stress may have different effects on the developing immune system. Impaired parental functioning may be a mechanism linking family stress with adverse effects on children's health.
The application of simple adaptive control for simulated water hydraulic servo motor system

Because of the serious situation of environmental pollution all over the world, the water hydraulic technique using pure tap water as a pressure medium has become new drive source comparable to electric, oil hydraulic, and pneumatic drive systems. Furthermore, water hydraulics is also preferred because of its high power density, clean, high safety against fire hazards, and easy availability. However, the main problems for precise control in water hydraulic systems are steady state errors and overshoot due to its large friction torque and considerable leakage flow. In this study, a simple adaptive control (SAC) algorithm that is appropriate for dealing with these problems will be applied to a water hydraulic servo motor system for both angle and velocity controls. SAC also has simple, lower order structure, and few adaptive parameters; thus, it is high feasibility in real applications. For both angle and velocity controls using SAC, the tracking performances are good in simulation: 0.08 degree and almost 0 revolution per minute (min-1) for angle and velocity controls, respectively. The controllers also can highly attenuate the effects of disturbances.
From compliance to commitment: Centralization and public service motivation in different administrative regimes

Purpose - Building on institutional theories, the article tests the relationship of organizational centralization and public service motivation (PSM), and explores country's centralization effect on it. Design/methodology/approach - The quantitative analysis of 390 responses from 42 social care and labor market public service providers operating in two countries with opposite administrative regimes – decentralized Poland and centralized Belarus. Findings - The Polish sample confirms previous observations. Organizational centralization correlates with PSM, while PMS dimensions do not act in concert. In contrast to others, self-sacrifice is positively associated with increased centralization. A country’s context has a strong mediating effect. The Belarusian sample revealed no relationship between organizational centralization and PSM. Because the main difference with Poland lies in the politico-administrative organization of the public sector, the findings suggest further examination of the county’s centralization effects. - Democracy is not an imperative for higher PSM. Belarusian employees scored higher than the Polish on attraction to public service. Centralization of state administration does not necessarily indicate higher centralization in separate executive units. Polish organizations scored similar or higher on the questions of organizational centralization. - Research limitations/implications Context factors correlate differently with separate PSM dimensions, therefore, researchers should always look at PSM as a complex concept. Robust assertions about country’s centralization effect will require further tests on a larger sample of countries with different administrative regimes. - Practical implications HR managers in decentralized Poland could modify employees’ PSM behavior by altering the centralization level of an organization. In highly centralized Belarus, employees’ PSM is less responsive to centralization changes, thus, HR managers should recruit individuals with the initially high PSM. - Originality/value First PSM study with the primary data collected in a nondemocratic country; first study to simultaneously address centralization on organizational and country levels.
[The role of marine amphipods in the life cycles of the cestode genus Microsomacanthus at Bering Sea coast of Chukchi Peninsula. First results of the investigation].

Investigation of the helminth fauna was carried out in different amphipode species at Bering Sea coast of Chukchi Peninsula in July-September 2004. More than 3700 amphipode specimens of the following three species were examined: Lagunogammarus setosus Dementieva, 1931 (n = 2772 specimens) (Gammaridae), Eogammarus barbatus Tzvetkova, 1965 (n = 471), and Spinulogammarus subcarinatus (Bate, 1862) (n = 509) (Anisogammaridae). Numerous metacestodes of four hymenolepidid species from the genus Microsomacanthus Lopez-Neyra, 1945 were found, namely gull parasites M. ductilis (Linton, 1927) and M. lari (Yamaguti, 1940) comb. n. , and eider parasites M. minimus Ryjikov, 1965 and M. somateriae Ryjikov, 1965. Relative selectivity of cestodes in the choice of intermediate host is revealed: M. ductilis and M. somateriae are found on L. setosus only, while M. minimus and M. lari are found in both species of anisogammarids. Brief descriptions and figures of metacestodes are given; data on extensiveness and intensity of the intermediate hosts invasion in six collection localities are provided. The greatest extensiveness of invasion is recorded in L. setosus (E. I. in M. ductilis was 1.98 %, in M. somateriae - 1.84 %). The identification of metacestodes is confirmed by the finding of mature cestodes of all above species in two Pacific eider specimens (Somateria mollissima var. nigrum) and three gull specimens (one Larus argentatus and two L. hyperboreus) captured in the area where the largest sample of Gammaridae was collected.
Effect of exacerbation frequency on body composition and serum ghrelin and adiponectin concentrations in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

UNLABELLED INTRODUCTION Exacerbations affect the natural history of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). OBJECTIVES The aim of the study was to evaluate the effect of exacerbation frequency in COPD on body composition and systemic inflammation assessed by the measurement of serum adiponectin and ghrelin concentrations. PATIENTS AND METHODS The study group included 152 patients with COPD. Body composition was assessed by bioimpedance. Fasting serum adiponectin and ghrelin concentrations were evaluated by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays. RESULTS Of the 152 patients, 60 did not report any exacerbation in the last 12 months, 53 had 1 exacerbation, and 39 had more than 1 exacerbation. The mean number of exacerbations in the whole group was 1.04 ±1.3 per patient per year and increased with the increasing degree of airway obstruction. Patients with exacerbations had a lower fat-free mass (FFM) index, lower total body water, and lower resting metabolic rate compared with patients without exacerbations (18.3 ±2.5 kg/m2 vs. 19.3 ±2.7 kg/m2; 36.9 ±8.1 kg vs. 40.2 ±8.0 kg; and 1482.8 ±301.1 kcal vs. 1616.0 ±322.0 kcal; respectively). The adiponectin concentration was higher in patients with more than 1 exacerbation than in those with 1 or no exacerbations (14.5 ±8.6 mg/l vs. 11.2 ±7.6 mg/l, P <0.05). We observed significant negative correlations between the number of exacerbations and the muscle mass index, FFM index, total body water, resting metabolic rate, and adiponectin concentration in the whole group. CONCLUSIONS Exacerbations affect body composition in patients with COPD. Patients with frequent exacerbations have more enhanced systemic inflammation. Assessment of the body composition and systemic inflammation should be part of the routine management of patients with COPD.
Sexually transmitted infections and older people.

This article aims to raise awareness of the probability of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the older population and to challenge beliefs around the sexual health needs of the older adult. It also aims to alert nurses and other carers to the dangerous consequences of ignoring the possibility of STIs and not providing adequate health screening or education for people over the age of 60. After working through this article you should be able to: ■ Recognise that someone over the age of 60 is as much a sexual being as someone younger. ■ Understand that people over the age of 60 are no more immune to STIs than any other age group. ■ Describe major STIs that can affect any age group. ■ Apply knowledge to practice experiences. ■ Discuss the consequences of not providing equality of care around sexual health for older people. ■ Know what, when and where to refer on to specialist services.
Toxicity of phorbol esters for human epithelial cells expressing a mutant ras Oncogene

Phorbol esters and related compounds provide a promising source of potential anticancer agents. The mechanism of their toxicity, however, is unclear, and interpretation has been complicated by the conflicting responses exhibited by different transformed cell lines. Previously we showed that in primary thyroid follicular cells, expression of mutant p21ras conferred a striking sensitivity to the toxic effects of phorbol esters. We have now extended this work using a thyroid cell line with an inducible mutant ras gene to exclude the possibility that this result was a trivial consequence of the marked growth stimulation induced in these cells by mutant p21ras. Furthermore, by assessing the action of a panel of phorbol esters and a potential chemotherapeutic agent, bryostatin, we demonstrated that this phenomenon was only a function of biologically active phorbol esters. These results provide a molecular rationale for the development of phorbol ester analogues as chemotherapeutic agents.
Combining Conditional Random Fields and first-order logic for modeling hidden content structure in sentiment analysis

The paper develops a connection between the first-order logic representation and the content structure model in sentiment analysis applications. We propose a modified semi-supervised approach to study the word-level content structure with well-designed first-order logic features. The word-level content structure is the Conditional Random Fields (CRF) with latent word-level topic nodes. Introducing first-order logic features into our model can solve the long-distance dependency problem. The new approach is applied to two multi-aspect sentiment analysis tasks: the multi-aspect sentence labeling task and the multi-aspect rating prediction task. We use the data from Amazon corpus and movie-review corpus. We compare our method with other three hidden nodes graphical models, i.e. the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), the Hidden-Unit CRF (HUCRF), and the Content Structure using CRF (CSCRF, which is considered as our sentence-level baseline). Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the sentence-level baseline by 2.1% of the F1 measure in the multi-aspect sentence labeling task, and by 2.1% of the Accuracy in the rating prediction task. Our method outperforms other two methods at most by 16.6% and 10.3% separately in the multi-aspect sentence labeling task and the rating prediction task. By using 3000 unlabeled documents, our method improves the F1-measure in the multi-aspect sentence labeling task by 8.2%, and improves the Accuracy in the rating prediction task by 3.0%, using 400 unlabeled reviews.
Automated Diagnosis of Lung Cancer with the Use of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks on Chest CT

For the past several decades, machine learning has greatly enhanced the process of image analysis. With the development of deep learning technologies in the 21st century, image recognition has gained applicability to various technologies such as automated driving system, face recognition and medical data processing. This research attempts to diagnose lung cancer using chest CT of patients and non-patients. A modified form of Deep Convolutional Neural Network is introduced, which involves using multiple 2D convolutional neural networks on individual slices and combining the results to diagnose patients and non-patients. Each patient/non-patient's chest CT data were first segmented for the lung features and stored into three-dimensional arrays. The preprocessed three-dimensional arrays were fed into the CNN framework, and the parameters of the network were trained. Many iterations of the process with enough data modified network parameters in a way that the network was able to diagnose CT scans of patients with accuracy between 70~80%.
[Environment and the immune system].

A large number of xenobiotics (i. e. chemicals, drugs and biologicals) may adversely affect the immune system in consequence of different mechanisms: 1) the capacity of a large variety of xenobiotics to cause an allergic sensitization and different types of allergic sequelae (e.g. bronchial asthma, rhinitis, hypersensitivity pneumonitis, contact dermatitis); 2) the adjuvant effect, potentiating the IgE mediated immuno-response against ubiquitous allergens (e.g. pollens); 3) the direct or indirect action on the immune system, at doses that did not cause overt toxicity. This effect is studied by a new discipline, called Immunotoxicology; 4) the indirect action on the target organ, which facilitate the onset of respiratory symptoms in previously asymptomatic subjects. The widespread distributions of xenobiotics in the environment suggests that our current knowledge of their adverse health effects may represent only the tip of the iceberg and that exposure to such immunotoxic agents may play a greater role than heretofore suspected in disease causation. The exposure to immunotoxic agents in the workplace might represent and additional risk to HIV positive individuals.
What causes city growth? A cross-country examination

Cities are viewed as key to endogenous economic growth, yet there is a debate regarding the channel through which the agglomeration of workers and industries benefits growth: competition, specialization, or industrial diversity. We investigate how this mechanism varies across countries. Using firm level data from 10 countries across Europe, we construct the first comparable measures of local competition, regional specialization and industrial diversity to test which channel best explains city level employment growth in each country and industry in our sample. We find that the results established in the USA (competition and industrial diversity are positively associated with employment growth, while specialization negatively so) are generally robust across our sample of European countries. This is commonly interpreted as evidence for what is termed a Jacobs externality within the urban economics literature. We do find large differences across countries. Cities in Germany experience four times as much employment growth as cities in France from increased industrial diversity. Examining the results on a country-industry basis reveals that Germany typically enjoys the largest and the most frequent benefits from industrial diversity, while France the smallest and the least frequent.