Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Functional State of Cells During their Life and on their Journey Toward Inactivity and Death: Search for Morphological Evidence in Thyroid Fine Needle Aspiration Smears

Synthesis and storage of thyroglobulin as well as synthesis of thyroid hormones and their release into the circulation are important functions of thyroid, which were studied in fine needle aspiration (FNA) smears from thyroid lesions. Evidence of thyroglobulin synthesis was demonstrated in neoplastic and nonneoplastic follicular cells, especially in Hürthle cells, in the form of colloid inclusions. Whereas the pinocytic vesicles containing colloid at the luminal end of in nonneoplastic and neoplastic follicular cells indicated engulfment of colloid for synthesis of thyroid hormones (T3and T4), the marginal vacuoles (MVs) (fire-flare appearance) at the basal aspects of follicular cells suggested their release on way to the interfollicular capillaries. The morphological evidence of secretary activity could also be demonstrated in medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) in the form of azurophilic granules, marginal vacuoles, and intracytoplasmic lumina (ICL) with secretions; the secretory material, likely to be amyloid, present in MTC cells, and their release to the extracellular space was confirmed by positive immunocytochemical staining for calcitonin. It was found that nuclear grooves and related intranuclear cytoplasmic inclusions (INCIs) in papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) possibly represent an initial step of a degenerative process leading to formation of inactive cerebriform nuclei. Based on observation regarding formation and release of precursor substances for psammoma bodies (PBs), it was also suggested that PBs may not represent a process of dystrophic calcification over infarcted/dead papillae but suggest an active biological process, which leads to inhibition of growth of neoplastic cells and acts as a barrier against spread of PTC.
Osteoarthropathien und Myopathien bei Schilddrüsenerkrankungen

Abstract Triiodothyronine (T3) is a key regulator of bone, muscle and articular cartilage. Musculoskeletal symptoms of hyperthyroidism include loss of bone mass finally leading to osteoporosis and weakness of the skeletal musculature. Hypothyroidism on the other side frequently leads to muscle stiffness and cramping and, occasionally, results in rhabdomyolysis. To prevent terminal differentiation of chondrocytes with consecutive cartilage degeneration, cartilage probably depends on exact regulation of local T3 availability by the intracellular deiodinase system. Recent findings underline the importance of local T3 generation by deiodinase type 2 and support the existence of local hypo- or hyperthyroidism. In the review, the implications of the recent literature for current understanding of osteoarthritis, myopathies and diabetic osteoarthropathy will be discussed. Further emphasis will be placed on the association of autoimmune thyroiditis with musculoskeletal diseases and fibromyalgia.
Modelling hidden structure of signals in group data analysis with modified (Lr, 1) and block-term decompositions

This work is devoted to elaboration on the idea to use block term decomposition for group data analysis and to raise the possibility of modelling group activity with (Lr, 1) and Tucker blocks. A new generalization of block tensor decomposition was considered in application to group data analysis. Suggested approach was evaluated on multilabel classification task for a set of images. This contribution also reports results of investigation on clustering with proposed tensor models in comparison with known matrix models, namely common orthogonal basis extraction and group independent component analysis.
In vivo analgesic effect of different extracts of Hopea odorata leaves in mice and in silico molecular docking and ADME/T property analysis of some isolated compounds from this plant

Abstract Background The current study evaluates the analgesic effect of different extracts of Hopea odorata leaves in mice followed by molecular docking and absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADME/T) analysis of isolated compounds derived from the plant with the COX-1 enzyme. Methods In the present study, the dried leaves of H. odorata were subjected to extraction using methanol, ethanol, and water. In vivo analgesic activity was evaluated by using the acetic acid-induced writhing test and formalin-induced paw licking test, and in silico molecular docking and ADME/T study were performed using Schrödinger Maestro (version 11.1) and online-based tools, respectively, on eight isolated compounds. Results The results showed that the methanolic extract of leaves has highest significant dose-dependent analgesic activity at both 200 and 400 mg/kg followed by ethanolic extract of leaves. Among all the compounds, ampelopsin showed the best docking score of −7.055, ensuring strong binding affinity between the ligand and the receptor, and ADME/T analysis using Web-based tools ensures the compound has not violated Lipinski’s rule of five indicating its safety consumption. Conclusions The result confirms the analgesic activity of H. odorata leaves in both in vivo and in silico assays. The data support ampelopsin to be a potent analgesic compound worthy of future clinical trials and its “drug-likeliness”
Expanded Characterization of a Hemi-Body Shielded Göttingen Minipig Model of Radiation-induced Gastrointestinal Injury Incorporating Oral Dosing Procedures

Abstract In collaboration with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the authors recently conducted a pilot study in a hemi-body shielded model of radiation-induced gastrointestinal (GI) injury in Göttingen minipigs following exposure to radiation dose levels between 8–16 Gy. Herein, the impact of oral dosing procedures is assessed, as well as the specific causes of death in animals exposed to radiation doses of 14 and 16 Gy (n = 64; 32 male, 32 female, between 6 and 8 mo of age). Oral dosing using a 2‐tablet placebo system comprised of both immediate release and enteric-coated tablets starting 24 h post-irradiation resulted in inhibited gastric emptying of the enteric-coated tablets, which were found to be retained in the stomach and/or regurgitated. This finding appears to be species-specific, as similar findings have not been reported for other large animal species (e.g., non-human primates). Mortality was primarily dictated by decreased activity, body weight loss (>35%), and/or respiratory distress, despite shielding of the lung. The cause of respiratory distress in animals that were pre-terminally euthanized varied according to the timing of death, with interstitial inflammation and extensive fibrosis observed >20 days post-irradiation. Kidney damage was also identified in most animals after day 10. Changes in the GI tract were consistent with previous studies and included collagen deposition/fibrosis. Observations of inflammatory infiltrates and interstitial inflammation/fibrosis in both shielded and unshielded organs support a strong secondary inflammatory syndrome post-irradiation.
Rebuilding the Gut Microbiota Ecosystem

A microbial ecosystem in which bacteria no longer live in a mutualistic association is called dysbiotic. Gut microbiota dysbiosis is a condition related with the pathogenesis of intestinal illnesses (irritable bowel syndrome, celiac disease, and inflammatory bowel disease) and extra-intestinal illnesses (obesity, metabolic disorder, cardiovascular syndrome, allergy, and asthma). Dysbiosis status has been related to various important pathologies, and many therapeutic strategies aimed at restoring the balance of the intestinal ecosystem have been implemented. These strategies include the administration of probiotics, prebiotics, and synbiotics; phage therapy; fecal transplantation; bacterial consortium transplantation; and a still poorly investigated approach based on predatory bacteria. This review discusses the various aspects of these strategies to counteract intestinal dysbiosis.
The effects of mechanical strain on mouse eye lens capsule and cellular microstructure

The understanding of multiscale load transfer within complex soft tissues is incomplete. The eye lens is ideal for multiscale tissue mechanics studies as its principal function is to fine focus light at different distances onto the retina via mechanical shape changes. The biomechanical function, resiliency, and intricate microstructure of the lens make it an excellent non-connective soft tissue model. We hypothesized that compressive strain applied onto whole lens tissue leads to deformation of specific microstructures and that this deformation is reversible following removal of load. For this examination, mouse lenses were compressed by sequential application of increasing load. Using confocal microscopy and quantitative image analysis, we determined that axial strain ≥10% reduces capsule thickness, expands epithelial cell area, and separates fiber cell tips at the anterior region of the lenses. At the equatorial region, strain ≥6% increases fiber cell widths. The effects of strain on lens epithelial cell area, capsule thickness, and equatorial fiber cell widths are reversible following the release of lenses from strain. However, although fiber cell tip separation following the removal of low loads is reversible, the separation becomes irreversible with application of higher loads. This irreversible separation between fiber cell tips leads to incomplete bulk lens resiliency. The lens is an accessible biomechanical model system that provides new insights on multiscale transfer of loads in soft tissues.
Flummoxed by Diamox

Sir, A 39-year-old female, case of idiopathic intracranial hypertension, presented to the emergency medicine department with breathlessness and diplopia. She had a history of hyperreactive airway disease and had similar symptoms, 3 months back which was relieved by over-the-counter medications. The diplopia was present even on primary gaze. Ten days before the present episode, she had developed worsening diplopia, for which she was started on acetazolamide (Diamox) 500 mg twice daily by a neurologist. On admission, the patient had wheeze and the breathlessness was attributed to the bronchoconstriction.
Compilation and Analysis of Atherosclerosis Gene Expression Data

The objective of this project was to search for consensus in differential gene expression data and in regulation of differentially expressed genes among DNA microarray studies of atherosclerotic vessels and plaque. Seventeen DNA microarray studies of atherosclerosis were analyzed. Only 19 genes were found to be differentially expressed in 3 or more of the studies. The nineteen genes belong to classic gene ontologies known to be involved in atherosclerosis: immunity and defense, metabolism, proteases, receptors, and signal transduction. Four bioinformatics programs (TRED, rVISTA, JASPAR, and Ariadne Pathways) were used to further analyze the promoter regions and common upstream regulators of the 19 genes. Twelve of the genes shared nine common upstream regulators, many of them known to affect atherosclerosis, and one possible new pathway was identified that may be involved in this disease.
New Methods for Improving Perception in RoboCup SPL

This thesis introduces a number of new techniques motivated by the desire to improve robots’ perception of their environment in RoboCup SPL. These methods include a unified field-feature inverse sensor model, a natural landmark localisation system, a visual odometry module, and a robot detection system that combines vision with sonar sensors. All of these techniques were demonstrated in the 2012 RoboCup competition. Using a variation of ICP, the field-feature sensor model combines multiple simultaneous observations of aliased field-features into a single robot pose observation by: (1) matching observed features to the field map in a hierarchical fashion, and (2) minimising the squared positioning error simultaneously over all observed features. Results indicate that this sensor model is able to localise the robot from a single observation in 42% of field positions where multiple fieldfeatures are visible. However, it is not possible to distinguish between one end of the field and the other using field-features; this capability is provided by a natural landmark localisation system. Using a ‘bag of words’ image representation, the natural landmark localisation system stores up to 40 images of each goal area, and then matches camera frames to these stored images in real time on the Nao to resolve the field-end ambiguity. In a static environment this system is shown to perform flawlessly in repeated kidnap tests. To further improve robot localisation, a fast and unique method for calculating visual heading odometry is also presented. Experiments indicate that this system can reduce the odometric uncertainty of an uncalibrated Nao robot by 73%. The visual odometry module is also able to detect collisions with unseen objects, while remaining robust to the presence of moving objects in the environment. Both the visual odometry module and the natural landmark localisation system are based on modified 1D SURF image features extracted from pixels on the robot’s horizon. Consistent with the original SURF algorithm, the extracted features are robust to lighting changes, scale changes, and small changes in viewing angle or to the scene itself, while achieving a speed up of several orders of magnitude over SURF. This makes 1D SURF features suitable for visual navigation of resource constrained mobile robots. Finally, a combined vision and sonar robot detection system is presented that uses a novel sonar hardware control scheme to introduce a third sonar detection sector in front of the robot. Evidence suggests that during a penalty shoot-out, this system enables the striker to localise a stationary goalie to within 28 mm to 60 mm before shooting. This capability also enabled rUNSWift to develop coordinated role-switching behaviours that remain operational during total wireless failures.
Life Contingencies with Stochastic Discounting Using Moving Average Models

This paper offers simplified procedures for calculating moments of functions in life contingencies when the random force of interest is modeled using an unconditional moving average process of order q, MA(q). It extends the MA(l) model that has been used for stochastic discounting. Using the more general MA(q) model allows actuaries to better capture the autocorrelation between successive interest rates in a time series.
Concomitant Hierarchy Construction and Rendering of Large Point Clouds

Rendering large point clouds ordinarily requires building a hierarchical data structure for accessing the points that best represent the object for a given viewing frustum and level-of-detail. The building of such data structures frequently represents a large portion of the cost of the rendering pipeline both in terms of time and space complexity, especially when rendering is done for inspection purposes only. In this work we present OMiCroN -- Oblique Multipass Hierarchy Creation while Navigating -- which is the first algorithm capable of immediately displaying partial renders of the geometry, provided the cloud is made available sorted in Morton order. In fact, a pipeline coupling OMiCroN with an incremental sorting algorithm running in parallel can start rendering as soon as the first sorted prefix is produced, making this setup very convenient for streamed viewing.
Hierarchical Self-awareness and Authority for Scalable Self-integrating Systems

System self-integration from open sets of components provides the basis for open adaptability to unpredictable environments. Hierarchical architectures are essential for enabling such systems to scale, as they allow to compromise between processing detailed knowledge in parallel and coordinating parallel processes from a more abstract viewpoint; recursively. This position paper aims to bring to the fore the following key design aspect of such hierarchical systems: how should the authority of decision and action be assigned across hierarchical levels, with respect to the self-awareness capabilities of these levels? The difficulty lays in that all levels lack knowledge, which may be key to certain decisions, because lower levels have detailed knowledge but within a narrow scope (good for local customisation), and higher levels have a broader scope but no details (good for global coordination). We highlight the most obvious authority schemes available and discuss their advantages and shortcomings: top-down, bottom-up, and iterative (yoyo). We discuss three detailed application examples from our previous work on hierarchical systems, pointing-out the knowledge and authority schemes employed and the possible alternatives. This provides a basis for offering system designers the necessary understanding and tools for taking the appropriate decisions with respect to the distribution of self-awareness capabilities and authority of decision / action across hierarchical system levels.
Composition of the board and firm value of brazilian public companies

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the composition of boards of directors of Brazilian public companies and the firm value. The analysis is conducted by reference to a group of 208 Brazilian companies listed on Bovespa in the year 2008. The contribution of the study is done to assess the level of adherence to the recommendations of the Brazilian Institute of Corporate Governance (IBGC) regarding the composition of the board and its relation to market value. Using a multiple regression, three variables were studied: the level of board independence (Indep), accumulation of function by the Chief Executive Officer (CeoPowerful) and board size (Nmembros). The variable Nmembros was statistically significant, indicating positive correlation between corporate value and board size.
Flow injection green method for the quantitative analysis of ketoconazole in pharmaceutical preparations

A flow injection method for the quantitative analysis of ketoconazole in tablets, based on the reaction with iron (III) ions, is presented. Ketoconazole forms a red complex with iron ions in an acid medium, with maximum absorbance at 495 nm. The detection limit was estimated to be 1×10--4 mol L-1; the quantitation limit is about 3×10--4 mol L-1 and approximately 30 determinations can be performed in an hour. The results were compared with those obtained with a reference HPLC method. Statistical comparisons were done using the Student's t procedure and the F test. Complete agreement was found at the 0.95 significance level between the proposed flow injection and the HPLC procedures. The two methods present similar precision, i.e., for HPLC the mean relative standard deviation was ca. 1.2% and for FIA ca. 1.6%.
Reconfigurable near-IR metasurface based on Ge2Sb2Te5 phase-change material

A reconfigurable metasurface made of Ge2Sb2Te5 phase-change material was experimentally demonstrated in the 1.55 μm wavelength range. A nanostructured Ge2Sb2Te5 film on fused silica substrate was optimized to switch from highly transmissive (80%) to highly absorptive (76%) modes with a 7:1 contrast ratio in transmission independent of polarization, when thermally transformed from the amorphous to crystalline state. The metasurface was designed using a genetic algorithm optimizer linked with an efficient full-wave electromagnetic solver.
In situ measurements of isoprene and monoterpenes within a south-east Asian tropical rainforest

Abstract. Biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) emitted from tropical rainforests comprise a substantial fraction of global atmospheric VOC emissions, however there are only relatively limited measurements of these species in tropical rainforest regions. We present observations of isoprene, α-pinene, camphene, Δ-3-carene, γ-terpinene and limonene, as well as oxygenated VOCs (OVOCs) of biogenic origin such as methacrolein, in ambient air above a tropical rainforest in Malaysian Borneo during the Oxidant and Particle Photochemical Processes above a south-east Asian tropical rainforest (OP3) project in 2008. Daytime composition was dominated by isoprene, with an average mixing ratio of the order of ~1 ppb. γ-terpinene, limonene and camphene were the most abundant monoterpenes, with average daytime mixing ratios of 102, 71 and 66 ppt respectively, and with an average monoterpene toisoprene ratio of 0.3 during sunlit hours, compared to 2.0 at night. Limonene and camphene abundances were seen to be related to both temperature and light conditions. In contrast, γ-terpinene emission continued into the late afternoon/evening, under relatively low temperature and light conditions. The contributions of isoprene, monoterpenes and other classes of VOC to the volatile carbon budget and OH reactivity have been summarised for this rainforest location. We observe good agreement between surface and aircraft measurements of boundary layer isoprene and methacrolein above the natural rainforest, suggesting that the ground-level observations are broadly representative of isoprene emissions from this region.
Vertical Transmission of Mycoplasma pneumoniae Infection

Mycoplasma pneumoniae is a significant cause of pneumonia in school-aged children and young adults. We report a case of neonatal M. pneumoniae pneumonia in a preterm child manifesting in the first hours of life. Vertical transmission was demonstrated by the detection of M. pneumoniae in inflamed placental tissue indicating chorioamnionitis.
An Ensemble-Rich Multi-Aspect Approach Towards Robust Style Change Detection: Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2018

We describe the winning system for the PAN@CLEF 2018 task on Style Change Detection. Given a document, the goal is to determine whether it contains style change. We present our supervised approach, which combines a TF.IDF representation of the documents with features speciﬁcally engineered for the task and which makes predictions using an ensemble of diverse models including SVM, Random Forest, AdaBoost, MLP and LightGBM. We further perform comparative analysis on the performance of the models on three diﬀerent datasets, two of which we have developed for the task. Moreover, we release our code in order to enable further research.
Nitrogen Fixation in Cereals

Cereals such as maize, rice, wheat and sorghum are the most important crops for human nutrition. Like other plants, cereals associate with diverse bacteria (including nitrogen-fixing bacteria called diazotrophs) and fungi. As large amounts of chemical fertilizers are used in cereals, it has always been desirable to promote biological nitrogen fixation in such crops. The quest for nitrogen fixation in cereals started long ago with the isolation of nitrogen-fixing bacteria from different plants. The sources of diazotrophs in cereals may be seeds, soils, and even irrigation water and diazotrophs have been found on roots or as endophytes. Recently, culture-independent molecular approaches have revealed that some rhizobia are found in cereal plants and that bacterial nitrogenase genes are expressed in plants. Since the levels of nitrogen-fixation attained with nitrogen-fixing bacteria in cereals are not high enough to support the plant’s needs and never as good as those obtained with chemical fertilizers or with rhizobium in symbiosis with legumes, it has been the aim of different studies to increase nitrogen-fixation in cereals. In many cases, these efforts have not been successful. However, new diazotroph mutants with enhanced capabilities to excrete ammonium are being successfully used to promote plant growth as commensal bacteria. In addition, there are ambitious projects supported by different funding agencies that are trying to genetically modify maize and other cereals to enhance diazotroph colonization or to fix nitrogen or to form nodules with nitrogen-fixing symbiotic rhizobia.