Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Simplified and efficient technique for designing of broadband patch antenna

In high-performance aircraft, spacecraft, satellite, and missile applications, where size, weight, cost, performance, ease of installation, and aerodynamic profile are constraints, and low-profile antennas may be required. Presently there are many other government and commercial applications, such as mobile radio and wireless communications that have similar specifications. To meet these requirements, microstrip antennas can be used. This paper presents a novel technique for design and development of a broadband patch antenna by loading reactively with slots placed in such a manner it closely resembles an E shape for various applications in wireless communications. The antenna was designed for operating in S band (2.0 – 2.3 GHz) frequency range with a linear polarization and it was built as E shaped patch antenna. The feeding arrangement in the presented experimental models above is a coaxial connector in the ground plane with the center-pin extended to the patch as an inductive probe although other feeding methods could be easily adapted. The developed antenna successfully attains a bandwidth of 18% (VSWR ≪2) with a central frequency of 2.03 GHz. Also it attains an acceptable value of gain of about 6.3 dB with respect to its central frequency . The measured 3dB Beamwidth is of about 83.62° and 96.03° in E-plane and H- plane respectively. The designed antenna was successfully developed and tested in anechoic chamber.
Low-overhead single-event upset hardened latch using programmable resistance cells

This study presents a single-event upset (SEU) hardened latch having first and second cross-coupled inverters and first and second programmable resistance metallisation cells. The metallisation cells may be programmed to low or high-resistance states. When set to a low-resistance state, the latch may be accessed to write a new logic state into the latch. When reset to a high-resistance state, the latch is in a radiation-hard state, thereby preventing the latch from getting affected by SEUs. This technique introduces little layout penalty, does not adversely affect circuit speed and is simple to implement in conventional semiconductor manufacturing process flow.
The E6 Oncoproteins of High-Risk Papillomaviruses Bind to a Novel Putative GAP Protein, E6TP1, and Target It for Degradation

ABSTRACT The high-risk human papillomaviruses (HPVs) are associated with carcinomas of the cervix and other genital tumors. Previous studies have identified two viral oncoproteins, E6 and E7, which are expressed in the majority of HPV-associated carcinomas. The ability of high-risk HPV E6 protein to immortalize human mammary epithelial cells (MECs) has provided a single-gene model to study the mechanisms of E6-induced oncogenic transformation. In this system, the E6 protein targets the p53 tumor suppressor protein for degradation, and mutational analyses have shown that E6-induced degradation of p53 protein is required for MEC immortalization. However, the inability of most dominant-negative p53 mutants to induce efficient immortalization of MECs suggests the existence of additional targets of the HPV E6 oncoprotein. Using the yeast two-hybrid system, we have isolated a novel E6-binding protein. This polypeptide, designated E6TP1 (E6-targeted protein 1), exhibits high homology to GTPase-activating proteins for Rap, including SPA-1, tuberin, and Rap1GAP. The mRNA for E6TP1 is widely expressed in tissues and in vitro-cultured cell lines. The gene for E6TP1 localizes to chromosome 14q23.2-14q24.3 within a locus that has been shown to undergo loss of heterozygosity in malignant meningiomas. Importantly, E6TP1 is targeted for degradation by the high-risk but not the low-risk HPV E6 proteins both in vitro and in vivo. Furthermore, the immortalization-competent but not the immortalization-incompetent HPV16 E6 mutants target the E6TP1 protein for degradation. Our results identify a novel target for the E6 oncoprotein and provide a potential link between HPV E6 oncogenesis and alteration of a small G protein signaling pathway.
An emergency logistics transportation path optimization model by using trapezoidal fuzzy

Due to the uncertainty of major influential factors in emergency logistics transportation path optimization, this paper intends to describe those uncertain factors, such as the transportation time, the safety factor and the transportation costs, etc. by using trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. And then the paper establishes a multi-objective optimization model according to the previous described decision-making matrix with trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. The following theoretical derivation and numerical examples prove the feasibility of this suggested model.
Breaking the mould – novel diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for invasive pulmonary aspergillosis in the immune deficient patient

Invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA) caused by the ubiquitous environmental fungus Aspergillus is a frequently fatal lung disease of immunocompromised humans accounting for more than 200,000 infections each year, with an associated mortality rate of 30–90%. This review addresses the current status of IPA diagnosis and treatment and the urgent need to develop accurate, non-invasive strategies for identifying pulmonary infections in the ever-expanding population of immune deficient patients at risk of acquiring opportunistic fungal infections including hematological malignancy and hematopoetic stem cell transplant patients. Recent advances in the use of an Aspergillus-specific monoclonal antibody, JF5, for point-of-care diagnosis of IPA using lateral-flow technology is examined, as is its use in PET/MRI bioimaging and radio-immunotherapy using radionuclide-labeled single chain antibody fragments, Fab fragments, and a fully humanized JF5 derivative.
Acute kidney injury in cardiac surgery

Purpose of review Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a long-recognized complication of cardiac surgery. It is a commonly encountered clinical syndrome that, in its most severe form, increases the odds of operative mortality three to eight-fold. The pathogenesis of cardiac surgery-associated acute kidney injury (CSA-AKI) is complex. No single intervention is likely to provide a panacea, and thus, the purpose of this review is to assess the wide breadth of emerging research into potential strategies to prevent, diagnose, and treat CSA-AKI. Recent findings Research in the field of CSA-AKI published within the last 18 months adds further layers of knowledge to many previously studied areas. These include its definition (Risk, Injury, Failure, Loss, End-stage kidney disease, Acute Kidney Injury Network, and Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes criteria), diagnosis (biomarkers and intraoperative renal oximetry), prevention (statin therapy, acetylsalicylic acid, N-acetylcysteine, sodium bicarbonate, off-pump coronary revascularization, goal-directed hemodynamic therapy, and minimizing blood transfusion), and treatment (early initiation of renal replacement therapy). Summary Although there has been much high-quality research conducted in this field in recent years, preventing CSA-AKI by avoiding renal insults remains the mainstay of management. Although biomarkers have the potential to diagnose CSA-AKI at an earlier stage, efficacious interventions to treat established CSA-AKI remain elusive.
Speaker normalisation for large vocabulary multiparty conversational speech recognition

One of the main problems faced by automatic speech recognition is the variability of the testing conditions. This is due both to the acoustic conditions (different transmission channels, recording devices, noises etc.) and to the variability of speech across different speakers (i.e. due to different accents, coarticulation of phonemes and different vocal tract characteristics). Vocal tract length normalisation (VTLN) aims at normalising the acoustic signal, making it independent from the vocal tract length. This is done by a speaker specific warping of the frequency axis parameterised through a warping factor. In this thesis the application of VTLN to multiparty conversational speech was investigated focusing on the meeting domain. This is a challenging task showing a great variability of the speech acoustics both across different speakers and across time for a given speaker. VTL, the distance between the lips and the glottis, varies over time. We observed that the warping factors estimated using Maximum Likelihood seem to be context dependent: appearing to be influenced by the current conversational partner and being correlated with the behaviour of formant positions and the pitch. This is because VTL also influences the frequency of vibration of the vocal cords and thus the pitch. In this thesis we also investigated pitch-adaptive acoustic features with the goal of further improving the speaker normalisation provided by VTLN. We explored the use of acoustic features obtained using a pitch-adaptive analysis in combination with conventional features such as Mel frequency cepstral coefficients. These spectral representations were combined both at the acoustic feature level using heteroscedastic linear discriminant analysis (HLDA), and at the system level using ROVER. We evaluated this approach on a challenging large vocabulary speech recognition task: multiparty meeting transcription. We found that VTLN benefits the most from pitch-adaptive features. Our experiments also suggested that combining conventional and pitch-adaptive acoustic features using HLDA results in a consistent, significant decrease in the word error rate across all the tasks. Combining at the system level using ROVER resulted in a further significant improvement. Further experiments compared the use of pitch adaptive spectral representation with the adoption of a smoothed spectrogram for the extraction of cepstral coefficients. It was found that pitch adaptive spectral analysis, providing a representation which is less affected by pitch artefacts (especially for high pitched speakers), delivers fea-
Detection of Extended-Spectrum β-Lactamases in Clinical Isolates of Pseudomonas aeruginosa

ABSTRACT With the occurrence of extended-spectrum β-lactamases (ESBLs) in Pseudomonas aeruginosa being increasingly reported worldwide, there is a need for a reliable test to detect ESBLs in clinical isolates of P. aeruginosa. In our study, a total of 75 clinical isolates of P. aeruginosa were studied. Nitrocefin tests were performed to detect the β-lactamase enzyme; isoelectric focusing electrophoresis, PCR, and PCR product sequencing were designed to further characterize the contained ESBLs. Various ESBL-screening methods were designed to compare the reliabilities of detecting ESBLs in clinical isolates of P. aeruginosa whose β-lactamases were well characterized. Thirty-four of 36 multidrug-resistant P. aeruginosa clinical isolates were positive for ESBLs. blaVEB-3 was the most prevalent ESBL gene in P. aeruginosa in our study. Among the total of 34 isolates that were considered ESBL producers, 20 strains were positive using conventional combined disk tests and 10 strains were positive using a conventional double-disk synergy test (DDST) with amoxicillin-clavulanate, expanded-spectrum cephalosporins, aztreonam, and cefepime. Modifications of the combined disk test and DDST, which consisted of shorter distances between disks (20 mm instead of 30 mm) and the use of three different plates that contained cloxacillin (200 μg/ml) alone, Phe-Arg β-naphthylamide dihydrochloride (MC-207,110; 20 μg/ml) alone, and both cloxacillin (200 μg/ml) and MC-207,110 (20 μg/ml) increased the sensitivity of the tests to 78.8%, 91.18%, 85.29%, and 97.06%.
Screening and Functional Analysis of TPO Gene Mutations in a Cohort of Chinese Patients With Congenital Hypothyroidism

Backgrounds As a crucial enzyme in thyroid hormone synthesis, the genetic defective thyroid peroxidase (TPO) was one of the main genetic factors leading to congenital hypothyroidism (CH). Methods Mutations in the TPO gene were screened and identified in 219 patients with CH from northwest China by using high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics analysis. The biological function of detected variants was studied by in vitro experiments and homology modeling. Results Nineteen rare variants, including seven novel ones, were detected in 17 of 219 patients (7.8%). Most cases were detected with one single heterozygous variant, and only two patients were detected with multiple variants, i.e., compounds for (1) IVS7-1G>A, p.Ala443Val, and p.Arg769Trp and (2) p.Asn592Ser and p.Asn798Lys. The biological function of the four missense mutations (i.e., p.Ala443Val, p.Arg769Trp, p.Asn592Ser, and p.Asn798Lys) they carried were further studied. Experimental data showed that these four mutations did not affect the protein expression level of the TPO gene but remarkably reduced the peroxidase activity toward guaiacol oxidation, retaining 8–32% of activity of the wild-type protein. The comparison of the predicted 3-D structures of wild-type and mutant TPO proteins showed that these four amino acid substitutions changed the non-covalent interactions of studied residues that might alter the structure and function of the TPO protein. Conclusion This study was the first to analyze the TPO mutation spectrum of patients with CH in northwest China. Our data indicated that the TPO mutation was not a common reason to cause CH in China. The functional data may help to clarify the structure-function relationship of the TPO protein and provide further evidence for the elucidation of the genetic etiology of CH.
The effects of radiation dose and CT manufacturer on measurements of lung densitometry.

BACKGROUND To evaluate the effect of radiation dose and scanner manufacturer on quantitative CT scan measurements of lung morphology in smokers. METHODS Low-dose and high-dose, inspiratory, multislice CT scans were obtained in 50 subjects at intervals of approximately 6 months (mean [+/- SD] interval, 0.5 +/- 0.2 years). In another 30 subjects, multislice CT scans were acquired first using a GE LightSpeed Ultra (General Electric Healthcare; Milwaukee, WI), followed a mean time of 1.2 +/- 0.4 years later by using a Siemens Sensation 16 scanner (Siemens Medical Solutions; Erlangen, Germany). Custom software was used to measure lung volume, mass, mean density, and the extent of emphysema using threshold cutoffs of -950, -910, and -856 Hounsfield units (HU) and the lowest 15th and 5th percentile points. RESULTS The change in radiograph dose significantly affected measurements of emphysema assessed using mean lung density, threshold, or percentile methods. There were also interactions between dose and total lung volume for all of the measurements except the -950-HU threshold and the lowest fifth percentile point. These two emphysema measurements suggest that there was more emphysema found in the CT scans obtained using a lower radiograph dose. Only the mean lung density and -856-HU threshold showed significant effects between CT scanner manufacturers and interactions between total lung volume and scanner. All other measures of lung structure were not different between the two CT scanners. CONCLUSION CT scan measurements of very low density lung structures are significantly affected by radiation dose but are less sensitive to the lung volume. Image acquisition parameters including radiation dose, scanner type, and the subject's breath size should be standardized to estimate emphysema severity in longitudinal studies.
Cross-linking of collagen. Isolation, structural characterization and glycosylation of pyridinoline.

A method for the isolation and purification of pyridinoline from bone collagen was developed, with the use of sulphonated polystyrene resins. The analytical techniques were used to quantify pyridinoline, for which hydroxyallysine is a known precursor, in a wide range of tissues. The structure of pyridinoline proposed by Fujimoto, Moriguchi, Ishida & Hayashi [(1978) Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun. 84, 52-57] was confirmed by 13C-n.m. r. spectroscopy and fast-atom-bombardment mass spectrometry. At concentrations greater than about 0.1 mM, pyridinoline exhibited altered fluorescence properties that were consistent with excimer formation. From alkali hydrolysates of several different tissues, a fluorescent compound was purified by gel filtration and ion-exchange chromatography and was shown to be galactosylpyridinoline. This derivative was very labile to acid treatment compared with the bifunctional cross-link analogues, and was completely converted into free pyridinoline by heating at 108 degrees C for 8 h in 0.1 M-HCl. Galactosylpyridinoline was also partially converted into free pyridinoline by prolonged alkali hydrolysis. This lability, which could also apply to other multifunctional cross-link derivatives, may explain the fact that no disaccharide derivatives of pyridinoline were isolated.
Increased Availability for Networked Software Services

The availability of networked software services is an increasingly important quality of service issue. A service user gauges service availability in terms of initial access time and subsequent service delivery time. This paper develops - from a user perspective - a quality of service framework for the availability of networked software services. The paper utilises this quality of service framework to suggest the functional characteristics of a new transport layer software specification that would facilitate the increased availability of networked software services.
Quantum limit on noise in a Raman amplifier.

Using Caves's theory on the quantum-noise limit in an amplifier, we consider the quantum limit on noise in a Raman amplifier. We show explicitly that the full quantum equations for the Raman interaction can be transformed into the general form for a quantum amplifier. In addition, we show that in the steady-state limit the Raman amplifier becomes a phase-insensitive amplifier. At this limit we find that the output signal-to-noise ratio is unity when one photon per mode is input. Thus we conclude that the Raman amplifier, in the phase-insensitive limit, will operate at the quantum-noise limit.
Development of mid-infrared light-emitting diodes for low-power optical gas sensors

This work presents the experimental investigation of different techniques to improve the electrical and optical performance of mid-infrared antimonide-based semiconductor light-emitting diodes. A study of the current crowding effect, supported by spatially-resolved photocurrent measurements, allows the design of an optimal contact geometry. Additionally, a higher fraction of the generated light is redirected towards the top surface of the device thanks to the integration of a back reflector and a resonant-cavity design. Enhanced performance for mid-IR LEDs represents a significant step forward towards power efficient optical sensors for environmental, safety and health applications.
Neutrophil-Mediated Lung Damage: A New COPD Phenotype?

inducing a proteolytic burden in the lung microenvironment. Under normal circumstances, A1AT and other antiproteases neutralize this threat posed by neutrophils. However, in A1AT deficiency, defenses are perturbed, leading to elastic degradation on lung tissue resulting in emphysema. While most COPD patients do not have A1AT, this genetic syndrome serves as a useful human model of how disturbances in the protease-antiprotease system can lead to emphysema. Since most patients with COPD have adequate circulating levels of A1AT, according to this theory, aberrant neutrophil activity is at the heart of COPD pathogenesis and by turning off excess neutrophil recruitment and activation (e.g. through smoking cessation) COPD progression can be halted. However, even with smoking cessation, the inflammatory process in the lungs persists once COPD becomes firmly established and in many patients the disease continues to progress [5] . The reason for these observations is obscure. In this issue of Respiration, Milara et al. [6] offer new insights into the role of neutrophils in COPD that may in part explain the conundrum of disease progression in COPD in ex-smokers. The authors studied subjects with severe COPD developed at an early age ( ! 56 years) and showed that, despite years of smoking cessation, the neuChronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a menace affecting 300 million people worldwide and is responsible for 3 million deaths annually [1] . Despite this, its pathophysiology is not well understood. It is now well accepted that lung inflammation exists in COPD and that the inflammatory process intensifies with disease progression [2] . The most important environmental risk factor in COPD is cigarette smoking; it is responsible for more than 50% of the cases worldwide. Interestingly, although all smokers eventually develop lung inflammation, only about 15–20% of smokers incur COPD [3] . On the other hand, nearly 100% of smokers with rare genetic mutations in the SERPINA1 gene located in the long arm of chromosome 14 develop lung inflammation and COPD in their 40s and 50s [4] . Nearly 100% of all individuals with the null-null allele in this gene, which encodes for alpha-1-antitrypsin (A1AT) (resulting in undetectable serum A1AT concentrations), develop COPD and 80–100% of those with the S-Z allele (resulting in serum A1AT concentrations of 2.5–7 mmol/l) develop COPD [4] . Why are individuals with A1AT deficiency so susceptible to COPD? It is postulated that with cigarette smoking neutrophils and other inflammatory cells are recruited to the lungs. When activated, neutrophils release proteolytic enzymes such as elastase and other proteolytic enzymes, Published online: December 6, 2011
The effect of nitrate supplementation on muscle contraction in healthy adults

Abstract This study examined the effect of dietary supplementation with inorganic nitrate ( ) on markers of contractile function in human knee extensors. In a double-blinded, randomized cross-over design, 18 (12 M) healthy participants undertook four days of supplementation with either nitrate-rich beetroot juice (NITRATE; days 1–3: 525 mg , day 4: 1050 mg ) or nitrate-depleted beetroot juice (PLACEBO). On the fourth day, isometric knee extension force was assessed during a series of voluntary and electrically evoked (stimulation) tests. In addition, muscular fatigue was examined in two separate continuous-stimulation (0.8 s tetanus with a 1:1 work:rest ratio for 102.4 s) fatigue tests, one with and one without blood flow restriction. There were no differences for maximum voluntary contraction, peak twitch force, half-relaxation time and the force–frequency relationship for stimulations up to 100 Hz between the NITRATE and PLACEBO trials. No differences between trials were observed in the non-restricted fatigue test, however NITRATE was found to attenuate the decline in force during the restricted test, such that the force at the 80 s mark (PLACEBO: 66 ± 11 vs. NITRATE 74 ± 9% of initial force; P = .01) and 102 s mark (PLACEBO: 47 ± 8% vs. NITRATE 55 ± 8%; P < .01) were significantly higher. These results suggest that four days of supplementation elicits peripheral responses in muscle that attenuate muscular fatigue during exhaustive exercise under hypovolemic conditions. This ergogenic action is likely attributable to improved Ca2+ handling in the muscle, or enhanced perfusion during ischemia.