Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Multiscale Finite Element Analysis of Balloon Kyphoplasty to Investigate the Risk of Bone-Cement Separation In Vivo

ABSTRACT Background: During the past decade there has been a significant increase in the number of vertebral fractures being treated with the balloon kyphoplasty procedure. Although previous investigations have found kyphoplasty to be an effective treatment for reducing patient pain and lowering cement-leakage risk, there have been reports of vertebral recollapse following the procedure. These reports have indicated evidence of in vivo bone-cement separation leading to collapse of the treated vertebra. Methods: The following study documents a multiscale analysis capable of evaluating the risk of bone-cement interface separation during lying, standing, and walking activities following balloon kyphoplasty. Results: Results from the analysis found that instances of reduced cement interlock could initiate both tensile and shear separation of the interface region at up to 7 times the failure threshold during walking or up to 1.9 times the threshold during some cases for standing. Lying prone offered the best protection from interface failure in all cases, with a minimum safety factor of 2.95. Conclusions: The results of the multiscale analysis show it is essential for kyphoplasty simulations to take account of the micromechanical behavior of the bone-cement interface to be truly representative of the in vivo situation after the treatment. The results further illustrate the importance of ensuring adequate cement infiltration into the compacted bone periphery during kyphoplasty through a combination of new techniques, tools, and biomaterials in a multifaceted approach to solve this complex challenge.
Childhood environmental adversity is not linked to lower levels of cooperative behaviour in economic games

Abstract Abstract Cooperation is a universal phenomenon, it is present in all human cultures from hunter–gatherers to industrialised societies, and it constitutes a fundamental aspect of social relationships. There is, however, variability in the amount of resources people invest in cooperative activities. Recent findings indicate that this variability may be partly explained as a contextually appropriate response to environmental conditions. Specifically, adverse environments seem to be associated with less cooperation and recent findings suggest that this effect is partly mediated by differences in individuals’ life-history strategy. In this paper, we set out to replicate and extend these findings by measuring actual cooperative behaviour in three economic games – a Dictator game, a Trust game and a Public Goods game – on a nationally representative sample of 612 people. Although we found that the cooperation and life-history strategy latent variables were adequately captured by the models, the hypothesised relationship between childhood environmental adversity and adult cooperation and the mediation effect by life-history strategy were not found.
Mineralization Defects in the Primary Dentition Associated With X‐Linked Hypophosphatemic Rickets

X-linked hypophosphatemia rickets (XLH) is caused by inactivating mutations in the phosphate-regulating endopeptidase homolog, X-linked (PHEX) gene, leading to renal phosphate wasting and hypophosphatemia. Dental mineralized tissues are affected by XLH, though tissue-specific dental mineralization defects have been variably described. We aimed to quantify dental effects in primary teeth of six pediatric patients with XLH (four females and two males, aged 5–12 years). All participants had received conventional treatment of calcitriol and phosphate from initial diagnosis. High-resolution μCT and histologywere employed to analyze 15 exfoliated or extracted primary teeth from patients in comparison with primary control teeth from healthy children. Compared with controls, a third of the teeth from patients with XLH showed reduced enamel density, though enamel thickness was not reduced. Teeth from patients with XLH featured 10% reduction in mean dentin density, though teeth from three affected individuals had dentin densities within normal limits. Dentin mineralization defects were found across all regions of dentin in affected teeth: outer mantle dentin, circumpulpal dentin, and the most recently formed proximal pulpal dentin. Both crown and root dentin thickness appeared reduced in XLH-affected versus control teeth, with root dentin more severely affected. Interglobular dentin accumulation throughout the circumpulpal dentin was evident by both μCT and histology (585-fold volume increase and 45-fold area increase, respectively). Histology also revealed substantially wider predentin and decreased acellular cementum thickness in XLH-affected versus control teeth, though thinner cementum appeared to include functionally oriented Sharpey’s fibers except in the most severely affected individuals. These data provide quantitative analyses of dental mineralization defects associatedwith XLH, finding awide range of severity, with dentin more significantly and consistently defective across the spectrum of XLH.
Information seeking criteria: artificial intelligence, economics, psychology, and neuroscience

Abstract There has been an enormous amount of interest in how the brain seeks information. The study of this issue is a rapidly growing field in neuroscience. Information seeking is to make informative choices among multiple alternatives. A central issue in information seeking is how the value of information is assessed in order to choose informative alternatives. This issue has been studied in psychology, economics, and artificial intelligence. The present review is focused on information assessment and summarizes the psychological and computational criteria with which humans and computers assess information. Based on the summary, neurophysiological findings are discussed. In addition, a computational view of the relationships between these criteria is presented.
Adsorption Mechanisms of Typical Carbonyl-Containing Volatile Organic Compounds on Anatase TiO2 (001) Surface: A DFT Investigation

The carbonyl-containing compounds (CCs) are typical volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and ubiquitously present in the environment. Therefore, the adsorption structures and properties of typical CCs on the anatase TiO2 (001) surface were investigated systematically with density functional theory (DFT) to understand their further catalytic degradation mechanisms. The adsorption mechanisms show that three selected typical CCs, acetaldehyde, acetone, and methyl acetate, can easily be trapped on the anatase TiO2 (001) surface via the interaction between the carbonyl group with Ti5c sites of catalyst surface. Especially for acetaldehyde with the bare carbonyl group and the strongest adsorption energy, it is the most stable on the surface, because the bare carbonyl group can interact with not only the Ti5c atom, but also the O2c atom of the surface. The substituent effect of different CCs has less impact on its adsorption models in this studied system and the bare carbonyl group is the key functional group withi.
A novel intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations for multiobjective goal programming problems

This paper investigates novel intuitionistic fuzzy preferences relations to determine the imprecise linguistic terms with fuzzy goals. The proposed intuitionistic fuzzy goal programming (IFGP) considers the degree of vagueness and hesitations simultaneously. Different sorts of membership functions such as linear, exponential, parabolic, and hyperbolic have been introduced to depict the linguistic importance term. The overall satisfaction level is achieved by maximizing the convex combination of each fuzzy goals and the preference relations simultaneously. To verify and validate the proposed IFGP model, a numerical example is presented with the comparative study. Further, it is also applied to a banking financial statement management system problem. The proposed IFGP approach outperforms over others. At last, the conclusion and future research direction are suggested based on the performed study.
Microrheology with Optical Tweezers : Principles and Applications

Thanks to the pioneering works of Ashkin and coworkers, optical tweezers (OTs) have become an invaluable tool for myriad studies throughout the natural sciences. Their success relies on the fact that they can be considered as exceptionally sensitive transducers that are able to resolve pN forces and nm displacements, with high temporal resolution, down to μs. Hence their application to study a wide range of biological phenomena such as measuring the compliance of bacterial tails, the forces exerted by a single motor protein, and the mechanical properties of human red blood cells and of individual biological molecules. The number of articles related to them totals to a whopping 58,000 (source Google Scholar)! Microrheology is a branch of rheology, but it works at micrometer length scales and with microliter sample volumes. Therefore, microrheology techniques have been revealed to be very useful tools for all those rheological/mechanical studies where rare or precious materials are employed, such as in biological and biomedical studies. The aim of this book is to provide a pedagogical introduction to the physics principles governing both the optical tweezers and their application in the field of microrheology of complex materials. This is achieved by following a linear path that starts from a narrative introduction of the "nature of light," followed by a rigorous description of the fundamental equations governing the propagation of light through matter. Moreover, some of the many possible instrumental configurations are presented, especially those that better adapt to perform microrheology measurements. In order to better appreciate the microrheological methods with optical tweezers explored in this book, informative introductions to the basic concepts of linear rheology, statistical mechanics, and the most popular microrheology techniques are also given. Furthermore, an enlightening prologue to the general applications of optical tweezers different from rheological purposes is provided at the end of the book.
Curriculum Learning by Optimizing Learning Dynamics

We study a novel curriculum learning scheme where in each round, samples are selected to achieve the greatest progress and fastest learning speed towards the ground-truth on all available samples. Inspired by an analysis of optimization dynamics under gradient ﬂow for both regression and classiﬁcation, the problem reduces to selecting training samples by a score computed from samples’ residual and linear temporal dynamics. It encourages the model to focus on the samples at the learning frontier, i.e., those with large loss but fast learning speed. The scores in discrete time can be estimated via already-available byproducts of training, and thus require negligible extra compute. We discuss the properties and potential advantages of the proposed dynamics optimization via current deep learning theory and empirical studies. By integrating it with cyclical training of neural networks, we introduce “ dynamics-optimized curriculum learning ( DoCL )”, which selects the training set at each step by a weighted sampling based on the scores. On nine different datasets, DoCL signiﬁcantly outperforms random mini-batch SGD and recent curriculum learning methods both in terms of efﬁciency and ﬁnal performance.
Can Inhibin B Reflect Ovarian Reserve of Healthy Reproductive Age Women Effectively?

Objective The reference range and potential value of inhibin B are still unclear and controversial. This study aimed to define the variation trend of inhibin B in healthy women with age and explore its value in the reflection of ovarian reserve. Methods A total of 2524 healthy reproductive age women from eight medical institutes nationwide were recruited. The variation tendency of inhibin B with age was primarily established in the first group of 948 women and validated in another 605. We evaluated the relationship between inhibin B and classic ovarian reserve and function markers. The potency of inhibin B in predicting AFC <5-7 was also estimated and compared with FSH. Results The nomogram showed that serum levels of inhibin B rapidly decreased after the age of 40. Inhibin B was positively correlated with AMH (R = 0.57, P < 0.001), AFC (R = 0.34, P < 0.001) and testosterone (R = 0.10, P = 0.002), and negatively correlated with FSH (R = -0.41, P < 0.001) and LH (R = -0.20, P < 0.001) and FSH/LH (R=-0.18, P < 0.001), while no correlation was found with PRL. Unexpectedly, Inhibin B (AUC = 0.74, P < 0.001 for the establishment population; AUC = 0.78, P < 0.001 for the validation population) had a slightly higher value than FSH (AUC = 0.71, P < 0.001 for the establishment population; AUC = 0.72, P < 0.001 for the validation population) in diagnosing AFC <5-7. Conclusions For healthy reproductive age women, the decline of inhibin B can reflect decreased ovarian reserve effectively, having a good consistency with AMH and AFC. More importantly, inhibin B had an advantage in predicting AFC <5-7 compared with FSH, which suggested the potential of inhibin B in predicting ovarian response. These results will be helpful to the clinical application of inhibin B in the evaluation of female ovarian reserve and the assessment of their reproductive capacity. Trial registration: http://clinicaltrials.gov; NCT02294500.
How to Develop Entrepreneurial Talent More Effectively? A Comparison of Different Entrepreneurship Educational Methods

Recently, scholars have begun to shift focus toward the effectiveness of different teaching methods for entrepreneurship education. However, the establishment of a unified and clear standard for the division of entrepreneurship educational methods remains unfulfilled, affecting the accuracy of research conclusions. In the present study, for the first time, the aim was to divide the entrepreneurship educational method into the classroom teaching method (CTM) and the extracurricular activity method (EAM) from the perspective of competency level training. On the basis of the modified planning behavior theory, the influence of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention (EI) was explored. In the present study, 514 college students of 14 universities in China were surveyed. The results reveal that the CTM and EAM had a direct positive bearing on EI, with indirect impact exerted by attitude toward entrepreneurship (ATE) and perceived behavioral control (PBC). Although the direct effects of the two teaching methods were similar, EAM could effectively improve ATE and PBC, thereby resulting in a positive effect on EI to a greater extent. Further observations were made that the participation of research University students in CTM was significantly lower than that of applied University students, leading to lower EI. Additionally, higher EI could be attributed to the more active participation in EAM of male students than female students, while no significant difference was indicated between different majors in EI. The results are of significant reference value for promoting the reform of entrepreneurship education and improving the quality of entrepreneurship education in colleges and universities.
Light-responsive polymer brushes: active topographic cues for cell culture applications

In the call for novel stimuli-responsive biomaterials, azobenzene-containing polymer brushes entail a remarkable potential. In fact, their ability to be patterned at the micro- and nanoscale using interference lithography (IL) might be exploited for the realisation of cell-instructive materials (CIMs). In this work, Disperse Red 1 (DR1)-based photoresponsive polymer brushes were synthesised using a controlled radical polymerisation technique. A sinusoidal pattern was inscribed on the azopolymer brush samples using Lloyd's IL configuration. Interestingly, we found that seeded human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) oriented in the pattern direction. Furthermore, using a non-cytotoxic ultrasonication treatment, pattern erasure was achieved. Hence, we envisage the possibility of using these surfaces as reconfigurable cell-instructive biomaterials for tissue engineering applications.
Melatonin as a Chronobiotic and Cytoprotective Agent in Parkinson’s Disease

This article discusses the role that melatonin may have in the prevention and treatment of Parkinson’s disease (PD). In parkinsonian patients circulating melatonin levels are consistently disrupted and the potential therapeutic value of melatonin on sleep disorders in PD was examined in a limited number of clinical studies using 2–5 mg/day melatonin at bedtime. The low levels of melatonin MT1 and MT2 receptor density in substantia nigra and amygdala found in PD patients supported the hypothesis that the altered sleep/wake cycle seen in PD could be due to a disrupted melatonergic system. Motor symptomatology is seen in PD patients when about 75% of the dopaminergic cells in the substantia nigra pars compacta region degenerate. Nevertheless, symptoms like rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder (RBD), hyposmia or depression may precede the onset of motor symptoms in PD for years and are index of worse prognosis. Indeed, RBD patients may evolve to an α-synucleinopathy within 10 years of RBD onset. Daily bedtime administration of 3–12 mg of melatonin has been demonstrated effective in RDB treatment and may halt neurodegeneration to PD. In studies on animal models of PD melatonin was effective to curtail symptomatology in doses that allometrically projected to humans were in the 40–100 mg/day range, rarely employed clinically. Therefore, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical studies are urgently needed in this respect.
Stabilization of battery electrodes through chemical pre-intercalation of layered materials

Vanadium oxide with bilayered crystal structure shows high specific capacity in intercalation-based energy storage systems, such as Li-ion and Na-ion batteries. The enhanced charge storage ability is attributed to the high oxidation state of vanadium enabling intercalation of more than one Li+ (or Na+) ion per V2O5 unit cell. In addition, large interlayer spacing of ∼10–13 Å, typical for the bilayered vanadium oxide, is believed to lead to the facilitated diffusion of charge carrying ions further improving specific capacity of this material. However, we found that initial high capacity of the bilayered V2O5 notably decreases only after a few cycles. In this work, we show results of the capacity stabilization strategy based on inclusion of inorganic ions, other than lithium ion, between the structural layers using chemical pre-intercalation approach. These ions are believed to form bonds with the V–O layered framework improving structural stability of the material during electrochemical cycling, and therefore they are often called stabilizing ions. In this paper we report how electrochemical stability of the AxV2O5 (A = Na, K, Mg, Ca) cathode materials is correlated with the size and charge of the stabilizing ions. Li-preintercalated vanadium oxide (LixV2O5) served as the reference material in this study. We found that chemical insertion of doubly charged, small (r = 0.86 Å) Mg2+ stabilizing ion results in the highest capacity retention.
CRISPR/dCas9-Mediated Parkin Inhibition Impairs Mitophagy and Aggravates Apoptosis of Rat Nucleus Pulposus Cells Under Oxidative Stress

Objective The aim of this study is to explore the role of Parkin in intervertebral disk degeneration (IDD) and its mitophagy regulation mechanism. Study design and methods Rat nucleus pulposus (NP) cells were stimulated with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) to a mimic pathological condition. Apoptosis and mitophagy were assessed by Western blot, terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase dUTP nick end labeling (TUNEL) assay, and immunofluorescence staining. The CRISPR–dCas9–KRAB system was used to silence the expression of Parkin. Result In this study, we found that Parkin was downregulated in rat NP cells under oxidative stress. In addition, treatment with H2O2 resulted in mitochondrial dysfunction, autophagy inhibition, and a significant increase in the rate of apoptosis of NP cells. Meanwhile, mitophagy inhibition enhanced H2O2-induced apoptosis. Furthermore, repression of Parkin significantly attenuated mitophagy and exacerbated apoptosis. Conclusion These results suggested that Parkin may play a protective role in alleviating the apoptosis of NP cells via mitophagy, and that targeting Parkin may provide a promising therapeutic strategy for the prevention of IDD.
PD-L1 Improves Motor Function and Alleviates Neuropathic Pain in Male Mice After Spinal Cord Injury by Inhibiting MAPK Pathway

Background Traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) causes severe motor dysfunction and persistent central neuropathic pain (Nep), which has not yet been effectively cured. Programmed cell death ligand-1 (PD-L1) is typically produced by cancer cells and contributes to the immune-suppressive in tumor microenvironment. However, the role of PD-L1 in regulating inflammatory response and Nep after SCI remains unclear. A growing amount of researches have begun to investigate the effect of PD-L1 on macrophages and microglia in recent years. Considering the pivotal role of macrophages/microglia in the inflammatory response after SCI, we proposed the hypothesis that PD-L1 improved the recovery of locomotor and sensory functions after SCI through regulating macrophages and microglia. Methods The mice SCI model was established to determine the changes in expression patterns of PD-L1. Meanwhile, we constructed PD-L1 knockout mice to observe differences in functional recovery and phenotypes of macrophages/microglia post-SCI. Results In present study, PD-L1 was significantly upregulated after SCI and highly expressed on macrophages/microglia at the injury epicenter. PD-L1 knockout (KO) mice showed worse locomotor recovery and more serious pathological pain compared with wild-type (WT) mice. Furthermore, deletion of PD-L1 significantly increased the polarization of M1-like macrophages/microglia. Mechanistic analysis revealed that PD-L1 may improve functional outcomes following SCI by inhibiting phosphorylation of p38 and ERK1/2. Conclusions Our observations implicate the involvement of PD-L1 in recovery of SCI and provide a new treatment strategy for the prevention and treatment of this traumatic condition.