Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Phylogenetic Diversity and Physiology of Termite Gut Spirochetes1

Abstract The hindgut microbiota of termites includes an abundant and morphologically diverse population of spirochetes. However, our understanding of these symbionts has remained meager since their first observation in termite guts by Leidy over a century ago, in part because none had ever been isolated in culture. Recently, this situation has changed dramatically with the application of cultivation-independent molecular methods to determine their phylogeny, and with the isolation of the first pure cultures. The emerging picture is that earth's termites constitute an enormous reservoir of novel spirochetes, which possess metabolic properties (H2/CO2-acetogenesis and N2 fixation) hitherto unrecognized in spirochetes and which contribute to the carbon, nitrogen and energy requirements of their termite host. These discoveries help to explain the enigmatic dominance of CO2-reductive acetogenesis over methanogenesis in the hindgut of many termites, as well as the old observation that elimination of spirochetes from the gut results in decreased termite survival.
Frequent Users of Doctor Services in a Small Rural Community

Thirty-six per cent of the visits to doctors in a small rural community were made by the 6% of the population having the most diseases or symptoms. About 90% of the population accounted for about one-half of the medical services provided by the Kuusamo doctors; the other half was taken up by the 10% of the inhabitants in greatest need of medical attention. Adults consulted a doctor 2.1 times a year on the average. The most common reasons for consultations were respiratory diseases (23%), diseases of the genito-urinary system (16%) and accidents (14%).
The Alpha Catalytic Subunit of Protein Kinase CK2 Is Required for Mouse Embryonic Development

ABSTRACT Protein kinase CK2 (formerly casein kinase II) is a highly conserved and ubiquitous serine/threonine kinase that is composed of two catalytic subunits (CK2α and/or CK2α′) and two CK2β regulatory subunits. CK2 has many substrates in cells, and key roles in yeast cell physiology have been uncovered by introducing subunit mutations. Gene-targeting experiments have demonstrated that in mice, the CK2β gene is required for early embryonic development, while the CK2α′ subunit appears to be essential only for normal spermatogenesis. We have used homologous recombination to disrupt the CK2α gene in the mouse germ line. Embryos lacking CK2α have a marked reduction in CK2 activity in spite of the presence of the CK2α′ subunit. CK2α−/− embryos die in mid-gestation, with abnormalities including open neural tubes and reductions in the branchial arches. Defects in the formation of the heart lead to hydrops fetalis and are likely the cause of embryonic lethality. Thus, CK2α appears to play an essential and uncompensated role in mammalian development.
System level mutation analysis applied to a state-based language

One of the great challenges within software testing is to know if a test suite covers a program sufficiently. Mutation analysis is presented as an approach to address that challenge. Faulty versions, or mutants, are created, and whether the test suite is able to discover the defects is investigated. The technique is mostly applied to the unit level testing of software programs. Mutation analysis is applied to integration and system level testing in addition to unit level testing. A state based specification and description language, SDL, is used. The specific structural information is used to employ mutation analysis at different abstraction levels.
The Role of the Kidney in the Elimination of Pancreatic Lipase and Amylase from Blood

Two clinical observations indicate that the kidney plays the main role in the elimination of lipase and amylase from the circulation: 1. in patients with uncomplicated acute pancreatitis the decrease of the activity of both enzymes in the serum ran almost in parallel. The half life for lipase was found to be 6.9-13.7 h, and somewhat higher figures (9.3-17.7 h) were calculated for amylase; 2. in patients with reduced glomerular filtration rate the serum activity of either or of both enzymes was distinctly elevated. The contribution of the kidney to the elimination of lipase and amylase from blood was studied in the rat. After an intravenous bolus injection of homologous lipase and amylase, the serum activity of both enzymes decreased rapidly. The half-life of lipase was 18.1 min, that of amylase 20.5 min. Up to 30% of the injected amylase but only traces of lipase activity were recovered in the urine. In animals with ligated kidneys the serum half-life of both enzymes was 3 times longer. Our results indicate that lipase as well as amylase are removed from the serum mainly by glomerular filtration at nearly the same rate. Reabsorption of lipase is almost complete, in contrast to that of amylase. It is suggested that the differences in the renal handling of both enzymes are due to their differing affinities for hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces.
Economic evaluation of thermal power station investments considering the impact of renewable energy sources

With the advent of power system restructuring, there is now competition on the generation activity and the generation mix changed in many countries with the incentives to induce investments in renewables, in many cases, using volatile primary resources. Given this increase of the installed capacity in wind parks and PV stations as well as in hydro stations (as a way to address the mentioned volatility), investments in large thermal stations became more risky. In this scope, this paper describes a long term generation expansion planning model that can be used by generation companies to investigate the profitability of new thermal generation investments considering the increasing presence of renewables. This long term simulation tool uses System Dynamics, a framework particularly suited to mode the long term dependencies between different variables while incorporating delays on some decisions. At a final section this paper includes a Case Study based on a generation system that corresponds to a scaled version of the Portuguese system.
Risk factors of atrial fibrillation following coronary artery bypass grafting: a preliminary report.

BACKGROUND To evaluate the risks factors of atrial fibrillation (AF) following coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). METHODS AND RESULTS Twelve hundred patients subjected to CABG were included. Postoperative AF developed in 278 patients (23.2%). Statistical analysis identified 5 independent predictors of AF: advanced age, history of supraventricular arrhythmias, preoperative heart failure, operation with standard CABG technique and repeated revascularization. CONCLUSIONS Postoperative AF caused a significant increase in mortality and hospitalization length. There were 4 independent risk factors of postoperative AF. Administration of beta-blockers and the OPCAB (off-pump CABG) operating technique were identified as protective factors.
Broadband Folded Dipole Antenna Using The Real Frequency Method

Broadband folded dipole antenna with omnidirectional feature is proposed. The planar folded antenna is selected as a radiating element; because it can be fabricated on simple printed circuit board as well as its input impedance can be adjusted over a wide range of band. The real frequency method (RFM) is used to design matching network having maximum bandwidth for folded dipole antenna. The merit of RFM is that it does not need any analytical modeling and description of the impedance function that is being matched. Antenna dimension is 30 mm by 300 mm with a line width of 1.85 mm. The simulated gain of antenna is 1.8 dBi in the frequency range from 340 MHz to 460 MHz, which is 30 % fractional bandwidth.
Ultrastructural and Biochemical Changes in Human Jejunal Mucosa Associated with Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (0111) Infection

Summary A case of prolonged diarrhoea following Escherichia coli 0111 gastroenteritis is reported. Electron microscopy of the jejunal biopsy revealed effacement of the brush border and attachment of bacteria by pedestal formation. Specific activities of brush border enzymes showed marked depression of disaccharidases, zinc-resistant α-glucosidase, and alkaline phosphatase. In contrast, marker enzymes for basolateral membranes and endoplasmic reticulum were unaffected. The biochemical changes support the pathogenic mechanism suggested by ultrastructural studies previously reported.
Tumor Necrosis Factor Alpha-Mediated Reduction of KLF2 Is Due to Inhibition of MEF2 by NF-κB and Histone Deacetylases

ABSTRACT Activation of the endothelium by inflammatory cytokines is a key event in the pathogenesis of vascular disease states. Proinflammatory cytokines repress the expression of KLF2, a recently identified transcriptional inhibitor of the cytokine-mediated activation of endothelial cells. In this study the molecular basis for the cytokine-mediated inhibition of KLF2 is elucidated. Tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) potently inhibited KLF2 expression. This effect was completely abrogated by a constitutively active form of IκBα, as well as treatment with trichostatin A, implicating a role for the NF-κB pathway and histone deacetylases. Overexpression studies coupled with observations with p50/p65 null cells support an essential role for p65. A combination of promoter deletion and mutational analyses, chromatin immunoprecipitation assays, and coimmunoprecipitation studies indicates that p65 and histone deacetylases 4 cooperate to inhibit the ability of MEF2 factors to induce the KLF2 promoter. These studies identify a novel mechanism by which TNF-α can inhibit endothelial gene expression. Furthermore, the inhibition of MEF2 function by p65 and HDAC4 has implications for other cellular systems where these factors are operative.
Pharmacist-Managed, Physician-Directed Asthma Management Program Reduces Emergency Department Visits

Objective: To determine whether the number of emergency department (ED) visits for acute asthma exacerbations could be decreased by providing patients with a comprehensive program of asthma management delivered by a pharmacist and a physician. Design: Patients were selected from the ED and asked to attend a special asthma clinic that provided education about asthma and proper use of asthma medications, regular telephone contact between the pharmacist and patient, and an open-door clinic policy. Setting: A university-affiliated urban teaching hospital. Participants: The study population consisted of 25 asthmatic patients who were at least 18 years of age and who were seen in the ED a minimum of 3 times in a 12-month period. Main outcome measures: The number of visits to the ED for acute exacerbations of asthma was measured. Patients served as their own controls. The number of ED visits for asthma during the 6-month study period was compared with two 6-month periods prior to the study period for each patient. Results: The total number of ED visits for the 25 enrolled patients six months prior to their enrollment into the study was 92; the number of ED visits during the same months of the study in the prior year was 47. During the study period, there were only 6 ED visits for asthma exacerbations. Conclusions: The comprehensive asthma management program reduced the number of ED visits for acute exacerbations of asthma.
Spatial variability of liquid water path in marine low cloud : The importance of mesoscale cellular convection

Abstract Liquid water path (LWP) mesoscale spatial variability in marine low cloud over the eastern subtropical oceans is examined using two months of daytime retrievals from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the NASA Terra satellite. Approximately 20 000 scenes of size 256 km × 256 km are used in the analysis. It is found that cloud fraction is strongly linked with the LWP variability in the cloudy fraction of the scene. It is shown here that in most cases LWP spatial variance is dominated by horizontal scales of 10–50 km, and increases as the variance-containing scale increases, indicating the importance of organized mesoscale cellular convection (MCC). A neural network technique is used to classify MODIS scenes by the spatial variability type (no MCC, closed MCC, open MCC, cellular but disorganized). It is shown how the different types tend to occupy distinct geographical regions and different physical regimes within the subtropics, although the results suggest considerable o.
60-GHz substrate integrated imaging guide leaky-wave antenna on LTCC

A substrate integrated image guide (SIIG) is proposed based on the low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) technology. Compared with other existed structures, it is easier to design and better fabrication reliability is offered. It is shown that an SIIG has the lowest loss among various planar transmission lines in the V-band and thus it is considered as an excellent candidate for high-efficiency leaky-wave antenna designs. Two 60-GHz leaky-wave antennas including six uniform metal strips and nine-teen tapered elements are proposed and designed, respectively.
Examining the Evidence Base for School-Wide Positive Behavior Support

As the field of education embraces the task of adopting evidence-based practices, ongoing discussion will be appropriate about the standards and format for determining whether an intervention is supported by data on its effectiveness. We propose here six criteria that may be useful in this discussion and apply these criteria to assessment of Schoolwide Positive Behavior Support (SWPBS). Because multiple systems and practices are combined within a three-tiered behavior support framework, SWPBS presents a complex, though useful, example. We propose that a sufficiently rigorous and voluminous body of scholarship establishes SWPBS as an evidence-based practice for use in public schools, by typical educational personnel, to decrease problem behavior and promote prosocial behavior. Further research is needed, however, to better assess the breadth, interaction effects with effective intervention, and sustainability of SWPBS implementation and outcomes. After decades of productive research on the development of effective educational practices, the focus is expanding from transforming practices that “work” as part of iso
Oblikovanje mnijenja ili nužnost manipulacije

In an average person's life, the majority of time is spent listening, and only little time reading or speaking. However, nobody has ever taught us how to listen, yet the subject we would like to present is based on listening and watching, as the intention of the creation and the public management is to shape information, i.e. a thought, in order to be easily accepted. A market success terror is transformed into a quality absolute criterion, and this is how we enter a magic circle: the less the public is educated, the more successful the primitive media contents are.
Combining visual and proprioceptive cues to improve the discrimination of object location.

Little is known about the way in which visual and proprioceptive cues for object location are combined. In order to investigate this, we measured the ability of participants to discriminate the location of a virtual target in the presence or absence of proprioceptive information. Participants viewed three virtual reference spheres using a head mounted display. The spheres lay on a circle of radius 14 cm and defined a reference plane that was located within easy reaching distance of the participant. In the proprioceptive condition, participants moved a hand-held pointer to the centre of each sphere in turn. When the pointer was fully inside the reference sphere, the sphere changed colour from red to green to indicate correct alignment. Once all three spheres had turned green, the participant clicked a mouse which made the spheres disappear to be replaced by a target sphere. A similar reaching movement was then performed to locate the centre of the target sphere. Once both the reference and target spheres had been located, the participant's task was to judge the depth of the target sphere relative to the plane defined by the previously-displayed reference spheres. For the vision-only condition, the procedure was similar but participants made their judgements without reaching towards either the reference or target spheres. Thresholds (defined as the standard deviation of the fitted cumulative Gaussian) were measured both with and without hand movements and also for two levels of transparency of the spheres. Results show that thresholds for combined proprioception and vision were significantly lower than for vision alone. In other words, proprioceptive input significantly improved depth discrimination despite vision being both sufficient to complete the task and necessary to define the proprioceptive cue. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.
Between a Rock and a Hard Place – Parsing for Hyperege Replacement DAG Grammars

We study the uniform membership problem for hyperedgereplacement grammars that generate directed acyclic graphs. The study of this type of language is motivated by applications in natural language processing. Our major result is a low-degree polynomial-time algorithm that solves the uniform membership problem for a restricted type of such grammars. We motivate the necessity of the restrictions by two different NP-completeness results.
Short communication Genetic variants of parvovirus B19 identified in the United Kingdom: Implications for diagnostic testing

Background: Discrepant results in diagnostic parvovirus B19 PCR assays have been observed with strains showing nucleotide sequence variation. Objectives and study design: To perform phylogenetic analysis on two parvovirus B19 strains that gave discrepant PCR results. Results: One strain was found to be genotype 2; the second strain was genotype 3. Conclusions: Parvovirus B19 genotypes 2 and 3 strains were identified in diagnostic samples of UK origin following the investigation of discrepant PCR results. More structured investigations are needed to estimate the prevalence of these variants. In the meantime, diagnostic PCR results should be interpreted cautiously when they are at variance with serological testing. Manufacturers of PCR kits for the detection of B19 sequences will need to consider re-designing their primers.
Discriminative Autoencoders for Acoustic Modeling

Speech data typically contain information irrelevant to automatic speech recognition (ASR), such as speaker variability and channel/environmental noise, lurking deep within acoustic features. Such unwanted information is always mixed together to stunt the development of an ASR system. In this paper, we propose a new framework based on autoencoders for acoustic modeling in ASR. Unlike other variants of autoencoder neural networks, our framework is able to isolate phonetic components from a speech utterance by simultaneously taking two kinds of objectives into consideration. The first one relates to the minimization of reconstruction errors and benefits to learn most salient and useful properties of the data. The second one functions in the middlemost code layer, where the categorical distribution of the context-dependent phone states is estimated for phoneme discrimination and the derivation of acoustic scores, the proximity relationship among utterances spoken by the same speaker are preserved, and the intra-utterance noise is modeled and abstracted away. We describe the implementation of the discriminative autoencoders for training tri-phone acoustic models and present TIMIT phone recognition results, which demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the conventional DNN-based approach.
Automatic Enhanced Update Summary Generation System for News Documents

 Abstract — Fast changing knowledge systems on the Internet can be accessed more efficiently with the help of automatic document summarization and updating techniques. The aim of multi-document update summary generation is to construct a summary unfolding the mainstream of data from a collection of documents based on the hypothesis that the user has already read a set of previous documents. In order to provide a lot of semantic information from the documents, deeper linguistic or semantic analysis of the source documents were used instead of relying only on document word frequencies to select important concepts. In order to produce a responsive summary, meaning oriented structural analysis is needed. To address this issue, the proposed system presents a document summarization approach based on sentence annotation with aspects, prepositions and named entities. Semantic element extraction strategy is used to select important concepts from documents which are used to generate enhanced semantic summary.
Regional prevalence and distribution of ischemic neurons in dog brains 96 hours after cardiac arrest of 0 to 20 minutes.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE In this established outcome model of cardiac arrest in dogs, we have used total (summed regional) brain histopathologic damage scores. The present study describes the regional progression of necrotic (ischemic) neuron prevalence with increasing duration of cardiac arrest. It tests the hypothesis that increases in the total prevalence of necrotic neurons better correspond to increasing arrest duration and better correlate with neurological deficit than do any individual regional scores. METHODS Blinded evaluation with light microscopy was used to score the prevalence (five categories) and note the distribution of necrotic neurons in dog brains 96 hours after normothermic ventricular fibrillation cardiac arrest followed by standard reperfusion and control of extracerebral variables. Six coronal brain sections including 19 regions were examined from dogs subjected to 0 (n = 2), 5 (n = 5), 10 (n = 6), 12.5 (n = 12), 15 (n = 8), 17 (n = 5), or 20 (n = 1) minutes of cardiac arrest. Dogs were neurologically evaluated before death. RESULTS Necrotic neurons were widespread and scattered among normal neurons. Individual regions varied in their sensitivity to different durations of cardiac arrest. There were consistent increases in the mean prevalence of necrotic neurons with increased arrest duration in the hippocampal dentate gyrus and for cerebellar granule neurons. Regionally, the caudate nucleus had the best correlation with clinical neurological deficit (rho = +.85, P < .01). CONCLUSIONS Compared with total (summed regional) necrotic neuron prevalence scores, increased regional prevalence scores for cerebellar granule neurons with increasing arrest duration were equally significant, and scores for the caudate nucleus had nearly the same correlation with individual clinical neurological deficit.