Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Research progress of exosomes

Exosomes are automatically secreted homogenous membrane vesicles,with multiple functions such as anti-tumor immunity and angiogenesis.Exosomes have been found to be released by various cell types and isolated from biological fluids,including plasma,urine,breast milk and bronchial lavage fluid.In this review,we summarize the structure,function and extraction of exosomes,and the different ways exosomes target to cells.
Ebola’s Fatal Hemorrhagic Fever from Discovery to Vaccine

The Ebola Virus (EBOV) causes a hemorrhagic fever that is distinguished by a sudden onset of intense headaches, fever and severe hemorrhages which can be fatal in less than a week. The largest Ebola outbreak to date is currently underway, with 28.488 confirmed, probable and suspected cases reported, 15.239 laboratory confirmed cases and 11.297 fatalities as of October 11th, 2015. Most of the cases have occurred in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. The Ebola virus genus has five species: Zaire, Sudan, Tai Forest, Reston and Bundibugyo. The Zaire virus has caused ten epidemics since its identification in 1976, with a mortality rate of 57%-88%. Fruit bats appear to be the natural reservoir of EBOV, while human to human transmission is spread through direct contact of infected bodily fluids; patients only acquire the ability to infect others when symptomatic. Once inside the host, EBOV infects immune system cells directly and begins to replicate inside them while severely compromising it. Recent evidence shows EBOV alters cytokine expression while expressing its own viral proteins causing significant lymphopenia and lymphapoptosis, as well as endothelial damage. Massive hemorrhages throughout the body are one of the cardinal points of EBOV infection; however, it is not as present in patients as it is believed. The current outbreak has affected countries where sanitation is inadequate, resulting in the inability to control its spread. This review aims to give a broad spectrum of the current findings in several fields to better comprehend Ebola´s fatal Hemorrhagic Fever.
CREATING AGRIBUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES FOR SMALL SCALE FARMERS IN THABA NCHU BY INTRODUCING WATER HARVESTING TECHNIQUES: A PROFITABILITY AND RISK ANALYSIS

Thaba Nchu is a semi-arid area with low and erratic annual rainfall not exceeding 600mm. Various dryland crops are produced with relatively low yields and high risk of failure. Lack of appropriate technology and other constraints has led to most of the arable land being unused thus restricting agribusiness opportunities in an area where unemployment and food insecurity are thriving. Rainwater harvesting has a huge potential to increase crop yields in Thaba Nchu and reduce the risk of losses, and thus improve food security and enhance sustainability. Different in-field rainwater harvesting (IRWH) techniques have been tested and applied at Glen and Thaba Nchu. This paper gives comparative results for three crops produced with regard to relative profitability and risk of failure. This is done by integrating crop enterprise budgets with crop yield simulations models to calculate per hectare profits over an 81-year period and developing and analyzing cumulative probability functions.
Cell-Mediated Protection against Pulmonary Yersinia pestis Infection

ABSTRACT Pulmonary infection with the bacterium Yersinia pestis causes pneumonic plague, an often-fatal disease for which no vaccine is presently available. Antibody-mediated humoral immunity can protect mice against pulmonary Y. pestis infection, an experimental model of pneumonic plague. Little is known about the protective efficacy of cellular immunity. We investigated the cellular immune response to Y. pestis in B-cell-deficient μMT mice, which lack the capacity to generate antibody responses. To effectively prime pulmonary cellular immunity, we intranasally vaccinated μMT mice with live replicating Y. pestis. Vaccination dramatically increased survival of μMT mice challenged intranasally with a lethal Y. pestis dose and significantly reduced bacterial growth in pulmonary, splenic, and hepatic tissues. Vaccination also increased numbers of pulmonary T cells, and administration of T-cell-depleting monoclonal antibodies at the time of challenge abrogated vaccine-induced survival. Moreover, the transfer of Y. pestis-primed T cells to naive μMT mice protected against lethal intranasal challenge. These findings establish that vaccine-primed cellular immunity can protect against pulmonary Y. pestis infection and suggest that vaccines promoting both humoral and cellular immunity will most effectively combat pneumonic plague.
Challenges and Opportunities of Community based Tourism Development in Awi Zone: A Case Study in Guagusa and Banja Woredas, Ethiopia

Community Based Tourism is a type of tourism that takes economical, environmental, socio-cultural sustainability into account. It is managed and owned by the community, for the community, in order to enable visitors to increase their awareness and learn about the community and local ways of life. Various studies attempted to study the potentials for CBT development has been done in Ethiopia, and little is done on exploring the challenges and opportunities of CBT development. Thus, this thesis was done to address the objective of identifying the key challenges and opportunities of CBT development in Guwagusa and Banja woredas, Awi Administrative Zone. In order to achieve these objectives, both primary and secondary data were generated through qualitative (focus group discussion, in depth interview and non participatory observation) and quantitative (CBT participant survey questionnaires) methods. The census technique was used to select 3 CBT sites and 45 direct participants of CBT development. The quantitative data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics while qualitative data were used to validate and triangulate the study. The research reveals that several challenges have been experienced in the implementation and running of CBT projects in the study area. Lack of knowledge, interest and perception of local community towards CBT; low level of attitude of the community towards CBT, conflict over resource ownership; capacity problems of the direct participants CBT and woreda level government office staff; incompatibility of policies and legislations; low quality and standard of products and services and weak cooperation among stakeholders were identified as challenges of CBT in the study area. However, a number of opportunities like the strategic location of the CBT sites, positive attitude of the CBT participants towards CBT, hospitality of the local community, and the great potential tourism resources of the area are identified as success factors for CBT development in the area Key words : Community , Tourism challengeies and opportunities, Tourism policy Development, CBT development, Awi Zon
Is translation semantically mediated? Evidence from Welsh-English bilingual aphasia

The involvement of the semantic system in picture naming is undisputed. However, it has been proposed that translation could take place via direct lexical links between L1 and L2 word forms in addition to or instead of via semantics(i.e., with translation going from a spoken word in L1 accessing its meaning and this meaning then leading to the retrieval of the translation equivalent in L2). There is conflicting evidence in the psycholinguistic literature as to the extent of semantic mediation in translation vs. picture naming tasks (Potter et al, 1984; Kroll and Stewart, 1994). More recently, Hernandez et al (2010) investigated this question in a case study of JFF, a proficient bilingual Spanish-Catalan speaker with Alzheimer’s disease and naming difficulties due to a semantic deficit. As JFF’s semantic deficit did not only affect picture naming but also translation tasks, the authors concluded against the existence of functional direct lexical links to support translation. The goal of our study was to explore this issue further in a larger sample of proficient bilingual patients with aphasia and word finding difficulties in both languages. More specifically, we compare the rate of semantic errors produced in naming vs. translation tasks.
ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH

People are distressed when pharmaceutical companies use market-pricing justifications for pricing decisions. Consumers are reluctant to confront explicit trade-offs between health and money. Distress and perceptions of fairness, however, are mitigated when pharmaceutical companies use communal-sharing rationales to justify prices. A common example is that high prices compensate for the R&D failures of medicines that benefit public health. For other utilitarian products, such as software, however, communal-sharing justifications do not mitigate pricing criticisms and are perceived as less believable. Moreover, communal-sharing rationales are effective only for medicines designed to improve health and well-being, and thus are deemed a “necessity. ”
Parametric study on the effect of endwalls on fluid flow in micro pin-fins

Micro pin-fin heat sinks have been considered as new generation micro heat sinks and may find applications in many fields such as microreactor, electronics cooling, micro turbine cooling and microbiological applications. The flow across micro pin fins can be considered as cross flow across intermediate size (based on the height-diameter ratio, H/D ratio changes from 1/2 to 5) fins, whose thermal and hydraulic performances are different from long conventional tubes due to the effects of endwalls on the both thermal and velocity boundary layers as well as low flow rates. The endwalls effects imposed by the microchannel having micro pin fins have not been extensively discussed in the literature since mostly long fins have been used at high flow rates, where such effects were mostly negligible. This article intends to address to the lack of information on endwalls effects on heat and fluid flow in micro pin fin heat sinks having intermediate size pin fins under broad working conditions. Water was used as working fluid in the following Reynolds number ranges (1<Re<1000). Heat flux was changed from 30W/cm2 to 60W/cm2. As a result of extensive parametric investigation, it is observed that the velocity field, friction factor and heat transfer across the micro pin fin surface significantly are affected by the endwalls.
BUILDING TRUST: CONDITIONAL CASH TRANSFERS AND SOCIAL CAPITAL

In this paper we propose a measure of social capital based on the behaviour in a public good game. We play the public good game within 28 groups in two similar neighborhoods in Cartagena, Colombia, one of which had been targeted for over two years by a conditional cash transfer program that has an important social component. The level of cooperation we observe in the ‘treatment’ community is considerably higher than in the ‘control’ community. The two neighborhoods, however, although similar in many dimensions, turned out to be significantly different in other observable variables. The result we obtain in terms of cooperation, however, is robust to controls for these observable differences. In the last part of the paper we also compare our measure of social capital with other more traditional measures that have been used in the literature.
Molecular phylogeny of Escherichia coli isolated from clinical samples in Hilla, Iraq

Escherichia coli strains can be assigned to one of the main phylogenetic groups (A, B1, B2 and D). Strains of these groups differ in their phenotypic characteristics, including the ability to use certain sugars, antibiotic resistance profiles and growth rate-temperature relationships. A total of 45 E. coli isolates were obtained from different clinical samples by standard bacteriological methods. PCR was conducted to determine the phylogenetic grouping of these isolates by targeting two genes, chuA, yjaA and anonymous DNA fragment TspE4.C2. Three phylogeny genetic markers (chuA, yjaA and TspE4.C2) were used. Results found that the most isolates of E. coli belong to the phylogeny group A (44.4%) which includes: urine (3 samples), stool (8 samples), rectal (6 samples), and vagina (3 samples), followed by group B1 (22.2%) which included urine (4 samples), stool (2 samples), rectal (3 samples) and vagina (1 samples), group B2 (17.7%) which included urine (5 samples), and vagina (3 samples), while group D (15.5%) which included urine (3 samples), rectal (1 sample) and 3 vagina samples. Phylogeny pedigree was done according to the data recovered previously. This study explains that the distributions of E. coli isolates in phylogenetic groups (A, B1, B2 and D) varied depending on the characteristics of host population and also on the variation in bacterial sources. Key words : Phylogeny, Escherichia coli, polymerase chain reaction.
A geomechanical approach for the genesis of sediment undulations on the Adriatic shelf

This study is among the first to examine the genesis of the seafloor and subsurface undulations on the Adriatic continental shelf by integrating stratigraphic information and in situ and laboratory geotechnical measurements. Interpretation of sediment behavior is based on a 32‐m‐long borehole crossing (1) a possible shear plane and (2) a silty clay layer at about 20 m below seafloor (mbsf) on which sediment undulations are rooted and could be interpreted as a potential weak layer succession. Our main results in terms of triggering mechanism for the observed undulations show that under an earthquake, liquefaction and/or failure of the silty‐clay sediments (weak layer) leading to deformation of the upper more cohesive sediments is possible only when such a layer is buried by less than 5 m. For greater burial thicknesses, this silty clay becomes stable under the confining lithostatic pressure exerted by the overlying sediment. This work shows that the seafloor and subsurface undulations observed in the study area are most probably the result of an early deformation process of the seafloor followed by a depositional process.
Bubbles and Fools

This article reviews the literature on greater-fool theories of bubbles, which argue that bubbles can arise if traders are willing to buy assets they know to be overvalued because they hope to later sell them at a profit to others. The author discusses two approaches that attempt to model this phenomenon and what these approaches imply for economic policy.
Heterosubtypic antiviral activity of IgA antibodies against influenza A virus hemagglutinins

Title Heterosubtypic antiviral activity of IgA antibodies against influenza A virus hemagglutinins [an abstract of dissertation and a summary of dissertation review] Author(s) 村松, 美笑子 Issue Date 2014-03-25 Doc URL http://hdl.handle. net/2115/56201 Rights(URL) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.1/jp/ Type theses (doctoral abstract and summary of review) Additional Information There are other files related to this item in HUSCAP. Check the above URL. File Information Mieko_Muramatsu_review. pdf (審査の要旨)
Vitamin D in Health and Disease – An Update

The importance of vitamin D in health and disease is being increasingly recognized nowadays and lots of research is being carried out in this area. Thus, it is essential to understand about this vitamin and this narrative review is one such initiative. The main aim of this review is to provide a comprehensive and in-depth knowledge of the role of vitamin D in health and disease. A comprehensive literature search was carried out in the search portals of PubMed, Google Scholar and Indmed to identify the role of vitamin D in health and disease. Vitamin D is a fat soluble prohormone, synthesized in our epidermal cells following exposure to sunlight. The synthesized precursors of vitamin D are metabolically activated by 25-hydroxylation in the liver and 1-α hydroxylation in the kidney. The biologically active form of vitamin D is 1, 25-dihydroxycholecalciferol which binds to the vitamin D receptor to mediate its effects. Vitamin D plays a key role in maintaining calcium and phosphate homeostasis in the body. However, vitamin D is also found to have various pleiotropic effects like anti-inflammatory, anti-apoptotic, antifibrotic and immunomodulatory effects. The serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels are considered as indicator of body’s vitamin D stores. Deficiency of vitamin D is highly prevalent and is associated with various diseases like osteoporosis, hip fractures, myocardial infarction and malignancies of colon, breast and prostate.
Anti-ulcer activity of Swietenia mahagoni leaf extract in ethanol-induced gastric mucosal damage in rats

Swietenia mahagoni (West Indian mahogany) has been reported to have medicinal uses, such as treatment for hypertension, cancer, amoebiasis, chest pains and intestinal parasitism. The present study was performed to evaluate, the acute toxicity and anti-ulcer activity of S. mahagoni ethanol leaf extract against ethanol-induced gastric ulcer. 24 rats included in this study were divided into 4 groups with 6 rats each group. Group 1 rats (ulcer control group) were pre-treated with vehicle (Carboxyl methyl cellulose). Group 2 (reference group) was orally pretreated with 20 mg/kg omeprazole. Group 3 and 4 (experimental groups) were orally pre-treated with S. mahagoni ethanol leaf extract at 250 and 500 mg/kg doses, respectively. After one hour later, all groups received absolute ethanol to generate gastric mucosal injury. After an additional hour, all the rats were sacrificed and the ulcer areas of the gastric walls were determined. Grossly, the ulcer control group exhibited severe mucosal injury, whereas pre-treatment with either omeprazole or plant extract resulted in significantly protection of gastric mucosal injury and increase in mucus production. Flattening of gastric mucosal folds was also observed in rats pretreated with S. mahagoni leaf extract. Histological studies of the gastric wall of ulcer control group revealed severe damage of gastric mucosa, along with edema and leucocytes infiltration of the submucosal layer compared to rats received either omeprazole or S. mahagoni leaf extract where there was marked gastric protection along with reduction or absence of edema and leucocytes infiltration of the submucosal layer. Acute toxicity study with a higher dose of plant extract at 5 g/kg did not reveal any toxicological signs in rats. In conclusions, the present findings suggest that S. mahagoni ethanol leaf extract exhibit an anti-ulcer activity against ethanol-induced gastric ulcer in experimental animals. Key words: Swietenia mahagoni leaf extract, gastric ulcer, histology.
Predicting landscape patterns of aspen dieback: mechanisms and knowledge gaps

Sudden dieback and deterioration of mature aspen stands is commonly observed throughout North America. This dieback process has tremendous ecological and economic importance, yet remains poorly understood. This paper summarizes our understanding of aspen dieback in North America, identifies potential processes that contribute to re- duced vigour and dieback of aspen stands, and examines the scales (stand, ecosite, regional) at which these processes operate. Many factors including pathogens, nutrition, or successional changes may be involved in the decline of aspen vigour and thereby contribute to the dieback process. However, insect defoliation, drought, and thaw-freeze events ap- pear to be the most likely factors initiating dieback in mature aspen stands. Further study is clearly needed to elucidate the mechanisms and landscape patterns of dieback. Information needs related to identifying processes and modeling landscape patterns of dieback are indicated. Resume : Le deperissement soudain et la degradation des peuplements matures de peuplier faux-tremble sont couram- ment observes un peu partout en Amerique du Nord. Ce deperissement a une enorme importance ecologique et econo- mique; pourtant il demeure mal compris. Cet article resume notre comprehension du deperissement du peuplier faux- tremble en Amerique du Nord, identifie les processus qui pourraient contribuer a la perte de vigueur et au deperisse- ment des peuplements de peuplier faux-tremble et examine l'echelle (peuplement, aire ecologique, region) a laquelle operent ces processus. Plusieurs facteurs incluant les agents pathogenes, la nutrition et les changements du stade de succession pourraient etre responsables de la perte de vigueur du peuplier faux-tremble et contribuer par consequent au processus de deperissement. Cependant, les facteurs plus probablement a l'origine du deperissement dans les peuple- ments matures de peuplier faux-tremble semblent etre la defoliation par les insectes, la secheresse et les episodes de gel et degel. D'autres etudes seront evidemment necessaires pour elucider les mecanismes du deperissement et son comportement a l'echelle du paysage. Il serait utile de combler les besoins d'information reliee aux processus d'identification et a la modelisation du comportement du deperissement a l'echelle du paysage.
Abrasion injuries on artificial turf: A real risk or not?

Abrasion injuries result in damage only to the surface layer of skin and can result in player discomfort and changes in performance. The perceived fear of abrasion injuries on artificial turf playing surfaces has significantly affected the adoption of these surfaces, particularly in sports that involve frequent player-surface interactions. The underreporting of abrasion injuries due to how time-loss injuries are defined and the lack of validity of the current abrasion measurement device highlight the need for more research to understand fully the incidence and nature of abrasions on artificial turf playing surfaces and the effect of these injuries on playing behaviour. Improved reporting of abrasion injuries and a more biofidelic test device could assist in both the development of abrasion-related injury prevention strategies and in dispelling players’ negative perceptions of abrasions on artificial turf.
Segmentation of ray and shark tesserae

Rays and sharks are cartilaginous fishes. Most of the cartilaginous skeleton is covered with calcified tiles to improve the stability of the skeleton. These tiles are called tesserae and enclose areas of uncalcified cartilage. Because of the special properties of the tesserae, biologists are interested to understand shape and structure of tessellated cartilage. This thesis presents a segmentation pipeline for the separation of tesserae on the cartilaginous skeleton of rays and sharks. The segmentation pipeline consists of an automatic initial segmentation step followed by manual error corrections by the user. The initial segmentation is based on the contour tree data structure that tracks the evolution of level sets in a dataset during iso-value changes. The presented segmentation concepts are not limited to the segmentation of tesserae but also viable for similar kinds of tiled structures. The input datasets are given as micro-CT scans. The contribution of this thesis is the development of a segmentation pipeline. The pipeline uses a newly developed fast version of the contour-tree-based segmentation algorithm that, after a preprocessing step, does not need to iterate over all voxels in the dataset. Visualizations and computations are done with the software system ZIBAmira. Used algorithms are either implemented as new ZIBAmira modules or they extend already existing ZIBAmira modules.
Human cold exposure, adaptation and performance in a northern climate

Objectives. The purpose of the study was to examine the amount of cold exposure and factors affecting it at the population level in Finland, to determine what type of cold acclimatisation, if any, develops in urban residents in winter, and to find out whether cold acclimatisation or acclimation has a functional significance on psychological or physical performance. Tasks of low physical activity requiring attention and concentration (cognition, postural control) were assessed in cold.