Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Long non-coding RNA H19 regulates endothelial cell aging via inhibition of STAT3 signalling

Abstract Aims Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been shown to regulate numerous processes in the human genome, but the function of these transcripts in vascular aging is largely unknown. We aim to characterize the expression of lncRNAs in endothelial aging and analyse the function of the highly conserved lncRNA H19. Methods and results H19 was downregulated in endothelium of aged mice. In human, atherosclerotic plaques H19 was mainly expressed by endothelial cells and H19 was significantly reduced in comparison to healthy carotid artery biopsies. Loss of H19 led to an upregulation of p16 and p21, reduced proliferation and increased senescence in vitro. Depletion of H19 in aortic rings of young mice inhibited sprouting capacity. We generated endothelial-specific inducible H19 deficient mice (H19iEC-KO), resulting in increased systolic blood pressure compared with control littermates (Ctrl). These H19iEC-KO and Ctrl mice were subjected to hindlimb ischaemia, which showed reduced capillary density in H19iEC-KO mice. Mechanistically, exon array analysis revealed an involvement of H19 in IL-6 signalling. Accordingly, intercellular adhesion molecule 1 and vascular cell adhesion molecule 1 were upregulated upon H19 depletion. A luciferase reporter screen for differential transcription factor activity revealed STAT3 as being induced upon H19 depletion and repressed after H19 overexpression. Furthermore, depletion of H19 increased the phosphorylation of STAT3 at TYR705 and pharmacological inhibition of STAT3 activation abolished the effects of H19 silencing on p21 and vascular cell adhesion molecule 1 expression as well as proliferation. Conclusion These data reveal a pivotal role for the lncRNA H19 in controlling endothelial cell aging.
Drebrin: a new player in angiotensin II-induced aortopathies.

hypertension aortic remodelling that predisposes to several cardiovascular diseases. There many unknowns on the mechanisms of the cellular and structural changes of hypertension-induced aortic remodelling. A publication reports effects of drebrin on angiotensin II (AngII)-induced aortic remodelling, which provides new insights into understanding mechanisms of vascular diseases. in HEK-293 cells. These findings implicate that effects of SMC-specific drebrin on preventing aortic remodelling are not through direct interac-tion with AngII activation of AT1a receptors (
Beneficial effects of bilateral subthalamic stimulation on alexithymia in Parkinson's disease

Subthalamic nucleus (STN) deep brain stimulation (DBS) improves quality of life (QoL) and motor and non‐motor symptoms in advanced Parkinson's disease (PD). However, its effect on alexithymia and its relationship to other neuropsychiatric symptoms and QoL in PD is unclear.
Quantitative Resilience Assessment for Power Transmission Systems Under Typhoon Weather

Reliable power grids are also vulnerable to extreme events, which are with a low probability but highly risk events, such as a typhoon. Power system, as an important infrastructure, should have the ability to withstand the adverse effect of such extreme events. This paper proposes a quantitative resilience assessment framework for power transmission systems operated under typhoon weather, which considers both the spatial and temporal impacts of typhoon. The proposed framework allows systematic estimation of resilience considering weather intensity, fault location of components, restoration resources, and emergency response plans. The typhoon wind field model for disaster risk assessment is applied to evaluate the intensity and the duration of impacts. The finite element modeling of components is developed to model the outage probability of components. A new resilience index considering the duration of extreme events (RICD) is proposed, which not only considers the performance of system but also considers characteristics of disruption. The proposed method is demonstrated by four case studies using the modified IEEE 6-bus test system. The numerical results reveal that the proposed method is able to quantify the influence of extreme event on power system resilience, and it shows that RICD is more feasible than two traditional indices in terms of normalization and comparability.
SANGN: A New Service Oriented Architecture for Provisioning of NGN Scalable Multimedia Services

The introduction of Next Generation Networks (NGN) has changed significantly the network service model. Vertical structures that are designed to each type of access have been replaced by horizontal structures. However, the service architecture has to be rebuilt to support the required agility within the horizontal structures. Our proposal, named SANGN, is based on a full integration of Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) with Java Agent DEvelopment (JADE) framework for providing multimedia services of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). We have introduced a Televote service as a use case in order to validate the SANGN architecture ensuring the massive scalability of these services to meet the stringent multimedia requirements. Our implementation is able to adapt with a high dynamic load of the system, making use of a minimal set of computational resources seamlessly for the clients, providing IMS core components in the network infrastructure.
Oceanographic boundaries constrain microbial diversity gradients in the South Pacific Ocean

Significance High-resolution data covering marine microbes and microeukaryotes are sparse, even though these organisms control global biogeochemical cycles. Here we present a dataset describing the microbial pro- and eukaryotic diversity along a 7,000-km transect from the Antarctic ice edge to the equator in the South Pacific Ocean. We show that (i) temperature is not a primary driver of richness gradients, (ii) prokaryotic richness increases with productivity, and (iii) oceanographic features can structure the diversity of pro- and eukaryotes. Our data have given us a better understanding of how diversity relates to dissolved inorganic nitrogen and productivity as well as insights into the potential shifts in the geographical range of marine microbe communities in light of the rapidly changing climate. Marine microbes along with microeukaryotes are key regulators of oceanic biogeochemical pathways. Here we present a high-resolution (every 0.5° of latitude) dataset describing microbial pro- and eukaryotic richness in the surface and just below the thermocline along a 7,000-km transect from 66°S at the Antarctic ice edge to the equator in the South Pacific Ocean. The transect, conducted in austral winter, covered key oceanographic features including crossing of the polar front (PF), the subtropical front (STF), and the equatorial upwelling region. Our data indicate that temperature does not determine patterns of marine microbial richness, complementing the global model data from Ladau et al. [Ladau J, et al. (2013) ISME J 7:1669–1677]. Rather, NH4+, nanophytoplankton, and primary productivity were the main drivers for archaeal and bacterial richness. Eukaryote richness was highest in the least-productive ocean region, the tropical oligotrophic province. We also observed a unique diversity pattern in the South Pacific Ocean: a regional increase in archaeal and bacterial diversity between 10°S and the equator. Rapoport’s rule describes the tendency for the latitudinal ranges of species to increase with latitude. Our data showed that the mean latitudinal ranges of archaea and bacteria decreased with latitude. We show that permanent oceanographic features, such as the STF and the equatorial upwelling, can have a significant influence on both alpha-diversity and beta-diversity of pro- and eukaryotes.
Synthesis-Aided Reliability Assurance of Basic Block Models for Model Checking Purposes

In the Finnish nuclear industry, model checking, a formal verification technique, is used as an additional means of safety assurance for instrumentation and control (I&C) system design. Since the code of vendor-specific basic function blocks used in I&C is commonly closed, these blocks need to be modeled manually based on available specification. This modeling introduces an additional source of human factor into the verification process. To increase the reliability of the library of basic blocks used in nuclear I&C verification, we apply formal synthesis techniques, which can construct finite-state models of reactive systems from behavior examples and temporal properties. Since these techniques have computational limitations and synthesized models are hard to understand even by an analyst, we do not use them in the final verification process. Instead, in an iterative process, behavioral differences between a synthesized model and a manual model implementation are identified and used to create a list of features of manual implementations which either violate the specification or show that the specification is ambiguous.
Pseudonym Inference in Cooperative Vehicular Traffic Scenarios

Vehicle platooning is a promising technique to enhance travel safety and road capacity. A common form of platooning is Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC), where cars communicate their states with each other to maintain a constant gap between them. CACC can further reduce the headway between adjacent vehicles. However, the frequently broadcast safety messages with precise location and time information impose a significant threat to the location privacy of cars. Mix-zone based approaches are traditionally used to obfuscate vehicles' identities by mixing their pseudonyms. However, vehicles' movement is tightly coupled with each other inside a vehicular platoon, which introduces high predictability and spatial-temporal correlation for trajectories of vehicles. In this paper, we show how an adversary can exploit vehicles' platooning states to better infer their pseudonyms by observing their broadcast states before and after entering a mix-zone. We propose a novel attack strategy using a maximum likelihood estimator and expectation-maximization algorithm, and demonstrate the effectiveness of this attack through extensive simulations based on the real data from U.S. Highway 101. Our strategy achieves 30% higher inference accuracy compared with traditional non-platooning traffic scenarios. We also suggest a few possible approaches to mitigate such privacy threat in a platooning environment.
Binary image deblurring with automatic binary value estimation

Abstract. We propose a total variation-based variational model for nonblind binary image deblurring. The binary constraint is considered using the double-well function as the penalty term. We show the existence of a minimizer for the proposed model. By using operator splitting and alternating split Bregman, we get an effective numerical algorithm for the proposed model. Different from the existing methods in which the binary values are assumed to be known, our method can estimate the binary values automatically in the iteration process. Numerical results and comparisons demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is promising.
Optimal Local Dimming Based on an Improved Shuffled Frog Leaping Algorithm

The local backlight dimming technology has recently been presented for liquid crystal displays in order to reduce the power consumption of backlight and improve the quality of the display. Therefore, exploiting the tradeoff between the image quality and power consumption has become the focus of local backlight dimming technology. This paper considers the local backlight dimming as an optimization problem, i.e., how to preserve the image quality perception with a certain low backlight power consumption. To achieve this goal, we use the swarm intelligence algorithm. Specifically, an improved shuffled frog leaping algorithm is proposed for local backlight dimming. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves the better tradeoff between power consumption and image quality when compared to other algorithms based on image parameters.
Frontal EEG Temporal and Spectral Dynamics Similarity Analysis between Propofol and Desflurane Induced Anesthesia Using Hilbert-Huang Transform

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal analysis is commonly employed to extract information on the brain dynamics. It mainly targets brain status and communication, thus providing potential to trace differences in the brain's activity under different anesthetics. In this article, two kinds of gamma-amino butyric acid (type A -GABAA) dependent anesthetic agents, propofol and desflurane (28 and 23 patients), were studied and compared with respect to EEG spectrogram dynamics. Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT) was employed to compute the time varying spectrum for different anesthetic levels in comparison with Fourier based method. Results show that the HHT method generates consistent band power (slow and alpha) dominance pattern as Fourier method does, but exhibits higher concentrated power distribution within each frequency band than the Fourier method during both drugs induced unconsciousness. HHT also finds slow and theta bands peak frequency with better convergence by standard deviation (propofol-slow: 0.46 to 0.24; theta: 1.42 to 0.79; desflurane-slow: 0.30 to 0.25; theta: 1.42 to 0.98) and a shift to relatively lower values for alpha band (propofol: 9.94 Hz to 10.33 Hz, desflurane 8.44 Hz to 8.84 Hz) than Fourier one. For different stage comparisons, although HHT shows significant alpha power increases during unconsciousness stage as the Fourier did previously, it finds no significant high frequency (low gamma) band power difference in propofol whereas it does in desflurane. In addition, when comparing the HHT results within two groups during unconsciousness, high beta band power in propofol is significantly larger than that of desflurane while delta band power behaves oppositely. In conclusion, this study convincingly shows that EEG analyzed here considerably differs between the HHT and Fourier method.
Computational Modeling of the Effects of Inflammatory Response and Granulation Tissue Properties on Human Bone Fracture Healing.

Bone healing process includes four phases: inflammatory response, soft callus formation, hard callus development, and remodeling. Mechanobiological models have been used to investigate the role of various mechanical and biological factors on the bone healing. However, the initial phase of healing, which includes the inflammatory response, the granulation tissue formation and the initial callus formation during the first few days post-fracture, are generally neglected in such studies. In this study, we developed a finite-element-based model to simulate different levels of diffusion coefficient for mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) migration, Young's modulus of granulation tissue, callus thickness and interfragmentary gap size to understand the modulatory effects of these initial phase parameters on bone healing. The results showed that faster MSC migration, stiffer granulation tissue, thicker callus and smaller interfragmentary gap enhanced healing to some extent. After a certain threshold, a state of saturation was reached for MSC migration rate, granulation tissue stiffness and callus thickness. Therefore, a parametric study was performed to verify that the callus formed at the initial phase, in agreement with experimental observations, has an ideal range of geometry and material properties to have the most efficient healing time. Findings from this paper quantified the effects of the healing initial phase on healing outcome to better understand the biological and mechanobiological mechanisms and their utilization in the design and optimization of treatment strategies. Simulation outcomes also demonstrated that for fractures, where bone segments are in close proximity, callus development is not required. This finding is consistent with the concepts of primary and secondary bone healing.
Certificateless Provable Group Shared Data Possession with Comprehensive Privacy Preservation for Cloud Storage

Provable Data Possession (PDP) protocol makes it possible for cloud users to check whether the cloud servers possess their original data without downloading all the data. However, most of the existing PDP schemes are based on either public key infrastructure (PKI) or identity-based cryptography, which will suffer from issues of expensive certificate management or key escrow. In this paper, we propose a new construction of certificateless provable group shared data possession (CL-PGSDP) protocol by making use of certificateless cryptography, which will eliminate the above issues. Meanwhile, by taking advantage of zero-knowledge protocol and randomization method, the proposed CL-PGSDP protocol leaks no information of the stored data and the group user’s identity to the verifiers during the verifying process, which is of the property of comprehensive privacy preservation. In addition, our protocol also supports efficient user revocation from the group. Security analysis and experimental evaluation indicate that our CL-PGSDP protocol provides strong security with desirable efficiency.
Pregabalin treatment for neuropathic pain may damage intervertebral disc tissue

The aim of the present study was to determine whether pharmaceutical preparations with pregabalin (PGB) as an active ingredient, which are widely prescribed by clinicians, exert toxic effects on human primary nucleus pulposus (NP) and annulus fibrosis (AF). Primary human cell cultures were obtained from intact (n=6) and degenerated (n=6) tissues resected from the two groups of patients. Different doses of PGB were applied to these cultures and cells were subjected to molecular analyses at 0, 24 and 48 h. Cell vitality, toxicity and proliferation were assessed using a spectrophotometer. The expression of chondroadherin (CHAD), a (member of the NP-specific protein family), hypoxia-inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α) and type II collagen (COL2A1) was measured using reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction. The results revealed that cell intensity increased in a time-dependent manner and cell vitality continued in the cultures without pharmaceuticals. Cell proliferation was suppressed in the PGB-treated cultures independent from the dose and duration of application. PGB was demonstrated to suppress the expression of CHAD and HIF-1α. In contrast, COL2A1 gene expression was not revealed in any experimental group. The present study utilized an in vitro model and the PGB active ingredient used herein may not be representative of clinical applications; however, the results demonstrated that PGB has a toxic effect on NP/AF cell cultures containing primary human intervertebral disc tissue. In summary, the use of pharmacological agents containing PGB may suppress the proliferation and differentiation of NP/AF cells and/or tissues, which should be considered when deciding on an appropriate treatment regime.
Discovery of Novel Caeridins from the Skin Secretion of the Australian White's Tree Frog, Litoria caerulea

Abundant biologically active peptides have been discovered from frog skin secretions, a rich natural source of bioactive compounds with great potential in drug discovery. In this study, three Caeridin peptides, namely, Caeridin-1, S5-Caeridin-1, and Caeridin-a1, were discovered from the skin secretion of the Australian White's tree frog, Litoria caerulea, for the first time, by means of combining transcriptomic and peptidomic analyses. It also represents the first report on bioactive Caeridins since this family of peptides was initially studied 20 years ago. Chemically synthetic versions of each natural Caeridin demonstrated promising bioactivities either on rat smooth muscles or against microbial growth. Specifically, Caeridin-1 produced contraction of rat bladder smooth muscle, while S5-Caeridin-1 induced relaxation of rat ileum smooth muscle, both at nanomolar concentrations. Moreover, Caeridin-a1 was shown to potently inhibit the growth of the planktonic Gram-positive bacteria Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), and Enterococcus faecalis (E. faecalis), the Gram-negative bacterium, Escherichia coli (E. coli), and the yeast, Candida albicans (C. albicans). The discovery of these Caeridins may induce further intensive and systematic studies of frog skin peptides to promote the discovery of natural templates as lead compounds for drug discovery and therapeutic application.
"10 Points for the best answer!" - Baiting for explicating knowledge contributions within online Q&A

Online question answering (Q&A) provides a popular platform for people to interact with information online, both by asking and answering questions. Although previous studies have focused on factors that motivate answerers, these studies have not considered that questions offering potential rewards to answerers might provide extrinsic motivation to answer it. In the current study, we collected 25,878 resolved (i.e. one of the answers received a "Best Answer" rating from the asker) questions from Yahoo! Answers. Half contained an explicit offer to reward points, (i.e. "10 points for the best answer! ") in the question subject and/or content (n=12,939) and half did not (n=12,939). Findings indicate that although questions without explicit offers received more answers on average, questions with explicit offers to reward points received a "Best Answer" rating by the asker approximately five times faster than the ones without an expression. This suggests that an explicit offer to reward ten points within a question affects the resultant on the quality of the answers provided within online Q&A.
Source Critical Reinforcement Learning for Transferring Spoken Language Understanding to a New Language

To deploy a spoken language understanding (SLU) model to a new language, language transferring is desired to avoid the trouble of acquiring and labeling a new big SLU corpus. An SLU corpus is a monolingual corpus with domain/intent/slot labels. Translating the original SLU corpus into the target language is an attractive strategy. However, SLU corpora consist of plenty of semantic labels (slots), which general-purpose translators cannot handle well, not to mention additional culture differences. This paper focuses on the language transferring task given a small in-domain parallel SLU corpus. The in-domain parallel corpus can be used as the first adaptation on the general translator. But more importantly, we show how to use reinforcement learning (RL) to further adapt the adapted translator, where translated sentences with more proper slot tags receive higher rewards. Our reward is derived from the source input sentence exclusively, unlike reward via actor-critical methods or computing reward with a ground truth target sentence. Hence we can adapt the translator the second time, using the big monolingual SLU corpus from the source language. We evaluate our approach on Chinese to English language transferring for SLU systems. The experimental results show that the generated English SLU corpus via adaptation and reinforcement learning gives us over 97% in the slot F1 score and over 84% accuracy in domain classification. It demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed language transferring method. Compared with naive translation, our proposed method improves domain classification accuracy by relatively 22%, and the slot filling F1 score by relatively more than 71%.