Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Slow-wave sleep and the risk of type 2 diabetes in humans

There is convincing evidence that, in humans, discrete sleep stages are important for daytime brain function, but whether any particular sleep stage has functional significance for the rest of the body is not known. Deep non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, also known as slow-wave sleep (SWS), is thought to be the most “restorative” sleep stage, but beneficial effects of SWS for physical well being have not been demonstrated. The initiation of SWS coincides with hormonal changes that affect glucose regulation, suggesting that SWS may be important for normal glucose tolerance. If this were so, selective suppression of SWS should adversely affect glucose homeostasis and increase the risk of type 2 diabetes. Here we show that, in young healthy adults, all-night selective suppression of SWS, without any change in total sleep time, results in marked decreases in insulin sensitivity without adequate compensatory increase in insulin release, leading to reduced glucose tolerance and increased diabetes risk. SWS suppression reduced delta spectral power, the dominant EEG frequency range in SWS, and left other EEG frequency bands unchanged. Importantly, the magnitude of the decrease in insulin sensitivity was strongly correlated with the magnitude of the reduction in SWS. These findings demonstrate a clear role for SWS in the maintenance of normal glucose homeostasis. Furthermore, our data suggest that reduced sleep quality with low levels of SWS, as occurs in aging and in many obese individuals, may contribute to increase the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Intermediate Postchallenge Hyperglycemia in Overweight and Obese Subjects: A New Marker of Impaired Glucose Regulation?

The objective of this study was to compare subjects with intermediate postchallenge hyperglycemia (INPH) to those with normal glycemic status, impaired fasting glucose (IFG), and/or impaired glucose tolerance (IGT), as well as type 2 diabetes mellitus. Furthermore, the authors evaluated the impact of INPH on target organ damage. In total, 487 overweight and obese adults (BMI ≥27 kg/m2), 252 men and 235 women, mean age 52.9 ±10.2 years, were studied. All participants underwent a clinical and laboratory evaluation, as well as an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT). They were also investigated by echocardiography, carotid ultrasonography, and pulse wave analysis. Overall, 302 (62%) subjects had normal glycemic status, 64 (13.1%) had IFG and/or IGT, 95 (19.5%) had type 2 diabetes mellitus, and 26 (5.4%) had INPH. Individuals with INPH had an increased index of insulin resistance (higher homeostasis model assessment-insulinogenic index [HOMA-IR], p<0.0001), impaired insulin secretion (lower insulinogenic index, p<0.0001), and higher glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) levels (p<0.0001) in comparison with the normoglycemic subjects, but not to those with IFG and/or IGT or diabetes (p = 0.6). No difference was observed concerning the risk factors studied, left ventricular mass and vascular remodeling, among subjects with INPH, IFG and/or IGT, and diabetes. However, individuals with INPH had a higher proportion of echolucent carotid artery plaques in comparison with the normoglycemic subjects (p = 0.04) and those with IFG and/or IGT (p = 0.01). Intermediate postchallenge hyperglycemia seems to represent a new category of glucose metabolism disturbances with increased atherogenic impact. Therefore, evaluating intermediate glucose levels in an OGTT could contribute to better identify overweight individuals at risk of developing diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular events.
Putting a Finger on Growth Surveillance: Insight into MDM2 Zinc Finger-Ribosomal Protein Interactions

A number of events imparting instability to ribosomal biogenesis can cause nucleolar stress and trigger activation of a p53 checkpoint. Following nucleolar stress, ribosomal proteins L5, L11 and L23 bind to MDM2, blocking MDM2-mediated p53 ubiquitination and degradation. The MDM2 C4 zinc finger domain has been shown to play an important role in this process. Mutations targeting the C4 zinc finger of MDM2 have been reported in human cancers, and now a potential rationale for the occurrence of these mutations in cancer has emerged. Here we further discuss these findings and propose the existence of a Ribosomal Protein-MDM2-p53 surveillance network responsible for monitoring the stability of the transition between cell growth and division.
Inhibition of ABC Transporters Abolishes Antimony Resistance in Leishmania Infection

ABSTRACT The emergence of antimony (Sb) resistance has jeopardized the treatment of visceral leishmaniasis in various countries. Previous studies have considered the part played by leishmanial parasites in antimony resistance, but the involvement of host factors in the clinical scenario remained to be investigated. Here we show that unlike infection with Sb-sensitive (Sbs) Leishmania donovani, infection with Sb-resistant (Sbr) L. donovani induces the upregulation of multidrug resistance-associated protein 1 (MRP1) and permeability glycoprotein (P-gp) in host cells, resulting in a nonaccumulation of intracellular Sb following treatment with sodium antimony gluconate (SAG) favoring parasite replication. The inhibition of MRP1 and P-gp with resistance-modifying agents such as lovastatin allows Sb accumulation and parasite killing within macrophages and offers protection in an animal model in which infection with SbrL. donovani is otherwise lethal. The occurrence of a similar scenario in clinical cases is supported by the findings that unlike monocytes from SAG-sensitive kala-azar (KA) patients, monocytes from SAG-unresponsive KA patients overexpress P-gp and MRP1 and fail to accumulate Sb following in vitro SAG treatment unless pretreated with inhibitors of ABC transporters. Thus, the expression status of MRP1 and P-gp in blood monocytes may be used as a diagnostic marker for Sb resistance and the treatment strategy can be designed accordingly. Our results also indicate that lovastatin, which can inhibit both P-gp and MRP1, might be beneficial for reverting Sb resistance in leishmaniasis as well as drug resistance in other clinical situations, including cancer.
Reconstructing genetic networks with concurrent representation of instantaneous and time-delayed interactions

Although living organisms can have some genetic interactions occurring instantaneously while others with time-delay, current modeling techniques for genetic network reconstruction make simplifications and assume that the interactions can be either of these but not both. In this paper, we propose a gene regulatory network reconstruction algorithm that can model concurrent occurrence of both, instantaneous as well as time-delayed interactions, thus providing a better representation of the original biological processes. First we introduce a novel framework using the Bayesian network (BN) formalism that can model both types of interactions. A gene regulatory network reconstruction algorithm using this proposed framework is then developed that employs an evolutionary search strategy and a decomposable scoring metric based on information theoretic quantities. Investigations of our approach are performed using both, the synthetic data as well as Saccharomyces cerevisiae gene expression data. Comparisons with recent reconstruction methods show the superiority of the proposed method.
Evaluation of a Commercial Real-Time Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction Kit for the Diagnosis of Bovine Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection

Recently a commercial real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) kit has been marketed for the detection of Bovine respiratory syncytial virus (BRSV). However, diagnostic interpretation of the results of this kit requires its comparison to commonly used methods. Therefore, the objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of this kit in comparison with the conventional direct fluorescent antibody test (FAT). Twenty BRSV strains and 14 heterologous bovine viruses were used to check the kit's sensitivity and specificity. The efficiency and detection limit of the kit were determined by testing dilution series of a BRSV strain. The comparison between real-time RT-PCR kit and FAT was performed with 94 clinical samples from calves with clinical signs of respiratory disease including lung tissues (n = 55), transtracheal aspiration samples (n = 20), and nasal swab samples (n = 19). All of the BRSV strains tested were detected by real-time RT-PCR. No cross-reaction was shown with the 14 heterologous bovine viruses. The real-time RT-PCR was 99.3% efficient with a detection limit of 0.1 TCID50 (50% tissue culture infective dose). The results of real-time RT-PCR and FAT were concordant for 65 of the 94 clinical samples tested. The remaining 29 clinical samples were positive by real-time RT-PCR and negative by FAT, demonstrating the higher sensitivity of real-time RT-PCR. In conclusion, the kit evaluated in this study was sensitive, specific, and had a low threshold of detection. Furthermore, the use of this kit instead of FAT allows an improvement of the sensitivity for the detection of BRSV in clinical samples.
Molecular mechanisms of amyloidosis.

Amyloidosis affects millions of people, as a cause of Alzheimer's disease or a complication of dialysis, and also causes rare conditions. The many forms of the disorder have one underlying principle: misfolded proteins. Prompt, correct diagnosis is essential, especially in the inherited forms of amyloidosis. This article reviews the molecular basis of various types of amyloidosis and proposes new ways of treating these disorders.
Memory Controlled Sequential Self Attention for Sound Recognition

In this paper we investigate the importance of the extent of memory in sequential self attention for sound recognition. We propose to use a memory controlled sequential self attention mechanism on top of a convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) model for polyphonic sound event detection (SED). Experiments on the URBAN-SED dataset demonstrate the impact of the extent of memory on sound recognition performance with the self attention induced SED model. We extend the proposed idea with a multi-head self attention mechanism where each attention head processes the audio embedding with explicit attention width values. The proposed use of memory controlled sequential self attention offers a way to induce relations among frames of sound event tokens. We show that our memory controlled self attention model achieves an event based F -score of 33.92% on the URBAN-SED dataset, outperforming the F -score of 20.10% reported by the model without self attention.
An Energy Efficient and Secure Clustering Protocol for Military based WSN

Less contiguous nature of military applications demands for surveillance of widespread areas that are indeed harder to monitor. Unlike traditional Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), a military based large size sensor network possesses unique requirements/challenges in terms of self-configuration, coverage, connectivity and energy dissipation. Taking this aspect into consideration, this paper proposes a novel, efficient and secure clustering method for military based applications. In any clustering based approach, one of the prime concerns is appropriate selection of Cluster Heads and formation of balanced clusters. This paper proposes and analyzes two schemes, Average Energy based Clustering (AEC) and Threshold Energy based Clustering (TEC). In AEC, a node is elected as Cluster Head (CH) if its residual energy is above the average energy of its cluster whereas in case of TEC, a node is elected as Cluster Head if its residual energy is above the threshold energy. Further, both AEC and TEC choose nodes as CHs if their distance lies within safety zone of the Base Station. In this paper, aim is to come up with a solution that not only conserves energy but balance load while electing safe nodes as CHs. The performance of proposed protocols was critically evaluated in terms of network lifetime, average residual energy of nodes and uniformity in energy dissipation of nodes. Results clearly demonstrated that AEC is successful in incorporating security whilst increasing overall lifetime of network, load balance and uniform energy dissipation.
Caractérisation des composés organiques volatils dans une zone urbaine multi-influencée : développement de méthodes chromatographiques, de capteurs et campagnes de mesures

Les COV oxygenes sont des especes peu mesurees dans l’air ambiant en raison de difficultes analytiques liees a la presence d’eau dans l’echantillon. Nos connaissances sur les teneurs, les sources et les puits de ces composes restent incompletes. Afin de caracteriser les COV (notamment les COVO) sur la zone littorale multi-influencee de Dunkerque, deux methodes de mesures complementaires ont ete developpees : l’echantillonnage passif (revelant la repartition spatiale des especes) et l’analyse en mode on-line (informant l’evolution temporelle des teneurs). Deux campagnes de mesures preliminaires realisees sur la zone d’etude pendant des periodes hivernale et estivale a l’aide des tubes passifs Radiello ont permis d’identifier les COV presents sur la zone d’etude et d’examiner les origines des BTEX mesures. Concernant la mesure en mode on-line, une methode chromatographique pour l’analyse de 14 composes oxygenes, 4 nitriles a ete developpee et validee. Un procede de reduction de l’humidite avant l’etape de preconcentration a permis d’utiliser une colonne polaire specifique aux composes oxygenes. Des premieres mesures effectuees a Douai et a Dunkerque ont mis en evidence les origines urbaines et industrielles de certains composes. Quant a l’echantillonnage passif, la mesure de 2 composes oxygenes (ethanol acetone) et des BTEX a ete developpee pour une duree de prelevement de 8 h. Les caracteristiques metrologiques de l’echantillonneur ont ete determinees : debits d’echantillonnage dans les conditions standard et limites de detection et l’influence des facteurs environnementaux sur l’echantillonnage. Une campagne de mesures a l’aide d’echantillonneurs passifs a ensuite ete realisee pendant un episode de brise de mer. Des cartographies des COV et de l’ozone ont ete etablies et ont montre les « points chauds » en COV a proximite des emetteurs industriels et une zone de formation locale d’ozone sur le site d’etude.
Chronic pain

The neurologist is an important part of the pain management team.Factors that can alter presentation and complicate establishing a diagnosis are reviewed. A multidisciplinary approach to evaluation is advocated, particularly the inclusion of independent psychiatric or psychological evaluation. Treatment planning consists of addressing potential sources of failure of pain management, setting appropriate goals, and using the diagnostic assessment to plan pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic interventions based on pain mechanisms. Even if pharmacologic interventions do not alter pain, an education-oriented behavioral pain program integrated with physical therapy can improve function and foster self-reliance in controlling pain. NEUROLOGY 1995;45(suppl 9): S5-S10
Full-diversity STBC designs for two-user MIMO X channels

In this paper, we study space-time block code (STBC) designs for two-user MIMO X channels to achieve full diversity when the inter-user interference is cancelled by the group zero-forcing receiver. To do so, we first propose a design criterion and then propose a systematic design to satisfy the criterion so that it achieves the full diversity. The code rate approaches one when encoding length gets large. We prove that full diversity can be achieved by the proposed STBC without the channel information at the transmitters. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the theory.
Interleukin‐5 expressed by a recombinant virus vector enhances specific mucosal IgA responses in vivo

Several in vitro studies have shown that murine interleukin‐5 (mIL‐5) enhances IgA production by activated mucosal B cells. To date, however, there is no evidence that this factor significantly up‐regulates mucosal IgA responses in vivo. Here, we show that expression of the gene for mIL‐5 in a recombinant vaccinia virus vector markedly increases IgA responses to co‐expressed heterologous antigen in the lungs of mice given intranasal inocula of the virus. The elevated local IgA responses to vectors expressing mIL‐5 peaked at a fourfold higher level than those elicited by control virus at 14 days after infection and were sustained for at least 4 weeks. Increased IgA responses were abrogated in mice treated with monoclonal antibody against mIL‐5 and were not detected in systemic lymphoid tissue. No enhancement of specific IgG levels was found either locally or systemically. Our results indicate that mIL‐5 selectively enhances the development of mucosal IgA responses in vivo and suggest that expression of this factor in mucosal vaccine vectors may stimulate local immune reactivity.
Comment on "Coordination of Groups of mobile autonomous agents using nearest neighbor Rules"

Abstract— This note providessome corrections and generalizations to theaforementioned paper. Index Terms— Cooperative control,graph theory,multiagent systems,switched systems. In[1],eachagent’sheadingwasupdatedusingasimpleneighborrule,anditwasshownthatforalargeclassofswitchingsignalsandforanyinitialsetofheadingsthattheheadingsofallagentswillconvergetoasteady-statevalue.Theapproachin[1]isbasedonbidirectionalinformationexchange,modeledbyanundirectedgraph.Inthiscom-ment,wepointthatapartoftheProofsofTheorems4and5,themainresultsaboutleaderfollowingcasein[1],isquestionable.Theobjec-tiveofthiscommentistocorrecttheProofsofTheorems4and5of[1]andthenextendtheresultstodirectedgraphcase. Manuscript received March 3, 2005. Recommended by Associate EditorG. Pappas. This work was supported in part by the NNSF of China underGrants 60274010, 60343001, 60221301, and 60334040, and in part by theChinaPostdoctoralFoundationunderGrant200537121.L. GaoiswiththeInstituteofSystemsScience,WenzhouUniversity,Zhe-jiang325027,P.R. China(e-mail:lxgao@wznc.zj.cn). D.ChengiswiththeInstituteofSystemsScience,ChineseAcademyofSci-ences,Beijing100080,P.R. China(e-mail:dcheng@iss03.iss.ac.cn). DigitalObjectIdentiﬁer10. 1109/TAC.2005. 8586350018-9286/$20.00©2005IEEE
Lightning Hazards to Aircraft and Launchers Indirect Effects of Lightning on Aircraft and Rotorcraft

This article discusses issues related to indirect lightning on aircraft/rotorcraft. The standard waveforms used for qualifying the vulnerability of a system are introduced, with their frequency spectrum. The identification of the elementary EM coupling phenomenon allows the understanding of the key drivers of the current distribution and field scattering on a complex structure. The system level EM coupling analysis starts with examples of cable-measurements on real aircraft/rotorcraft, from which simple models are derived in order to understand the origin of the resulting waveforms. Various ways of protection are then proposed, ranging from passive to active solutions. Finally, despite limitations, 3D EM modeling is presented as an efficient complement to scale-one tests. The article concludes on the validity of current knowledge on indirect lightning for future aircraft designs.
Word co-occurrence information utilization method for evaluated number independent retrieval on BBS articles with user evaluation

Recently, BBS (Bulletin Board System) has been used widely as online space to exchange information. It has a lot of useful information including users' real voice such as review of new product, event information, and so on. However, sufficiently efficient functions for information search are not yet available to everyday users. BBS articles posted by general public have a lot of colloquial expressions and various expression patterns of same word. Therefore common searching methods, keyword matching and cosine similarity searching, can extract a lot of articles users do not want. As the result, it requires a fair amount of time for users to see if retrieved articles are necessary for them. The achievement of more efficiently retrieval function has been desired. A retrieval method using users' evaluations of articles has been proposed. In this method, search user evaluates each retrieved thread on binary of whether its content suits the retrieval question. And when a new retrieval query is entered, the past evaluations by retrieval queries similar to the new query are used as feedback. It can improve retrieval accuracy on BBS browsed by many users and updated frequently, because a lot of evaluations can be stored. When there are few evaluations, however, this method makes a false selection of evaluations used as feedback. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a feedback method using users' evaluations for evaluated number independent retrieval. In our method, appropriate feedback is achieved by using word co-occurrence information in articles and making word statistic classes, even if there are few evaluations. By using our method, the number of correct articles in retrieved result was increased compared to the conventional one when there are few evaluations.
The IgE response and atopy.

The relationship between atopy and immunoglobulin E (IgE) is discussed. The following conclusions/hypotheses are reached: 1. IgE is typical of, but not unique for atopy. 2. IgE is specific for atopy under conditions of marginal antigen presentation. 3. Under normal antigen stimulation conditions, i.e. conditions which lead to the formation of antibodies but not usually to that of IgE antibodies, the IgE-route of B-cell activation/differentiation is blocked, perhaps by interference with the biological activity of CD23 by IgE. 4. Under "strong" antigen stimulation the IgE blockade is circumvented, presumably via the production of excessive amounts of interleukin-4 (IL-4). 5. Cross-reactive priming in the gut might enhance the induction of IgE antibodies to inhalant allergens, according to the principle "IgE breeds IgE".
A Desirable Strategy for Resource Allocation using Virtual Machine in Cloud

Cloud computing is a facsimile of legalizing ubiquitous, expedient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly furnished and released with negligible management effort. It relies on sharing computing resources rather than having local servers or personal devices to handle applications. The resource allocation, still lack on sustaining tools that enable developers to compare different resource allocation strategies in cloud computing. In this paper we initiate the concept of “skewness” to measure the bumpy utilization of a server. By minimizing skewness, we can improve the overall utilization of servers in the face of multidimensional resource constraints. Here we use skewness metric to combine VMs with different resource characteristics suitably so that the capacities of servers are well utilized.