Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Toxic effects of 50 Hz electromagnetic field on memory consolidation in male and female mice

In this study, the effect of exposure to an 8 mT, 50 Hz extremely low-frequency electromagnetic field (ELF EMF) on memory consolidation of adult male and female mice was studied. For this purpose male and female mice were randomly distributed among six groups (n = 10 in each group). Using passive avoidance task, despite its natural tendency, mouse learns to stay on a small platform to avoidant electric shock. Immediately after the learning session, laboratory animals in the experimental groups were placed in an 8 mT, 50 Hz sinusoidal EMF for 4 h. The second male and female groups were sham exposed (exposure device off) and the third groups were considered as the controls. Twenty-four hours after the learning session, the animals were placed on small platform again and step-down latency was measured as the memory consolidation index. Significant (p < 0.05) decreases were determined among groups in memory function and results showed that exposure to an 8 mT, 50 Hz EMF for 4 h has devastating effects on memory consolidation in male and female mice.
Tn5-Induced and Spontaneous Switching ofSinorhizobium meliloti to Faster-Swarming Behavior

ABSTRACT Tn5 mutants of Sinorhizobium melilotiRMB7201 which swarmed 1.5 to 2.5 times faster than the parental strain in semisolid agar, moist sand, and viscous liquid were identified. These faster-swarming (FS) mutants outgrew the wild type 30- to 40-fold within 2 days in mixed swarm colonies. The FS mutants survived and grew as well as or better than the wild type under all of the circumstances tested, except in a soil matrix subjected to air drying. Exopolysaccharide (EPS) synthesis was reduced in each of the FS mutants when they were grown on defined succinate-nitrate medium, but the extent of reduction was different for each. It appears that FS behavior likely results from a modest, general derepression of motility involving an increased proportion of motile and flagellated cells and an increased average number of flagella per cell and increased average flagellar length. Spontaneous FS variants of RMB7201 were obtained at a frequency of about 1 per 10,000 to 20,000 cells by either enrichment from the periphery of swarm colonies or screening of colonies for reduced EPS synthesis on succinate-nitrate plates. The spontaneous FS variants and Tn5 FS mutants were symbiotically effective and competitive in alfalfa nodulation. Reversion of FS variants to wild-type behavior was sporadic, indicating that reversion is affected by unidentified environmental factors. Based on phenotypic and molecular differences between individual FS variants and mutants, it appears that there may be multiple genetic configurations that result in FS behavior in RMB7201. The facile isolation of spontaneous FS variants of Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa indicates that switching to FS behavior may be fairly common among bacterial species. The substantial growth advantage of FS mutants and variants wherever nutrient gradients exist suggests that switching to FS forms may be an important behavioral adaptation in natural environments.
Methods to develop arthritis and osteoporosis measures: a view from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).

OBJECTIVE Performance measurement at various levels of the health care system promotes improved processes that can result in the provision of more consistent and effective care. This chapter articulates the methodology and criteria utilized in measures development to ensure accountability and serve the information needs of physicians, health care systems, health plans and consumers, using arthritis and osteoporosis as example conditions. METHODS Observational studies conducted to assess the validity and feasibility of performance measures focused on arthritis and osteoporosis. Clinical expert panels were convened to develop measure specifications based on guidelines and evidence supporting critical aspects of care. The aspects of care that were assessed included: DMARD utilization for patients with rheumatoid arthritis; appropriate gastrointestinal prophylaxis for patients utilizing NSAIDS; comprehensive osteoarthritis care; comprehensive symptom assessment and medical management of woman over 65 years who experienced a bone fracture. RESULTS The implementation of performance measures for key aspects of arthritis and osteoporosis care is challenged by the availability of administrative data. However, potential for improvement is evident in each of the areas studied. CONCLUSION The key challenge to the feasibility of arthritis performance measures is the lack of administrative data to identify the eligible population. Administrative data capture suffers as a result of under-coding and under-recognition of arthritis. Consensus around a single set of measures creates a powerful tool for focusing on key components of care as a basis for quality improvement and allows for a valid comparison of care within and across health care settings.
Akt signaling dynamics in plasma membrane microdomains visualized by FRET-based reporters

Human kinase Akt has been shown to be activated at the plasma membrane upon generation of the cell membrane bound second messenger phosphatidylinositol (3,4,5)-trisphosphate through phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K). Several components in the PI3K/Akt signaling pathway have been found in the detergent-resistant plasma membrane compartments, lipid rafts. Increasing evidence also suggests crucial roles of lipid rafts in the activation of Akt in different cell types. However, the regulatory mechanisms of Akt activation at different microdomains of the plasma membrane are not clear. Using a newly developed genetically encodable fluorescent kinase reporter based on fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), AktAR, we studied spatio-temporal dynamics of Akt activity within plasma membrane microdomains in live-cell context. Our studies suggest that Akt activity is turned on more rapidly in lipid rafts upon growth factor stimulation, and Platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) or Insulin-like Growth Factor-1 (IGF-1) stimulated Akt activity is differentially regulated between raft and non-raft regions of the plasma membrane.
The predictive value of intraoperative electrocorticography in resections for limbic epilepsy associated with mesial temporal sclerosis.

OBJECTIVE Prior studies on the predictive value of intraoperative electrocorticography (ECoG) have been performed on heterogeneous groups of patients with both temporal and extratemporal interictal spikes, lesional and nonlesional pathological findings, and variably extensive resections by different surgeons. METHODS We performed both pre- and postresection intraoperative ECoG on 29 consecutive patients with medial temporal lobe epilepsy (17 left-sided) who underwent standard nontailored resections by one surgeon (RRG). All patients had only temporal interictal spikes (six bitemporal) and mesial temporal sclerosis diagnosed by preoperative magnetic resonance imaging and confirmed by pathological examination of resected tissue. RESULTS After a mean follow-up of 24.8 months, there were 15 (52%) patients who were seizure-free, 6 (21%) who were seizure-free except for auras, and 8 (28%) who had any seizure after the 1st postoperative month. Fourteen patients (48%) had active interictal discharges outside the area of planned resection revealed by preresection ECoG. Neither the presence of these spikes nor their mean frequency correlated with seizure outcome. Eleven patients (38%) had residual spike discharges after resection, and 18 patients (62%) had new spikes revealed by the postresection ECoG. Neither of these findings nor the mean spike frequency of residual or new spikes related to seizure outcome. Persistent spikes increased in frequency after resection in all outcome groups. CONCLUSIONS Electrocorticographic monitoring of interictal epileptiform activity intraoperatively is not useful in the surgical treatment of patients undergoing standard resection for medial temporal lobe epilepsy with magnetic resonance imaging evidence of mesial temporal sclerosis.
Support to family carers of patients with frontotemporal dementia

Objectives: To examine the provision of support to patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and their family carers compared with patients with early onset Alzheimer's dementia (AD) and their carers, and the carers’ satisfaction with the support. Method: Data came from 60 dyads of patients with dementia and their principal family carers, 23 subjects with frontotemporal dementia and their 23 carers, and 37 subjects with early onset Alzheimer's disease and their 37 carers. Results: Patients with a frontotemporal dementia diagnosis were significantly more frequently offered stays in nursing homes (p = 0.04). Carers of patients with frontotemporal dementia were significantly less satisfied with the provision of information about the disease compared with carers of early onset Alzheimer's disease patients (p = 0.05) and were significantly less satisfied with counseling and follow-up advice (p = 0.05). Conclusion: Changes of personality in patients with frontotemporal dementia may be the major reason why they were offered more stays in institutions. These family carers tend to be less satisfied with the provision of support they received from the specialist health service compared to carers of Alzheimer's disease patients, and are in need of more, and other forms of support.
Recovery from spinal cord injury achieved by 3 months of coordination dynamic therapy.

Coordination dynamic therapy was applied to 18 patients (average age 31 years) after a spinal cord injury between C4/5 and L4/5; the therapy was administered on average 5 years after the injury for a minimum of 3 months. All complete spinal cord lesions became incomplete, i.e. motor functions improved below the lesion level, including trunk stability and arm, hand and leg functions. The organization of the CNS, quantified by the coordination dynamics between arm and leg movements, improved by 42% for forward and by 49% for backward moving when exercising on a special coordination dynamic therapy device. The improvements of the coordination dynamics were 53%, 32% and 48% for lesions in the cervical, thoracic, and lumbar range, respectively. The plasticity for spinal cord lesions was thus higher when the intumescence was lesioned. Since the coordination dynamics did not change substantially prior to coordination dynamic therapy, did further improve with continued therapy, and worsened when the therapy was terminated, it is concluded that the improvement of CNS functioning above and below the spinal cord lesion level was due to the therapy. Since in stroke and traumatic brain lesion the CNS functioning further improved if the therapy was continued over longer time periods beyond 3 months, it is suggested that spinal cord lesions can partly be cured if coordination dynamic therapy is administered for 1 to 2 years.
Endocrine Allergy

IN a previous paper (Zondek and Bromberg, 1945) it was reported that a state of hypersensitivity to endogenous hormones exists in certain individuals. A hypersensitive state has been observed both in respect to protein-like, e.g., insulin and pituitary secretions, and to steroid hormones. The term " endocrine allergy " covers the various manifestations of the condition of hypersensitivity to the endogenous products of the endocrinc glands. Since allergy is elicited generally only by body-foreign substances, it is surprising to find that it can exist also in respect to an endogenous secretion. The following clinical and experimental findings seem, however, definitely to establish the occurrence of this condition in man.
Effect of operating parameters on specific production rate of a cloned‐gene product and performance of recombinant fermentation process

A two‐stage continuous system in combination with a temperature‐sensitive expression system were used as model systems to maximize the productivity of a cloned gene and minimize the problem associated with the plasmid instability for a high‐expression recombinant. In order to optimize the two‐stage fermentation process, the effects of such operational variables as temperature and dilution rate on productivity of cloned gene were studied using the model systems and a recombinant, Escherichia coli K12 ΔH1 Δtrp/pPLc23trp A1. When the expression of cloned gene is induced by raising the operating temperature above 38°C, a significant decrease in the colony‐forming‐units (CFU) of the plasmid‐harboring cell was observed, and the decrease was related to the product concentration. In order to describe this phenomenon, a new kinetic parameter related to the metabolic stress (metabolic stress factor) was introduced. It is defined as the ratio of the rate of change of pheno‐type from colony‐forming to non‐colony‐forming cells to the product accumulation per unit cell mass. At a fixed temperature of 40°C, the varying dilution rate D in the range of 0.35‐0.90 h−1 did not affect the metabolic stress factor significantly. At a fixed dilution rate of D = 0.35 h−1, this factor remained practically constant up to 41°C but increased rapidly beyond 41°C. The effects of temperature and dilution rate in the second stage on the specific production rate were also studied while maintaining the apparent specific growth rate (μ 2app ) of the second stage constant at or near μ 2app = 0.26 h−1. Under a constant dilution rate, D2 = 0.35 h−1, the maximum specific production rate obtained was about qp, max = 38 units TrpA/mg cell/h at 41°C. At a constant temperature, T2 = 40°C, specific production rate increased with decreasing dilution rate with in the dilution rate range of D2 = 0.35‐0.90 h−1. Based on the results of our study, the optimal operating conditions found were dilution rate D2 = 0.35 h−1 and operating temperature T2 = 41°C at the apparent specific growth rate of 0.26 h−1. Under the optimal operating conditions, about threefold increase in productivity was achieved compared to the best batch culture result. In addition, the fermentation period could be extended for more than 100 h.
Design of Optimum Weighting Functions for LFM Signals

Linear frequency-modulated (LFM) pulse signals are probably the most common type of pulse compression waveforms for various radar systems (Barton, 2005; CookB Curlander & McDonough, 1991; Levanon & Mozeson, 2004; Richards, 2005; Skolnik, 2008). LFM signals are also often the waveform of choice for wideband systems, where the required bandwidth may be hundreds of megahertz. The ambiguity function of the LFM signal suffers from significant sidelobes, both in delay (range) and in Doppler. It is known, for example, that the first range sidelobe is approximately 13 dB below the main peak of the ambiguity function. Such sidelobes may be unacceptable in many applications due to system performance degradation caused by high sidelobes (Cook & Bernfeld, 1967; Levanon & Mozeson, 2004; Richards, 2005). To suppress the sidelobes some form of weighting can be applied to the matched filter response. The main drawbacks associated with conventional weighting functions (e.g., Hamming, Kaiser windows) are the broadening of the main lobe of the ambiguity function cut along the time axis and an inevitable attenuation in the peak response which decreases the signal-to-noise ratio. The chapter provides theoretical justification for a new approach, which is being applied to the design of discrete weighting function, or in other words, digital mismatched receiving filters. This approach considers the design of weighting functions as a problem of finding such a digital mismatched filter that will maximize the proportion of the total response power that is concentrated in the specified time-frequency region. Two applications of the proposed approach are theoretically addressed in sections 2 and 3. First, in section 2, we apply it to the problem of the optimum Doppler-tolerant pair signalfilter design when a given signal is specified to be an LFM signal. Section 3 addresses the specification of weighting functions in interferometric synthetic aperture radars with the purpose of improving the height measurement accuracy. Both of these sections are supplimented with numerical results, which demonstrate benefits that one can derive from using the proposed optimum weigthing functions as compared to conventional weighting functions. Conclusions are given in section 4.
Non-Canonical Activation of GLI Transcription Factors: Implications for Targeted Anti-Cancer Therapy

GLI transcription factors constitute the final effectors of the Hedgehog (HH) signaling pathway. In many tumors, such as those of the pancreas, prostate, skin or lung, ectopic activation of GLI proteins has been linked to tumorigenesis. In several of these cases, HH ligand- or receptor-induced signaling (canonical HH signaling) was found to be the cause underlying GLI activation. Recent evidence points towards additional, non-canonical, mechanisms of GLI activation. Here we review findings on the crosstalk of two HH-unrelated signaling pathways (RAS and Transforming growth factor β) to the HH pathway downstream of the signaling component Smoothened. Both pathways stimulate and/or induce GLI1 and GLI2 activity independent of the presence of HH ligands. We also discuss the putative roles of these crosstalk mechanisms for tumor cell metastasis. The emerging picture of GLI transcription factors as an integrative platform of numerous signaling inputs has important implications for the understanding of tumor development and argues for inclusion of targets acting downstream of the receptor level in the design of current drug development programs.
1 Review : “ Searching the Web ” [ Arasu 2001 ]

The authors of “ Searching the Web” present an overview of the state of current technologies employed in the construction of search engines for the World Wide Web (WWW). Through a combination of studies of the current literature and their own experiments, the authors describe a general Web search engine architecture and contrast some “ crawling” and indexing strategies. The experiments are carried out on the “ Stanford WebBase” using the contents of the Stanford University Website, consisting of around 225 000 pages. Solutions to the challenges presented by the large scale of the WWW are explored.
The effect of voltage on a conductivity gradient in a nanochannel and its application to protein trapping

Studies in the last two decades have demonstrated the use of protein biomarkers for early disease detection. Increasingly, these biomarkers have been found at very low concentrations with a high background of abundant proteins. Recent work in nanofluidics has allowed for the possibility of high concentration enhancement and separation – two processes that are essential for the detection and discovery of trace biomarkers. With recent demonstrations of the trapping and detection of these biomolecules using nanochannels, there is a need to better model and appreciate the physical mechanisms that are involved in the trapping of these biomolecules. This paper investigates the effect that voltage has on a conductivity gradient established within a nanochannel. This conductivity gradient is used to focus proteins by balancing the opposing electrophoretic and viscous drag forces – and it is established in a nanochannel that connects two microchannels containing solutions of different salt concentrations and hence conductivity. A conductivity gradient is directly observed using a fluorescent salt, then the trapping behaviour of a fluorescent protein, in a phosphate buffered solution containing salt, is investigated, while varying the applied voltage. This study concludes that voltage appears to have a significant effect on the conductivity gradient inside a nanochannel, and that this effect may have important implications for protein trapping inside a nanochannel.
Non-voluntary and voluntary processing of emotional prosody: an event-related potentials study

The present study investigated whether event-related potentials (ERPs) reflect non-voluntary vs voluntary processing of emotional prosody. ERPs were obtained while participants processed emotional information non-voluntarily (i.e. while evaluating semantic characteristics of a stimulus) and voluntarily (i.e. while evaluating emotional characteristics of a stimulus). Results suggest that emotional prosody is processed around 160 ms after stimulus onset under non-voluntary processing conditions (when the attention is diverted from the emotional meaning of the tone of voice); and around 360 ms under voluntary processing conditions. The findings support the notion that emotional prosody is processed non-voluntarily in the comprehension of a spoken message.
A multi-phase DMOC-based optimal trajectory generation methodology for a quadrotor

This paper proposes a new multi-phase DMOC based trajectory optimization methodology to solve optimal control problems for mechanical systems. DMOC (Discrete Mechanics and Optimal Control) approach directly derives from discrete Lagrange-D'Alembert principle. The constraints for the optimization of a given cost functional are modeled as Euler-Lagrange equations. In addition to the basic requirements of DMOC, a Multi-phase Trajectory Optimization Strategy is proposed to satisfy some specific requirements and help to improve trajectory generation performance when the system should operate in a relatively complex or special environment; To show its advantages, the numerical simulations illustrate the proposed approach by generating the multi-phase optimal trajectory for a quadrotor, and comparison with another state-of-art direct Gauss Pseudo-spectrum Method (GPM) is presented. The experiment results show that our approach is more efficient to generate optimal trajectory for complex nonlinear problems than GPM, and with prospect of wide application in trajectory optimization.
Agronomic Practices for Improving Gentle Remediation of Trace Element-Contaminated Soils

The last few decades have seen the rise of Gentle soil Remediation Options (GRO), which notably include in situ contaminant stabilization (“inactivation”) and plant-based (generally termed “phytoremediation”) options. For trace element (TE)-contaminated sites, GRO aim to either decrease their labile pool and/or total content in the soil, thereby reducing related pollutant linkages. Much research has been dedicated to the screening and selection of TE-tolerant plant species and genotypes for application in GRO. However, the number of field trials demonstrating successful GRO remains well below the number of studies carried out at a greenhouse level. The move from greenhouse to field conditions requires incorporating agronomical knowledge into the remediation process and the ecological restoration of ecosystem services. This review summarizes agronomic practices against their demonstrated or potential positive effect on GRO performance, including plant selection, soil management practices, crop rotation, short rotation coppice, intercropping/row cropping, planting methods and plant densities, harvest and fertilization management, pest and weed control and irrigation management. Potentially negative effects of GRO, e.g., the introduction of potentially invasive species, are also discussed. Lessons learnt from long-term European field case sites are given for aiding the choice of appropriate management practices and plant species.