Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
In Vivo and Ex vivo experimental MPI angiography with high selection field strength and tailored SPIO nanoparticles

MPI shows great promise for safe angiography, blood pool, and perfusion imaging. MPI images have unprecedented contrast that enables unambiguous measurements of tracer quantity and location [1-4]. At present, pre-clinical MPI resolution does not compare with pre-clinical MRI and CT, which routinely achieve better than 100-micron resolution. MPI's low resolution is primarily due to limitations in MPI hardware and magnetic nanoparticles. To begin to close this resolution gap, we are developing higher-field MPI gradients [3] and specialized MPI magnetic nanoparticles [4]. Since MPI resolution improves with stronger selection field gradients, we recently completed construction of a high-field MPI imager with a 7 T/m × 3.5 T/m × 3.5 T/m magnetic field gradient. Further, magnetic nanoparticles developed specifically for MPI show dramatic improvements in resolution and SNR over commercially available nanoparticles such as Resovist (BayerSchering) [4]. In this work, we demonstrate that combining these two breakthroughs enable improvements in MPI angiography images that begin to close the gap between MPI and pre-clinical MRI and CT.
Factors associated with adolescent use of doping agents: anabolic-androgenic steroids.

AIMS The purpose was to assess the importance of risk factors such as socio-demographics, sports activities, tobacco use, alcohol consumption, use of certain psychotropic substances and violence in the use of doping agents in adolescents. DESIGN Cross-sectional survey using anonymous closed response questionnaire. SETTING Eight senior high schools in Uppsala, Sweden. PARTICIPANTS A total of 2742 senior high school students; 1592 were in their first year (aged 16-17 years) and 1150 in their third (aged 18-19 years). FINDINGS Multiple logistic regression analyses revealed that strength training, tobacco use, heavy alcohol consumption, truancy at least once a week and living alone were significantly independently associated in the use of doping agents. Further, the study showed that use of cannabis oil, LSD, amphetamine and opioids were related specifically to anabolic-androgenic steroid use. CONCLUSIONS Use of doping agents probably involves more than a desire to enhance appearance or sports performance and appears to have much in common with use of alcohol, tobacco and psychotropic drugs.
Defective Lymphoid Development in Mice Lacking Jak3

The Janus tyrosine kinases (Jaks) play a central role in signaling through cytokine receptors. Although Jak1, Jak2, and Tyk2 are widely expressed, Jak3 is predominantly expressed in hematopoietic cells and is known to associate only with the common γ (γc) chain of the interleukin (IL)-2, IL-4, IL-7, IL-9, and IL-15 receptors. Homozygous mutant mice in which the Jak3 gene had been disrupted were generated by gene targeting. Jak3-deficient mice had profound reductions in thymocytes and severe B cell and T cell lymphopenia similar to severe combined immunodeficiency disease (SCID), and the residual T cells and B cells were functionally deficient. Thus, Jak3 plays a critical role in γc signaling and lymphoid development.
Monitoring batch processes using multi-model discriminant partial least squares

Multiway principal component analysis (MPCA) has been successfully used to monitor batch processes. But, there exist two problems when MPCA is used to monitor batch processes. One is that the process data must submit normal distribution. Another is that MPCA need complete batch data for online monitoring, so the values from the current until the end of its operation must been estimated or filled in. To overcome those problems, a novel monitoring method, multi-model discriminant partial least squares (multi-model DPLS), is presented. The proposed method is proved to be effective by the application of an industrial streptomycin fermentation process.
Working Papers 151 A needs theory of governance

New-institutional economics hypothesizes imperfect rationality, self-seeking preferences, monetary-related needs, and opportunism as fundamental features of human behavior. Consistently, new-institutionalist models of governance highlight the efficiency and transaction costs minimizing features of control rights and governance. Differently, needs theory of governance, as here presented, hypothesizes imperfect rationality, multiple needs, and reciprocity, in which case opportunism is reduced to an exception to individual behavior. Consistently, it presents a theory that links production governance with the wellbeing of those partaking in production. Building on Maslow’s human psychology, the governance model suggested in this paper is aimed at evidencing the self-actualization potential of control rights, organizational structures and practices. The application of Maslow’s theory to the institutional structure of organizations suggests that the deepest organizational layers (control rights and governance) broadly correspond to the most basic needs in Maslow’s theory (survival, security and belonging), while the outer layers (managerial models and employment relations) correspond to the fulfillment of the highest needs (self-esteem and self-actualization). Cooperative firms are used as an illustration of governance solutions consistent with needs theory in human psychology.
Involvement of mechanisms dependent on NMDA receptors, nitric oxide and protein kinase A in the hippocampus but not in the caudate nucleus in memory

The effects of the NMDA receptor antagonist AP5, the nitric oxide synthase (NO) inhibitor NO-arg or the protein kinase A (PKA) inhibitor KTS720 on memory were evaluated. Rats bilaterally implanted in the CA1 region of the dorsal hippocampus were trained and tested in a step-down inhibitory avoidance task, and rats unilaterally implanted in the left posteroventral region of the caudate nucleus were trained and tested in a cued water maze task. Previous findings from this and other laboratories had found that lesions or pharmacological treatments of these sites significantly altered memory of these two tasks. Immediately after training, animals received intrahippocampal or intracaudate 0.5 µl microinfusions of saline, AP5, NO-arg or KT5720. All three drugs impaired retention of inhibitory avoidance, but did not affect retention of the cued water maze. The findings suggest that NMDA receptor-, NO- and PKA-mediated processes in the dorsal hippocampus, but not in the caudate nucleus, are involved in memory.
1 Characterizing and Modeling Patching Practices of Industrial Control Systems

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are widely deployed in mission critical infrastructures such as manufacturing, energy, and transportation. The mission critical nature of ICS devices poses important security challenges for ICS vendors and asset owners. In particular, the patching of ICS devices is usually deferred to scheduled production outages so as to prevent potential operational disruption of critical systems. Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence suggests that ICS devices are riddled with security vulnerabilities that are not patched in a timely manner, which leaves them vulnerable to exploitation by hackers, nation states, and hacktivist organizations. In this paper, we present the results from our longitudinal measurement and characterization study of ICS patching behavior. Our study is based on IP scan data collected from Shodan over the duration of three years for more than 500 known industrial ICS protocols and products. Our longitudinal measurements reveal the impact of vulnerability disclosures on ICS patching. Our analysis of more than 100 thousand Internet-exposed ICS devices reveals that about 50% upgrade to newer patched versions within 60 days of a vulnerability disclosure. Based on our measurement and analysis, we further propose a variation of the Bass model to forecast the patching behavior of ICS devices. The evaluation shows that our proposed models have comparable prediction accuracy when contrasted against traditional ARIMA timeseries forecasting models, while requiring less parameters and being amenable to direct physical interpretation.
Effect of membrane fluidity on tyrosine kinase activity of reconstituted epidermal growth factor receptor.

Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) was functionally reconstituted into liposome membrane. Triton X-100 was removed by Bio-beads SM-2. More than 80% of the reconstituted EGFR possessed right-side-out orientation with the EGF binding side facing the medium. The tyrosine kinase assay of the EGFR was carried out in the presence of the antibiotic alamethicin. The reconstituted EGFR tyrosine kinase was well activated by EGF. The influence of lipid composition on tyrosine kinase activity was investigated. Introduction of cholesterol into the dioleoylphophatidylcholine (DOPC) liposome membrane resulted in the decrease of tyrosine kinase activity. The tyrosine kinase activity of EGFR in distearylphosphatidylcholine liposome was much lower than that of EGFR-DOPC proteoliposome. Results indicated the importance of membrane fluidity on the apparent tyrosine kinase activity of reconstituted EGFR.
No guidance is provided for situations for which evidence is lacking

EDITOR,--The paradigm of evidence based medicine provides clear guidance for making decisions about the delivery of health care in populations.1 2 Therefore, it must be qualified so that it can be used for managing specific patients. Evidence based medicine finds answers only to those questions open to its techniques; randomised controlled trials are its capstone. Other types of evidence, including natural observations and pathophysiological principles, are ranked lower and heavily discounted. Nevertheless, for many rare disorders and an increasing number of subgroups …
Palliative chemotherapy

Incurable malignancy is the most common diagnosis of hospice patients, comprising about 80 percent of terminal conditions. Expected survivals of patients with similar diagnoses of locally advanced or metastatic, incurable cancers vary widely. Many patients with incurable malignancies will have prolonged expected survivals either due to effective anticancer treatments or a relatively indolent history of their malignancy. Patients with cancer may be referred to hospice inappropriately without previous consideration of possibly beneficial anticancer treatments. Thus, it is important for the hospice professional to be able to sense when patients should be referred to an oncologic specialist for evaluation for chemotherapy or other cancer therapies. Chemotherapy is rarely considered a “palliative” treatment for most hospice patients, but if effective, it certainly may improve patients’ symptoms. Whether it is appropriate to administer chemotherapy in a hospice setting is a controversial issue and one that must be addressed on a case-bycase and hospice-by-hospice basis. This paper will review some specific aspects of “palliative chemotherapy” in the hospice or prehospice patient setting. Palliative chemotherapy in this sense refers to the use of antineoplastic medications to affect the cancer and to reduce the adverse signs and symptoms caused either directly or indirectly by the malignant disease process. The myriad of cancer-related problems can affect any organ system. Health care providers intuitively realize that significant tumor responses to chemotherapy usually are associated with a decrease in malignancy-induced symptoms. A response to chemotherapy should positively affect the patient’s quality of life if the treatments are well tolerated.
Randomized trial in advanced ovarian cancer comparing cisplatin and carboplatin.

The aim of this multicenter randomized trial was to compare carboplatin (400 mg/m2) and cisplatin (100 mg/m2) in patients with untreated advanced epithelial ovarian cancer. Toxicity and treatment efficacy assessed by pathological response rate, progression-free survival, and survival were the endpoints of the study. One hundred seventy-three patients with advanced epithelial ovarian cancer, F.I. G.O. (International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics) stage III and IV were accrued in the trial. The median follow-up time was 15 months (maximum, 34); three patients in each treatment arm were not eligible (four, nonepithelial ovarian cancer type; one, no data, and one, stage II). Patient characteristics were similar in the two groups. In the carboplatin-treatment arm, the overall pathological response rate was 57.3% and the complete pathological response rate was 26.8%. In the cisplatin-treatment arm, the overall pathological response rate was 71.6% and the complete pathological response rate was 24.7%. There was no statistical difference in the two arms in survival or progression-free survival. Cisplatin was more nephrotoxic while carboplatin induced a higher degree of myelosuppression, especially thrombocytopenia; however, severe hematological toxicity was seldom observed. Carboplatin is a cisplatin analog with definite activity in ovarian cancer, but it is more active than the parent compound. Because of less nonhematological toxicity, carboplatin is undoubtedly a useful substitute in patients who cannot be given cisplatin. Further experience is needed to indicate whether or not carboplatin should completely displace cisplatin in the clinical treatment of ovarian cancer.
Editorial: betaretrovirus in biliary epithelia of patients with autoimmune and cryptogenic liver disease

To better understand its role in liver disease, Wang et al. quantitated the prevalence of genomic integration and/or ribonucleic acid expression of human betaretrovirus (HBRV), a member of one of seven retrovirus genera, in a diverse cohort of patients with liver disease. The primary emphasis was to study patients who had endstage cirrhosis due to primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC, n = 39). However, the study population also included patients with autoimmune hepatitis (AIH, n = 8), cryptogenic liver disease (n = 5), and a comparator ‘other liver’ disease group consisting of patients with primary sclerosing cholangitis (n = 19), nonbiliary/autoimmune acute or chronic liver disease (n = 23), and focal nodular hyperplasia or haemangioma resection (n = 4). Three specimen types, when available, were examined: liver homogenates, peri-hepatic lymph node homogenates and biliary epithelial cell (i.e. cholangiocytes) isolates. Methods used included (i) polymerase chain reaction techniques coupled with bioinformatics and (ii) in situ hybridisation. The investigators detected unique HBRV integrations and/or RNA expression in the majority of PBC samples, especially within cholangiocytes. HBRV integrations and/ or RNA expression were also commonly detected in AIH (some of which were anti-mitochondrial antibody positive) and cryptogenic disease but only rarely seen in patients who were classified as ‘other liver’ disease. HBRV detection rates varied depending on the type of specimen and the method of detection that was used. Overall, these data suggest a role for HBRV in the pathogenesis of a subset of patients with PBC and also possibly AIH and cryptogenic liver disease, thus extending prior findings reported in animal models as well as in patients. These results are intriguing, but how and whether HBRV is pathogenic in autoimmune and idiopathic liver diseases still remains unclear and somewhat challenged by (i) HBRV being present in the liver of both normal controls as well as patients with alcoholic liver disease, (ii) the association of retroviruses with malignancy yet the nonincreased risk of cholangiocarcinoma in PBC and AIH, and (iii) viral presence being an epiphenomenon of the immunocompromised state of these patients (due to pharmacotherapy or severe illness). Nevertheless, given the growing evidence suggesting an important role for liver-gene-environmental interactions in chronic liver disease, particularly immune-mediated cholangiohepatopathies, continued efforts to elucidate mechanisms and potential clinico-therapeutic implications seem warranted.
An Improved Hyperspectral Classification Algorithm Based on Back-Propagation Neural Networks

In this paper, a new method is proposed to improve the classification performance of hyperspectral images by combining the principal component analysis (PCA), genetic algorithm (GA), and artificial neural networks (ANNs). First, some characteristics of the hyperspectral remotely sensed data, such as high correlation, high redundancy, etc., are investigated. Based on the above analysis, we propose to use the principal component analysis to capture the main information existing in the hyperspectral images and reduce its dimensionality consequently. Next, we use neural networks to classify the reduced hyperspectral data. Since the back-propagation neural network we used is easy to suffer from the local minimum problem, we adopt a genetic algorithm to optimize the BP network's weights and the threshold. Experimental results show that the classification accuracy is improved and the time of calculation is reduced as well.
Fair Factorizations of the Complete Multipartite Graph and Related Edge-Colorings

In this dissertation, first the technique of vertex amalgamations is used to extend known results on graph decompositions, and in particular on decompositions of the complete multipartite graph K(n, p) with p parts, each of which has n vertices. The decompositions focus on hamilton cycles and 1-factors that satisfy certain fairness notions, as well as frame versions of these results where each color class (as defined by the decompositions) spans all vertices except for those in one part. Second, some edge-coloring results are proved, extending theorems in the literature on edge-colorings with different fairness properties. Finally, a related new topic is introduced, focusing on equalizing the number of vertices in each color class of an edge-coloring.
Insecticidal Activity of Plant Essential Oils Against Pediculus humanus capitis (Anoplura: Pediculidae)

Abstract The insecticidal activity of 54 plant essential oils against female Pediculus humanus capitis De Geer was examined using direct contact and fumigation methods, and compared with the lethal activity of δ-phenothrin and pyrethrum, two commonly used pediculicides. In a filter paper contact bioassay with female P. humanus capitis, the pediculicidal activity was more pronounced in eucalyptus, marjoram, pennyroyal, and rosemary oils than in δ-phenothrin and pyrethrum on the basis of LT50 values at 0.0625 mg/cm2. At 0.125 mg/cm2, pediculicidal activity of cade, cardamone ceylon, clove bud, myrtle, rosewood, and sage oils was comparable with that of the test insecticides. In fumigation tests with female P. humanus capitis at 0.25 mg/cm2, eucalyptus, marjoram, pennyroyal, and rosemary oils were more effective in closed containers than in open ones, indicating that the effect of these oils was largely a result of action in the vapor phase. Neither δ-phenothrin nor pyrethrum exhibited fumigant toxicity. The essential oils described herein merit further study as potential control agents for P. humanus capitis.
Families of DFAs as Acceptors of ω-Regular Languages

Families of DFAs (FDFAs) provide an alternative formalism for recognizing $\omega$-regular languages. The motivation for introducing them was a desired correlation between the automaton states and right congruence relations, in a manner similar to the Myhill-Nerode theorem for regular languages. This correlation is beneficial for learning algorithms, and indeed it was recently shown that $\omega$-regular languages can be learned from membership and equivalence queries, using FDFAs as the acceptors. In this paper, we look into the question of how suitable FDFAs are for defining omega-regular languages. Specifically, we look into the complexity of performing Boolean operations, such as complementation and intersection, on FDFAs, the complexity of solving decision problems, such as emptiness and language containment, and the succinctness of FDFAs compared to standard deterministic and nondeterministic $\omega$-automata. We show that FDFAs enjoy the benefits of deterministic automata with respect to Boolean operations and decision problems. Namely, they can all be performed in nondeterministic logarithmic space. We provide polynomial translations of deterministic B\"uchi and co-B\"uchi automata to FDFAs and of FDFAs to nondeterministic B\"uchi automata (NBAs). We show that translation of an NBA to an FDFA may involve an exponential blowup. Last, we show that FDFAs are more succinct than deterministic parity automata (DPAs) in the sense that translating a DPA to an FDFA can always be done with only a polynomial increase, yet the other direction involves an inevitable exponential blowup in the worst case.
BslA, the S‐layer adhesin of B. anthracis, is a virulence factor for anthrax pathogenesis

Microbial pathogens use adhesive surface proteins to bind to and interact with host tissues, events that are universal for the pathogenesis of infectious diseases. A surface adhesin of Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax, required to mediate these steps has not been discovered. Previous work identified BslA, an S‐layer protein, to be necessary and sufficient for adhesion of the anthrax vaccine strain, Bacillus anthracis Sterne, to host cells. Here we asked whether encapsulated bacilli require BslA for anthrax pathogenesis in guinea pigs. Compared with the highly virulent parent strain B. anthracis Ames, bslA mutants displayed a dramatic increase in the lethal dose and in mean time‐to‐death. Whereas all tissues of animals infected with B. anthracis Ames contained high numbers of bacilli, only few vegetative forms could be recovered from internal organs of animals infected with the bslA mutant. Surface display of BslA occurred at the poles of encapsulated bacilli and enabled the binding of vegetative forms to host cells. Together these results suggest that BslA functions as the surface adhesin of the anthrax pathogen B. anthracis strain Ames.
[Effects of extracts of ginkgo biloba (EGB) on levels of nitric oxide and apoptosis in the retina induced by glutamate in adult rabbits].

OBJECTIVE To study the effects of extracts of ginkgo biloba (EGB) on the levels of nitric oxide (NO) and apoptosis in the retina induced by glutamate by intravitreal injection in adult rabbit. METHOD The model of apoptosis in retina induced by glutamate by intravitreal injection was established in adult rabbit and EGB was retrobulbarly injected. The levels of NO were measured by spectrophotometer. Retina DNA fragmentation was determined by agarose gel electrophoresis. RESULT The levels of NO in retina in experiment groups were significantly increased compared with controls, after treatment with high dosage of EGB, and levels of NO was decreased to normal. They were not decreased by injection of small dosage of EGB. DNA fragmentation of retina apoptosis was detected in experiment groups and small dosage EGB groups. CONCLUSION The retina apoptosis was induced by glutamate by intravitreal injection in adult rabbit and was inhibited by EGB that may be through blocking the generation of NO free radicals.