Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
2-O-Methylmagnolol Induces Apoptosis and Inhibits IL-6/STAT3 Signaling in Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Background/Aims: 2-O-methylmagnolol (MM1), a derivative of magnolol bearing one methoxy moiety, has been shown to display improved anti-tumor activity against skin cancers. In this study, we examined the anti-tumor effects of magnolol and MM1 on oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). Methods: Trypane blue staining and clonogenic assays were performed to determine the cytotoxic effects of magnolol and MM1 in OSCC cells. Migration and matrigel invasion assays were carried out to examine the metastasis effects of magnolol and MM1 in OSCC cells. IL6-stimulation, Western blot, and immunohistochemistry were used to investigate the IL-6/STAT3 signaling and apoptosis. A bioluminescent mouse model of orthotopically implanted SAS cells was used to determine the anti-tumor activity of MM1 in vivo. Results: MM1 displays greater activity than magnolol on affecting the cytotoxicity, migration, and invasion of OSCC cells cultured in vitro. The improved anti-tumor activity of MM1 was shown to associate with its greater activity to inhibit STAT3 signaling and to induce apoptosis in the OSCC. In addition, we presented evidence that MM1 is effective in inhibiting the growth of orthotopic implanted OSCC cells in vivo. Conclusion: Our data indicate that MM1 displays greater anti-tumor activity than magnolol in OSCC and is an attractive agent to be further explored for its potential clinical application.
Objectively Measured Physical Activity and Sedentary Time among Children and Adolescents in Morocco: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background Regular physical activity in childhood and adolescent plays an important role in reducing the risk of cardiovascular health diseases, diabetes, and obesity in adulthood. However, little is known about physical activity levels (PA) and sedentary time among children and adolescents in Morocco. Objective To examine gender, type of day, and age grade differences in objectively measured sedentary time, physical activity levels, and physical activity guideline attainment among children and adolescents in Morocco. Method 172 children/adolescents (mean age = 10.92 ± 1.55 years, 49.4% are boys) were recruited for this study and wore a tri-axial accelerometer (GT3X+) for 7 consecutive days. Time spent in sedentary, PA levels, and daily steps were measured and compared according to gender, age grade, and the type of day (weekdays/weekends). Results In weekdays children/adolescents spent more time in sedentary than weekends (p < 0.001). Boys were eight times more likely to meet the recommendation for at least 60 min of moderate to vigorous physical activity per day than girls (OR: 8.569; 95% [CI]: 4.23–17.32), p < 0.001. Conclusion These findings highlight the need for effective and sustainable strategies and programs aiming to promote physical activity and to reduce sedentary behavior among children and adolescents in Morocco.
Tear Luminex Analysis in Dry Eye Patients

Background The purpose of this study was to analyze tear inflammatory cytokines of different subclasses of dry eye disease (DED) patients using Luminex technology. Material/Methods Forty-five DED patients including 20 Sjogren syndrome aqueous tear deficiency (SS-ATD) patients, 20 non-Sjogren syndrome aqueous tear deficiency (NSS-ATD) patients, 15 meibomian gland dysfunction (MGD) patients, and 15 normal participants were enrolled in this study. Concentrations of 11 inflammatory cytokines in tear samples of study participants were measured by Luminex assay; ELISA assay was further applied for validation. Results The levels of cytokines were mostly increased (TNF-α, IL-1α, IL-1β, IL-6, IL-8, IL-12P70, IL-13, IFN-γ, and MIP-1α) in DED patients compared with normal participants. And the levels of TNF-α, IL-6, IL-8, and IL-12P70 were significantly elevated in tears of the patient groups compared to tears of participants in the normal group (P<0.05). Statistical differences were also observed among the patient groups (SS-ATD, NSS-ATD, and MGD) for the level of IL-8 and TNF-α. The results of ELISA assay demonstrated the consistence with Luminex assay, confirming the practicality of Luminex technology for the analysis of multiple cytokines in DED patient tears. Conclusions The levels of inflammatory cytokines were mostly elevated in DED patients, and statistical differences of some cytokines were also found between SS-ATD, NSS-ATD, and MGD groups, suggesting that inflammatory cytokines could be potential supplements for the diagnosis of DED subclasses and therapeutic targets for DED patients.
Things Become Appealing When I Win: Neural Evidence of the Influence of Competition Outcomes on Brand Preference

Against the background of an increasingly competitive market environment, the current study aimed to investigate whether and how victory and defeat, as two critical factors in competition outcomes, would affect consumers’ preference of unfamiliar brands. In the experiment, participants’ status of victory or defeat was induced by a pseudo-online game, followed by a main task of brand preference rating. Using the precise and intuitive attributes of neuroscientific techniques, we adopted event-related potentials to analyze brain activity precisely during brand information processing when individuals experienced victory or defeat. Behavioral data showed that individuals had a stronger preference for unfamiliar brands in victory trials than in defeat trials, even if the brand was completely unrelated to the competition; this indicated a transfer of valence. Three emotion-related event-related potential components, N1, P2 and later positive potentials, were elicited more negatively in victory trials than in defeat trials, indicating the existence of incidental emotions induced by victory or defeat. No significant correlation was found between any pair of ERP components and preference scores. These results suggest that the experience of victory and defeat can evoke corresponding incidental emotions without awareness, and further affect the individual’s preference for unfamiliar brands. Therefore, playing a game before presenting brand information might help promote the brand by inducing a good impression of the brand in consumers.
Online Controlled Experimentation at Scale: An Empirical Survey on the Current State of A/B Testing

Online Controlled Experiments (OCEs, aka A/B tests) are one of the most powerful methods for measuring how much value new features and changes deployed to software products bring to users. Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Booking.com report the ability to conduct thousands of OCEs every year. However, the competences of the remainder of the online software industry remain unknown. The main objective of this paper is to reveal the current state of A/B testing maturity in the software industry based on a maturity model from our previous research. We base our findings on 44 responses from an online empirical survey. Our main contribution of this paper is the current state of experimentation maturity as operationalized by the ExG model for a convenience sample of companies doing online controlled experiments. Our findings show that, among others, companies typically develop in-house experimentation platforms, that these platforms are of various levels of maturity, and that designing key metrics - Overall Evaluation Criteria - remains the key challenge for successful experimentation.
Sequence Mining within Formal Concept Analysis for Analyzing Visitor Trajectories

This paper presents our work about mining visitor trajectories, within the framework of CrossCult European Project about cultural heritage. We present a theoretical and practical research work about the characterization of visitor trajectories and the mining of these trajectories as sequences. The mining process is based on two approaches, namely the mining of subsequences without any constraint and the mining of frequent contiguous subsequences. Both approaches are defined within Formal Concept Analysis and its extension pattern structures. In parallel, a similarity measure allows us to build a hierarchical classification which is used for interpretation and characterization of the trajectories w.r. t. four well-known visiting styles in museum studies.
A Multilinear Model for Bidirectional Craniofacial Reconstruction

We present a bidirectional facial reconstruction method for estimating the skull given a scan of the skin surface and vice versa estimating the skin surface given the skull. Our approach is based on a multilinear model that describes the correlation between the skull and the facial soft tissue thickness (FSTT) on the one hand and the head/face surface geometry on the other hand. Training this model requires to densely sample the Cartesian product space of skull shape times FSTT variation, which cannot be obtained by measurements alone. We generate this data by enriching measured data---volumetric computed tomography scans and 3D surface scans of the head---by simulating statistically plausible FSTT variations. We demonstrate the versatility of our novel multilinear model by estimating faces from given skulls as well as skulls from given faces within just a couple of seconds. To foster further research in this direction, we will make our multilinear model publicly available.
Sparse Coding of Weather and Illuminations for ADAS and Autonomous Driving

Weather and illumination are critical factors in vision tasks such as road detection, vehicle recognition, and active lighting for autonomous vehicles and ADAS. Understanding the weather and illumination type in a vehicle driving view can guide visual sensing, control vehicle headlight and speed, etc. This paper uses sparse coding technique to identify weather types in driving video, given a set of bases from video samples covering a full spectrum of weather and illumination conditions. We sample traffic and architecture insensitive regions in each video frame for features and obtain clusters of weather and illuminations via unsupervised learning. Then, a set of keys are selected carefully according to the visual appearance of road and sky. For video input, sparse coding of each frame is calculated for representing the vehicle view robustly under a specific illumination. The linear combination of the basis from keys results in weather types for road recognition, active lighting, intelligent vehicle control, etc.
Simultaneous measurements of three-dimensional trajectories and wingbeat frequencies of birds in the field

Tracking the movements of birds in three dimensions is integral to a wide range of problems in animal ecology, behaviour and cognition. Multi-camera stereo-imaging has been used to track the three-dimensional (3D) motion of birds in dense flocks, but precise localization of birds remains a challenge due to imaging resolution in the depth direction and optical occlusion. This paper introduces a portable stereo-imaging system with improved accuracy and a simple stereo-matching algorithm that can resolve optical occlusion. This system allows us to decouple body and wing motion, and thus measure not only velocities and accelerations but also wingbeat frequencies along the 3D trajectories of birds. We demonstrate these new methods by analysing six flocking events consisting of 50 to 360 jackdaws (Corvus monedula) and rooks (Corvus frugilegus) as well as 32 jackdaws and 6 rooks flying in isolated pairs or alone. Our method allows us to (i) measure flight speed and wingbeat frequency in different flying modes; (ii) characterize the U-shaped flight performance curve of birds in the wild, showing that wingbeat frequency reaches its minimum at moderate flight speeds; (iii) examine group effects on individual flight performance, showing that birds have a higher wingbeat frequency when flying in a group than when flying alone and when flying in dense regions than when flying in sparse regions; and (iv) provide a potential avenue for automated discrimination of bird species. We argue that the experimental method developed in this paper opens new opportunities for understanding flight kinematics and collective behaviour in natural environments.
Identification of acutely sick people: individual differences and social information use

Can humans discriminate between healthy and sick individuals, and if so by what cues? In order to study these important questions, in a recent study, Axelsson et al . let 62 untrained raters decide for 32 facial photos whether the person in the photo was healthy or sick [1]. Photos were taken of 16 healthy volunteers, injected once with a lipopolysaccharide injection ( Escherichia coli endotoxin) and once with a placebo injection (with a three to four week interval in between). Photos were taken 2 h after injection. While the authors used this ingenious study design to estimate the average discrimination ability of raters, their analysis did not address two keys aspects pertaining to their research questions. First, they did not report whether and how individuals differ in discrimination ability. Individuals may differ in their ability to discriminate between healthy and sick individuals, and in how they balance the trade-off between sensitivity (i.e. the frequency of sick individuals classified as sick) and specificity (i.e. the frequency of healthy individuals classified as healthy), a.k. a. response bias [2]. Importantly, while the authors did not use their data to investigate the presence and structure of such differences, the implications of their work for disease dynamics—and consequently prevention strategies—will differ substantially between populations with and without individual differences [3–5]. For example, groups and populations with a large number of expert and/or ‘cautious’ individuals (i.e. individuals with a relatively low response bias) are predicted to have a lower prevalence and weaker infectious outbreaks than groups with fewer expert and/or cautious individuals. Second, while the authors investigated the discrimination ability of socially isolated raters, in many real-world contexts, individuals will be able to observe the responses of others to potentially sick individuals. In such situations, the social information present …
Probabilistic Map-based Pedestrian Motion Prediction Taking Traffic Participants into Consideration

As pedestrians are one of the most vulnerable traffic participants, their motion prediction is of utmost importance for intelligent transportation systems. Predicting motions of pedestrians is especially hard since they move in less structured environments and have less inertia compared to road vehicles. To account for this uncertainty, we present an approach for probabilistic prediction of pedestrian motion using Markov chains. In contrast to previous work, we not only consider motion models, constraints from a semantic map, and various goals, but also explicitly adapt the prediction based on crash probabilities with other traffic participants. Also, our approach works in any situation; this is typically challenging for pure machine learning techniques that learn behaviors for a particular road section and which might consequently struggle with a different road section. The usefulness of combining the aforementioned aspects in a single approach is demonstrated by an evaluation using recordings of real pedestrians.
Adult gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis prevalence, incidence, treatment and syndromic case reporting in South Africa: Estimates using the Spectrum-STI model, 1990-2017

Objectives To estimate trends in prevalence and incidence of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia in adult men and women in South Africa. Methods The Spectrum-STI tool estimated trends in prevalence and incidence of active syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia, fitting South African prevalence data. Results were used, alongside programmatic surveillance data, to estimate trends in incident gonorrhea cases resistant to first-line treatment, and the reporting gap of symptomatic male gonorrhea and chlamydia cases treated but not reported as cases of urethritis syndrome. Results In 2017 adult (15–49 years) the estimated female and male prevalences for syphilis were 0.50% (95% CI: 0.32–0.80%) and 0.97% (0.19–2.28%), for gonorrhea 6.6% (3.8–10.8%) and 3.5% (1.7–6.1%), and for chlamydia 14.7% (9.9–21%) and 6.0% (3.8–10.4%), respectively. Between 1990 and 2017 the estimated prevalence of syphilis declined steadily in women and men, probably in part reflecting improved treatment coverage. For gonorrhea and chlamydia, estimated prevalence and incidence showed no consistent time trend in either women or men. Despite growing annual numbers of gonorrhea cases − reflecting population growth − the estimated number of first line treatment-resistant gonorrhea cases did not increase between 2008 and 2017, owing to changes in first-line antimicrobial treatment regimens for gonorrhea in 2008 and 2014/5. Case reporting completeness among treated male urethritis syndrome episodes was estimated at 10–28% in 2017. Conclusion South Africa continues to suffer a high STI burden. Improvements in access and quality of maternal, STI and HIV health care services likely contributed to the decline in syphilis prevalence. The lack of any decline in gonorrhea and chlamydia prevalence highlights the need to enhance STI services beyond clinic-based syndromic case management, to reinvigorate primary STI and HIV prevention and, especially for women, to screen for asymptomatic infections.
A new full-length circular DNA sequencing method for viral-sized genomes reveals that RNAi transgenic plants provoke a shift in geminivirus populations in the field

Abstract We present a new method, CIDER-Seq (Circular DNA Enrichment sequencing) for the unbiased enrichment and long-read sequencing of viral-sized circular DNA molecules. We used CIDER-Seq to produce single-read full-length virus genomes for the first time. CIDER-Seq combines PCR-free virus enrichment with Single Molecule Real Time sequencing and a new sequence de-concatenation algorithm. We apply our technique to produce >1200 full-length, highly accurate geminivirus genomes from RNAi-transgenic and control plants in a field trial in Kenya. Using CIDER-Seq we can demonstrate for the first time that the expression of antiviral double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) in transgenic plants causes a consistent shift in virus populations towards species sharing low homology to the transgene derived dsRNA. Our method and its application in an economically important crop plant opens new possibilities in periodic virus sequence surveillance and accurate profiling of diverse circular DNA elements.
Forcings and Evolution of the 2017 Coastal El Niño Off Northern Peru and Ecuador

El Nino events, in particular the Eastern Pacific type, have a tremendous impact on the marine ecosystem and climate conditions in the Eastern South Pacific. During such events, the accumulation of anomalously warm waters along the coast favors intense rainfall. The upwelling of nutrient-replete waters is stopped and the marine ecosystem is strongly impacted. These events are generally associated with positive surface temperature anomalies in the Central and Eastern equatorial Pacific. During austral summer 2017, a strong surface temperature anomaly reaching ~3-4°C off Northern Peru and Ecuador led to intense coastal precipitations. However, neutral temperature anomalies were recorded in the equatorial Pacific. Using in situ measurements, satellite observations, and simulations from a eddy-resolving regional ocean circulation model, we investigate the physical processes triggering this peculiar 'coastal El Nino'. Its impact on the regional ocean circulation and heat budget off northern Peru and Ecuador is assessed. Using model sensitivity experiments, we investigate the respective roles of the equatorial Kelvin waves and local wind anomalies in driving the anomalously high nearshore SST. The atmospheric teleconnections which triggered the event are investigated using reanalysis data.
Quantification of permethrin resistance and kdr alleles in Florida strains of Aedes aegypti (L.) and Aedes albopictus (Skuse)

Recent outbreaks of locally transmitted dengue and Zika viruses in Florida have placed more emphasis on the importance of integrated vector management plans for Aedes aegypti (L.) and Aedes albopictus Skuse. Adulticiding, primarily with pyrethroids, can be the best option available for the immediate control of potentially arbovirus-infected mosquitoes during outbreak situations. While pyrethroid resistance is common in Ae. aegypti worldwide and testing is recommended by CDC and WHO, resistance to this class of products has not been widely examined or quantified in Florida. To address this information gap, we performed the first study to quantify both pyrethroid resistance and genetic markers of pyrethroid resistance in Ae. aegypti and Ae. albopictus strains in Florida. Using direct topical application, we examined 21 Ae. aegypti strains from 9 counties and found permethrin resistance (resistance ratio (RR)=6-61-fold) in all strains when compared to the susceptible ORL1952 control strain. Permethrin resistance in five strains of Ae. albopictus was very low (RR<1.6) even when collected from the same containers producing resistant Ae. aegypti. Characterization of two sodium channel kdr alleles associated with pyrethroid-resistance showed widespread distribution in 62 strains of Ae. aegypti. The 1534 phenylalanine to cysteine (F1534C) single nucleotide polymorphism SNP was fixed or nearly fixed in all strains regardless of RR. We observed much more variation in the 1016 valine to isoleucine (V1016I) allele and observed that increasing frequency of the homozygous V1016I allele correlates strongly with increased RR (Pearson corr= 0.905). In agreement with previous studies, we observed a very low frequency of three kdr genotypes, IIFF, VIFF, and IIFC. In this study, we provide a statewide examination of pyrethroid resistance, and demonstrate that permethrin resistance and the genetic markers for resistance are widely present in FL Ae. aegypti. Resistance testing should be included in an effective management program. Author Summary Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus can vector a variety of arboviruses that cause diseases and are thus a public health concern. Pyrethroid insecticide resistance is common in Aedes aegypti in many locations worldwide and can adversely affect vector control operations. However, the resistance status of these vectors in Florida is largely unreported and recent local transmission of dengue and Zika viruses has made this information critical for effective control operations. In this study, we showed that permethrin resistance and two common SNPs of the voltage gated sodium channel (V1016I and F1534C) previously associated with pyrethroid resistance were widely present in Florida Aedes aegypti strains. We also observed a strong correlation between the IICC genotype and RR as determined by topical application, which suggests, as have others, that kdr frequency may be a useful indicator of resistance in Aedes aegypti.