Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Involvement of vagal autonomic nuclei in multiple system atrophy and Lewy body disease

Background: Multiple system atrophy (MSA) and Lewy body disorders (LBDs) are associated with impaired control of gastrointestinal and cardiac functions. The dorsal vagal nucleus (DMV) innervates enteric neurons, whereas the ventrolateral nucleus ambiguus (NAmb) innervates the heart. The relationship between DMV and NAmb involvement and the gastrointestinal or cardiovagal manifestations in MSA and LBD is unclear. Methods: The authors counted the cholinergic neurons in the DMV and NAmb in 15 cases of neuropathologically confirmed MSA, 14 of LBD (4 brainstem, 3 limbic, and 7 neocortical), and 12 control cases. All MSA and 8 of the 14 LBD cases had gastrointestinal symptoms; 8 of 12 MSA and 1 of 4 LBD cases had laboratory evidence of cardiovagal failure; 5 of the MSA and no LBD cases had laryngeal stridor. Results: There was loss of cholinergic DMV neurons in all MSA and LBD cases. The degree of DMV cell loss was similar in LBD patient with or without gastrointestinal symptoms. In MSA but not in LBD cases, there was neuronal loss in the ventrolateral NAmb, with lower counts in patients with cardiovagal failure. Conclusions: There is comparable involvement of the dorsal vagal nucleus (DMV) in multiple system atrophy (MSA) and different stages of Lewy body disorders (LBDs). The relationship of DMV involvement and gastrointestinal symptoms is uncertain. Loss of neurons in the ventrolateral nucleus ambiguus may explain the more consistent cardiovagal failure in MSA than in LBD.
Mode selection for corrosion detection in pipes and vessels via guided wave tomography

Guided wave tomography offers a method to accurately quantify wall thickness losses in pipes and vessels caused by corrosion, using ultrasonic waves transmitted over distances of approximately 1 to 2 m, and measured by an array of transducers. These measurements are then used to reconstruct a map of wall thickness throughout the inspected region. To achieve accurate estimations of remnant wall thickness, it is vital that a suitable Lamb mode is chosen. This paper presents a detailed evaluation of the two most suitable modes, S0 and A0, to compare their performance using both numerical and experimental data. The sensitivity of A0 to thickness variations was shown to be superior to S0; however, the attenuation from A0 when a liquid loading was present was much higher than S0. A0 was less sensitive to the presence of coatings on the surface than was S0. Finally, it was shown that both modes could achieve a similar level of resolution in the plane of the plate surface.
Shigella flexneri enters human colonic Caco-2 epithelial cells through the basolateral pole

The commonly accepted view that enteroinvasive bacteria enter cells of the intestinal epithelial lining through the apical surface can be challenged in the case of shigellosis. This study is based on in vitro experiments that showed that the invasion of human colonic Caco-2 cells by Shigella flexneri occurred through the basolateral pole of these cells. In these experiments, the few bacteria that interacted with the apical surface either bound to microvilli of the cell dome without causing detectable alteration or bound at the level of intercellular junctions at which they demonstrated a limited capacity for paracellular invasion, which permitted subsequent entry through the lateral domain of the cells. Treatment of Caco-2 cell monolayers with ethylene glycol-bis(beta-aminoethyl ether)-N,N,N',N'-tetraacetic acid (EGTA), which disrupts intercellular junctions, greatly enhanced the rate of cell infection. These observations suggest a physiopathological paradox that may have important consequences for the understanding of the process of colonic invasion in vivo during shigellosis.
Modeling and Control of SOFC Based Stationary Power Generation

With the increasing interest in solid oxide fuel cells, it would be beneficial and important to study its modeling as well as the control of the fuel cell based distributed generation in power grid. In this paper, a solid oxide fuel cell model is firstly presently. It was shown how a block-oriented solid oxide fuel cell is modeled in MATLAB/Simulink. By combining the auxiliary components, a solid oxide fuel cell based power plant was developed. Furthermore, a control methodology using the concept of virtual synchronous generator is proposed to integrate the fuel cell based power plant to the electric power grid. The theoretical considerations are complemented by application to illustrate the value of the modelling and control.
Grammatical Gender in the Production of Single Words: Some Evidence from Greek

The present study investigated the effect of prior grammatical gender information provided by the production of a bare noun on the production of a syntactically unrelated, gender-inflected color adjective. The target language was Greek. A lexical priming task involving picture naming was employed. Participants saw a series of pictures, some in color and some in black-and-white; they had to name a black-and-white picture with the single noun (prime) and a color picture with the appropriately inflected color adjective (target). Prior gender information was shown to affect subsequent production of gender-marked words. The effect was restricted to nouns of one gender class (masculine) only. The implications of these results for the representation and processing of gender in production are discussed.
CoopCL: Cooperative Execution of OpenCL Programs on Heterogeneous CPU-GPU Platforms

In this work, we present CoopCL, an C++ API and runtime that abstracts and unifies the cooperative workload execution on multi-core CPU and GPU. The CoopCL takes a OpenCL-C kernel function and automatically uses both the CPU and the GPU to execute it in parallel. We propose a method that transparently manages the data transfers and synchronization necessary to ensure a coherence without requiring any effort from the programmer. The CoopCL is completely portable across different machines including platforms with discrete and integrated GPUs. Across a set of diverse benchmarks, our runtime shows a mean speedup of nearly 10% over a GPU only execution and 30% over a multi-core CPU. We also achieve up to a 52% reduction in energy consumption compared to the CPU only execution.
Cluster-Linkage Analysis in Traffic Data Clustering for Development of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

In terms of vehicle safety, the number of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) mounted in an automobile has been increasing recently. For an efficient conceptional design and system validation of ADAS, the representative test scenarios are indispensable. In order to identify the representative scenarios,the real-world traffic scenarios are to be clustered according to their similarity. The hierarchical agglomerative clustering is a well-known method to quantify the similarity of traffic scenarios existing in a database. However, the cluster structure is affected by the linkage criterion used in the agglomerative procedure.This study inquires into the similarity measurement of vehicle-pedestrian near-crashes in the USA. Various linkage criteria are selected to get better understanding of their influence on the clustering results and conduct a comparative study. Furthermore,a hybrid clustering algorithm is presented, which is based on k-covers and k-means clustering. Using the average silhouette width, the optimal number of clusters is calculated and the cluster structures are investigated. In the end, the representative scenarios are selected with the use of centrality measure and form the basis of the scenario catalog making for the reduction of test effort in ADAS development.
The Price of Racial Bias

Existing stereotypes about Black Americans may influence perceptions of intent during financial negotiations. In this study, we explored whether the influence of race on economic decisions extends to choices that are costly to the decision maker. We investigated whether racial group membership contributes to differential likelihood of rejection of objectively equal unfair monetary offers. In the Ultimatum Game, players accept or reject proposed splits of money. Players keep accepted splits, but if a player rejects an offer, both the player and the proposer receive nothing. We found that participants accepted more offers and lower offer amounts from White proposers than from Black proposers, and that this pattern was accentuated for participants with higher implicit race bias. These findings indicate that participants are willing to discriminate against Black proposers even at a cost to their own financial gain.
A novel optimization approach for packet-wise Selective Relaying in CDMA uplink communications

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for cooperative systems performance optimization. We are interested on the uplink CDMA communications, known to be both intra-cell and inter-cell interference limited. More precisely, we define a multi-access interference (MAI) cost that reliably quantifies the additional interference generated by a relayed communication to the whole cellular system. For CDMA uplink communications, this MAI cost hides an implicit and smart power control that takes into account not only the reception quality required at the serving base station but also the interference generated to the whole network. Here, the optimization process aims to improve the system performance, in terms of Packet-Error-Rate (PER) for a certain required quality of service (QoS). The optimization process is carried for both Selective Relaying (SR) and Incremental Selective Relaying (ISR) schemes, on packet-by-packet basis. A variety of simulation results are carried using analytical expressions of Packet-Error-Probability that are derived for SR and ISR schemes. We show that, for a target PER of 10−2, our optimized ISR scheme could provide up to 14 dB gain, in terms of MAI cost reduction, over the direct transmission scheme. Additionally, results highlight that our optimized ISR relaying is always more powerful than the optimized SR scheme and provides as much as 4 dB gain in the most favorable cases.
Joint STAP-ISAR for non-cooperative target imaging in strong clutter

The aim of this work is to combine clutter suppression and ISAR processing in order to obtain well focused images of extended moving targets. A STAP ISAR based moving target imaging scheme for Multichannel SAR (M-SAR) in strong clutter environment is presented. This scheme consists of two main processing steps. The first step performs clutter mitigation and radar motion compensation by exploiting Space Time Adaptive Processing while the second step performs target motion compensation using ISAR processing. Two principal issues will be addressed. First a technique for applying ISAR processing after clutter mitigation is presented and then a suboptimal approach to clutter mitigation is proposed to overcome computational and statistical issues associated with estimation of clutter space time covariance matrix. Results of the processing applied to simulated data are provided in order to show the effectiveness of the proposed technique.
Transition from AdS universe to DS universe in the BPP model

It can be shown that in the BPP model the smooth phase transition from the asymptotically decelerated AdS universe to the asymptotically accelerated DS universe is possible by solving the modified semiclassical equations of motion. This transition comes from noncommutative Poisson algebra, which gives the constant curvature scalars asymptotically. The decelerated expansion of the early universe is due to the negative energy density with the negative pressure induced by quantum back reaction, and the accelerated late-time universe comes from the positive energy and the negative pressure which behave like dark energy source in recent cosmological models.
Significance of bursa of Fabricius as target organ in infectious bursal disease of chickens

The highly virulent strain Cu-1 of infectious bursal disease virus caused 100% mortality in 4-week-old specific pathogen-free chickens. In contrast, chickens infected after bursectomy did not become sick and only showed some discrete and transient necrosis in lymphatic tissues. However, these chickens contained infectious virus and, subsequently, produced specific antibodies. The virus concentrations in the organs studied reached their maximum 2 days postinfection, but were about 1,000 times lower in non-bursectomized animals. It may be assumed that in bursectomized chickens the early events of infection are the same as in non-bursectomized ones. Virus is spread in varius organs, but due to the absence of a sufficient number of susceptible cells, virus multiplication is moderate and can be kept in check by the host defense mechanism. With the occurrence of circulating specific antibodies the virus can be rapidly eliminated. The studies particularly stress that the availability of a large number of highly susceptible cells is a crucial point in acute viral infections.
Modified direct torque control for sensorless asynchronous motor fed by three-level inverter

Direct Torque Control is a well-known high-performance technique used in asynchronous motors. This conventional technique which uses hysteresis comparators suffers from high torque ripples and variable switching frequency. The most common solution to those drawbacks is to use the modulation technique in order to have a constant frequency. This paper presents a modified direct torque control of asynchronous motor scheme associated to sinusoidal pulse width modulation and PI regulators to generate the system voltages. In the other hand and instead of using a two-level inverter, the asynchronous motor is fed by a three-level inverter in order to reduce stress of the power device and to enhance output quality. In addition, the control strategy uses a speed estimator that allows the elimination of the mechanical sensor, which greatly increases the reliability of the system. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, theoretical principles and simulation results using the MATLAB / SIMULINK software will be made.
Low-loss Si-slot waveguides and ring resonator embedded with Benzocyclobutene

In order to improve the property of the athermal ring resonator with Si-slot waveguide, a reduction of the propagation loss of a slot waveguide and introduction of a spot-size converter are reported. The propagation loss was measured to be 5.6 dB/cm, which is the lowest value to the best of our knowledge.
N-Acetylcysteine protects the rat diaphragm from the decreased contractility associated with controlled mechanical ventilation*

Objective:Controlled mechanical ventilation results in diaphragmatic dysfunction, and oxidative stress has been shown to be an important contributor to ventilator-induced diaphragm dysfunction. We hypothesized that the administration of an antioxidant, N-acetylcysteine, would restore the redox balance in the diaphragm and prevent against the deleterious effects of controlled mechanical ventilation. Design:Randomized, controlled experiment. Settings:Basic science animal laboratory. Subjects:Male Wistar rats, 14 wks old. Interventions:Anesthetized rats were submitted for 24 hrs to either spontaneous breathing receiving 150 mg/kg N-acetylcysteine (SBNAC) or saline (SBSAL) or to controlled mechanical ventilation receiving 150 mg/kg N-acetylcysteine (MVNAC) or saline (MVSAL). Measurements and Main Results:After 24 hrs of controlled mechanical ventilation, diaphragmatic force production was significantly lower in MVSAL compared with all groups. Importantly, administration of N-acetylcysteine completely abolished this controlled mechanical ventilation-induced diaphragmatic contractile dysfunction. Diaphragmatic protein oxidation was significantly increased after 24 hrs of controlled mechanical ventilation (+53%, p < .01) in MVSAL animals, whereas administration of N-acetylcysteine prevented this controlled mechanical ventilation-induced oxidative stress. Diaphragmatic 20S proteasome activity was increased in MVSAL (+62%, p < .05). Further, compared with SBSAL, diaphragm caspase-3 activity was significantly increased in MVSAL (+279%, p < .001), and N-acetylcysteine treatment provided partial protection against caspase-3 activation. Diaphragmatic calpain activity was significantly increased after controlled mechanical ventilation (+137%, p < .001) in MVSAL animals, but N-acetylcysteine treatment protected against this event. Finally, significant negative correlations existed between calpain activity and diaphragm force production (r from −0.56 to −0.49, p < .05). Conclusions:These data show that the administration of N-acetylcysteine protects the diaphragm from the deleterious effects of controlled mechanical ventilation. Specifically, N-acetylcysteine prevents against controlled mechanical ventilation-induced diaphragmatic oxidative stress and proteolysis and abolishes controlled mechanical ventilation-induced diaphragmatic contractile dysfunction.
Sweeter than wine? The use of the grape in early western Asia

Abstract Emotional news for lovers of a dry white wine. The blissful Hippocrene was composed from wild grapes from the sixth millennium BC in the lands of its natural habitat. But, as the author shows, the cultivation, domestication and selective breeding of the grape following in the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age was aimed primarily at the enjoyment of its sweetness.
Inverse relationship between dendritic cell CCR9 expression and maturation state

CCR9 has been identified on T cells as a chemokine receptor that directs these cells to migrate to the intestine. CCR9 has also been reported on different cell types in the intestine, thymus, liver and peripheral blood. Little is reported concerning the presence of or functional implications of this chemokine receptor on myeloid dendritic cells (DC). In the host, DC encounter a multiplicity of antigenic stimuli to which they mount immune responses. In addition to intracellular and functional changes on sensing antigen, maturation of DC is typically reflected in the up‐regulation of costimulatory molecules on DC. However, alterations in other surface markers may also be an indicator of DC activation. Using bone marrow‐propagated DC these studies investigated cellular maturation in the presence of microbial stimuli and analyzed the relationship of CCR9 expression with DC maturation. Fractionation of DC into CCR9high and CCR9lowsubsets revealed a distinct ability of each subset to induce division in naïve CD4+ T cells. Our results suggest that DC expressing high levels of CCR9 are less activated/mature than DC expressing low levels of CCR9.
VAGINAL IMMUNITY IN THE HSV-2 MOUSE MODEL

Herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) is a sexually transmitted pathogen that infects the genital tract. Efforts to develop vaccines to protect women against this and other sexually transmitted pathogens would be facilitated by a better understanding of the immune mechanisms that protect the female reproductive tract against such infections. Such information would be invaluable in developing vaccine strategies to promote the type and magnitude of immune responses in the genital tract that would effectively protect against infection. This review focuses on recent studies using a progestin-treated adult mouse model to explore mucosal immunity to HSV-2 in the vagina. Evidence indicating a major role for both humoral and T cell immunity is presented.
Deciding Backup Location Methods for Distributed Stream Processing System

A large amount of stream data are generated from some devices such as sensors and cameras. These stream data should be timely processed for real-time applications to satisfy the data latency requirements. To process a large amount of data in a short time, utilizing stream processing on edge/fog computing is a promising technology. In the stream processing system, a snapshot of processes and replications of the stream data are stored on another server, and when server fault or load spike of server occurs, the process is continued by using the stored snapshots and replicated data. Therefore, with edge computing environment, which has low bandwidth resource, process recovery takes a long time due to the transferring of restored data. In this paper, we propose a stream processing system architecture to decide servers to store snapshots and replication data and redeploy processes by considering the load of each server and the network bandwidth. We also propose a semi-optimal algorithm that reduces the computational cost by appropriately sorting servers and tasks according to the network bandwidth and server load. The algorithm can ﬁnd a solution over 1000 times faster than the Coin or Branch and Cut (CBC) solver.
Manifesto for the Reputation Society

Information overload, challenges of evaluating quality, and the opportunity to benefit from experiences of others have spurred the development of reputation systems. Most Internet sites which mediate between large numbers of people use some form of reputation mechanism: Slashdot, eBay, ePinions, Amazon, and Google all make use of collaborative filtering, recommender systems, or shared judgements of quality. But we suggest the potential utility of reputation services is far greater, touching nearly every aspect of society. By leveraging our limited and local human judgement power with collective networked filtering, it is possible to promote an interconnected ecology of socially beneficial reputation systems — to restrain the baser side of human nature, while unleashing positive social changes and enabling the realization of ever higher goals.
Role of macrophage tissue infiltration in metabolic diseases

Purpose of reviewWhite adipose tissue is necessary for optimal energy homeostasis and the excessive development of fat mass is clearly associated with the metabolic syndrome. The fact that adipocytes secrete a number of specific factors or ‘adipokines’ has forced a reassessment of the involvement of adipose tissue in a wide range of physiological and pathophysiological processes. Obesity has recently been described as a ‘low-grade’ inflammatory condition, a state proposed to represent a common determinator in the genesis of obesity-associated pathologies, i.e. diabetes and atherosclerosis. Recent findingsRecent reports of an increase in the number of macrophages that infiltrate the fat mass in obese individuals led to the suggestion that adipose tissue itself is a source and site of inflammation. SummaryThis review summarizes recent data on the characterization of the macrophage population in fat tissue. Their origin, fate and activation will be considered. The potential involvement of adipose tissue macrophages in the development of insulin resistance and vascular pathologies, as well as in the control of adipose tissue growth and metabolism, will be examined.
Border Bias

In this research, we documented a bias in which people underestimate the potential risk of a disaster to a target location when the disaster spreads from a different state, but not when it spreads from an equally distant location within the same state. We term this the border bias. Following research on categorization, we propose that people consider locations within a state to be part of the same superordinate category, but consider locations in two different states to be parts of different superordinate categories. The border bias occurs because people apply state-based categorization to events that are not governed by human-made boundaries. Such categorization results in state borders being considered physical barriers that can keep disasters at bay. We demonstrated the border bias for different types of disasters (earthquake, environmental risk) and tested the underlying process in three studies.