Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estudo da emissão de luz por diodo infravermelho na dor neuropática em ratos

Introducao: A lesao nervosa periferica pode causar alteracoes funcionais tanto sensitivas quanto motoras, podendo promover importantes comprometimentos, especialmente a dor neuropatica. Dentre os varios tratamentos propostos esta o emprego da luz monocromatica de baixa intensidade, como o diodo de emissao de luz (LED). Objetivo: Avaliar o efeito analgesico do LED no espectro infravermelho em modelo experimental de dor neuropatica por constricao do nervo ciatico em ratos. Material e metodos: Foram utilizados 24 ratos machos Wistar, randomizados em 4 grupos (n = 6). Grupo I: animais neuropaticos e tratados com LED; grupo II: animais neuropaticos e tratados com o LED desligado (placebo); grupo III: animais Sham e tratados com LED; grupo IV: animais Sham e tratados com LED desligado (placebo). Para avaliar a eficacia do tratamento, foram empregados parâmetros de nocicepcao como alodinia mecânica estatica, dinâmica e termica ao frio; hiperalgesia termica ao calor e nocicepcao espontânea . Resultados: Os animais neuropaticos desenvolveram alodinia e hiperalgesia ao estimulo mecânico, termico e nocicepcao espontânea em 7 dias (Tempo 0) contados a partir da inducao da neuropatia, mantendo essas manifestacoes ate o 14o dia. Conclusao: O tratamento continuo com LED no espectro infravermelho promoveu efeito analgesico em um modelo experimental de dor neuropatica em ratos. Os resultados obtidos neste estudo sugerem que esse recurso fisico pode ser utilizado no tratamento de pacientes com dor neuropatica. Palavras-chave: dor, neuropatia, diodo de emissao de luz.
140 GHz High-Gain LTCC-Integrated Transmit-Array Antenna Using a Wideband SIW Aperture-Coupling Phase Delay Structure

This paper presents the complete design of a wideband transmit-array (TA) antenna with high gain and high efficiency for D-band applications based on the low-temperature co-fired ceramic technology. The proposed unit cell is composed of a pair of wideband magnetoelectric dipoles as the receive/transmit elements, together with a substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) aperture-coupling transmission structure for independent phase adjustability. A 360° phase coverage is obtained by the proposed phasing element, and its phase response curves are nearly parallel within a broad frequency band, which indicates a wideband performance. To verify the design, the fabricated prototype is measured by using a vector network analyzer in a terahertz compact-range anechoic chamber. The measured peak gain is 33.45 dBi at 150 GHz with the aperture efficiency of 44.03%, and the measured 3 dB gain bandwidth is 124–158 GHz (24.29%). The good radiation performance ensures that the proposed SIW aperture-coupling TA antenna is a promising candidate for D-band applications.
NADPH Diaphorase‐Containing Nonpyramidal Cells in the Rat Hippocampus Exhibit Differential Sensitivity to Kainic Acid

Neurons containing nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH) diaphorase exhibit high resistance to several excitotoxins. In the neocortex and striatum, however, these neurons are sensitive to kainic acid. Here we report that, 2 weeks after i.p. injection of kainic acid, the number of NADPH diaphorase neurons in the hilus and CA1 subfield was decreased, whereas the cell counts in the other hippocampal areas were to a great extent similar to those for the controls. We propose that the loss of NADPH diaphorase neurons in the hippocampus after systemic injection of kainic acid is associated with the pathophysiological processes involved in the spreading of epileptic seizure activity rather than to the direct neurotoxic effect of the kainic acid per se.
A Web-Based Data Mining System for Forest Resource Planning System

Forest resource planning systems provide the infrastructure and tools needed to establish effective forest management. The present resource planning system only provides past records for decision making. In this paper, the Web-based data mining technique is applied to the decision making of forest resource planning. The proposed system makes use of the three-tier Web service architecture, gives employees an intuitive Web interface to access and manage information, and integrates the internal operations. Analysis tools are provided to help the staff make administrative decisions. The solution provides the users with an office automation module, a decision support module, an internal audit module and a system integrator module. This forest resource planning system provides an integrated solution to interconnect each system within an organization.
Genetics of prostate cancer: too many loci, too few genes.

It is with enormous excitement, last month, that the prostate cancer–mapping community acknowledges the cloning and characterization, by Tavtigian et al. (2000), of a hereditary prostate cancer (HPC) susceptibility gene, HPC2/ELAC2. In the past 5 years, investigators in the field have struggled, with mixed success, to localize genes responsible for this very common, yet complex phenotype. Although a half-dozen loci have been reported after analysis of conventional genomewide scans of “high-risk families,” confirmation studies have been few, and, until recently, there have been no public reports of cloned loci. As investigators in the field have wrestled with issues related to the variability in disease phenotype, large numbers of sporadics in the population, and statistical issues related to age-dependent penetrance, it seemed that the prostate cancer field was beginning to follow the tortuous path set by investigators mapping genes for diabetes and schizophrenia. Last month, those issues were temporarily set aside, when Rebbeck et al. (2000), in a clinic-based, follow-up study to the reported cloning of HPC2/ELAC2 (Tavtigian et al. 2000), demonstrated that men who carry both of two common polymorphisms in the HPC2/ELAC2 gene experience a modest increase in risk for prostate cancer. HPC2/ELAC2 seems well established, therefore, as the first prostate cancer–susceptibility gene characterized by positional cloning (Tavtigian et al. 2000). These data, together with several genome-scan reports and a host of follow-up papers, offer intriguing lessons for those in the field, suggesting new ways to approach the difficult problem of understanding prostate cancer susceptibility.
Meeting the challenges of micronutrient malnutrition in the developing world.

BACKGROUND Malnutrition still remains one of the major public health challenges, particularly in developing countries. Major risk factors for undernutrition such as suboptimal breastfeeding and micronutrient deficiencies (vitamin A and zinc) are responsible for more than one-third of all under five child deaths and 11% of the global total disease burden. SOURCES OF DATA Several strategies have been employed to supplement micronutrients. These include education, dietary modification, food provision, supplementation and fortification either alone or in combination. AREAS OF AGREEMENT Supplementation is the most widely practiced intervention while fortification can also be a potentially cost-effective public health intervention and target a larger population through a single strategy. Universal coverage with the full bundle of interventions including micronutrient provision, complementary foods, treatments for worms and diarrheal diseases and behavior change programs package could be the way forward in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). AREAS OF CONTROVERSY Bio-fortification and agricultural interventions including home and school gardening are relatively newer strategies and require further research as they have the potential to impact nutritional status of populations at large. GROWING POINTS Effectiveness of the various interventions is well recognized; however, consensus needs to be built around approaches to scale up coverage and delivery strategies to reduce disparities and provide equitable access. AREAS TIMELY FOR DEVELOPING RESEARCH Future studies should focus on evaluating various approaches to address malnutrition with a standard methodology and defined outcomes. This will help gauge the actual morbidity and mortality impacts of these specific interventions and the long-term viability of these programs. On a broader scale, strategies to address food insecurity and poverty alleviation are the key as these are complex sustainable development issues, linked to health through malnutrition, but also to sustainable economic development, environment and trade.
A wireless sensing platform for battery-free sensors

This paper presents an inductive telemetry platform system for the continuous, real-time and simultaneous remote measurement in harsh environment of multiple parameters. Based on an efficient algorithm used for system identification purpose a readout unit for passive telemetric environment is proposed. Tests show promising results at mutual coil distances up to 5 cm.
Institutional Investment Constraints and Stock Prices

We test the hypothesis that investment constraints in delegated portfolio management may distort demand for stocks, leading to price underreaction to news and stock return predictability. We find that institutions tend not to buy more of a stock with good news that they already overweight; they are reluctant to sell a stock with bad news that they already underweight. Stocks with good news overweighted by institutions subsequently significantly outperform stocks with bad news underweighted by institutions. The impact of institutional investment constraints sheds new light on asset pricing anomalies such as stock price momentum and post–earnings announcement drift.
A divergent pattern of the sex difference in life expectancy: Sweden and Japan, early 1970s‐late 1990s

Abstract For most of the 20th century the sex gap in life expectancy in the industrialized countries has widened in favor of women. By the early 1980s a reversal in the long‐term pattern of this differential had occurred in some countries, where it reached a maximum and thereafter followed a declining trend. Of particular interest to the present investigation is the anomalous experience of Japan, where unlike other high‐income countries the female advantage in life expectancy has been expanding. We contrast the case of Japan with that of Sweden, where, like many other high‐income nations, the sex differential in longevity has been narrowing in recent years. We observe that in Sweden, until the early 1980s, the sex gap in life expectancy (female‐male) exceeded that of Japan; but this situation reversed in subsequent periods, when the Swedish differential narrowed and that of Japan widened. A decomposition analysis indicates that these divergent patterns since 1980 have resulted mainly from larger than expected reductions in male mortality in Sweden due to heart disease and from accidents and violence, lung cancer and “other” cancers. In Japan, death rates for men and women from heart disease— which is a leading cause of death—have tended to decline more or less at the same pace since the early 1980s; and with regard to lung cancer, and “other” neoplasms, male death rates in Japan have been rising while those of women have either declined or risen more slowly. Moreover, during the 1990s, male and female suicide rates rose in Japan, but the rates for men went up faster. Altogether, the net effect of these divergent mortality trends for men and women in Japan underlie much of the observed widening of its sex differential in longevity in recent years.
Saquinavir gets accelerated approval.

Hoffmann-La Roche received accelerated approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its protease inhibitor, saquinavir (Invirase), when used in combination with nucleoside analogues. This is the quickest review of any AIDS drug made by the FDA. Accelerated approval is generally based on laboratory markers, such as CD4 counts. Clinically significant viral load changes in saquinavir trials have not been shown yet. Saquinavir has not been combined in tests with nucleoside analogues other than AZT and ddC. The wholesale cost of saquinavir for the recommended dose of 600 mg 3 times per day is $15.89. The Roche HIV Therapy Assistance Program provides saquinavir to patients waiting for insurance coverage and to those who cannot afford the drug.
Staphylococcal α‐toxin: repair of a calcium‐impermeable pore in the target cell membrane

Staphylococcal α‐toxin forms heptameric pores that render membranes permeable for monovalent cations. The pore is formed by an amphipathic β‐barrel encompassing amino acid residues 118–140 of each subunit of the oligomer. Human fibroblasts are susceptible to α‐toxin but are able to repair the membrane lesions. Thereby, toxin oligomers remain embedded in the plasma membrane and exposed to the extracellular medium. In this study, we sought to detect structural changes occurring in the pore‐forming sequence during lesion repair. Single cysteine substitution mutants were labelled with the environmentally sensitive fluorochrome acrylodan and, after mixing with wild‐type toxin, incorporated into hybrid heptamers on fibroblast membranes. Formation of the lipid‐inserted β‐barrel was accompanied by characteristic fluorescence emission shifts. After lesion repair, the environment of the residues at the outer surface of the β‐barrel remained unchanged, indicating continued contact with lipids. However, the labelled residues oriented towards the channel lumen underwent a green to blue shift in fluorescence, indicating reduced exposure to water. Pore closure proceeded in the presence of calmodulin inhibitors and of microtubule disruptors; however, it was prevented by cytochalasin D and by inhibitors of lipid metabolism. Our findings reveal the existence of a novel mechanism of membrane repair that may consist in constriction of the inserted proteinaceous pore within the lipid bilayer.
Tumor Regression Induced by Intratumor Therapy with a Disabled Infectious Single Cycle (DISC) Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV) Vector, DISC/HSV/Murine Granulocyte-Macrophage Colony-Stimulating Factor, Correlates with Antigen-Specific Adaptive Immunity1

Direct intratumor injection of a disabled infectious single cycle HSV-2 virus encoding the murine GM-CSF gene (DISC/mGM-CSF) into established murine colon carcinoma CT26 tumors induced a significant delay in tumor growth and complete tumor regression in up to 70% of animals. Pre-existing immunity to HSV did not reduce the therapeutic efficacy of DISC/mGM-CSF, and, when administered in combination with syngeneic dendritic cells, further decreased tumor growth and increased the incidence of complete tumor regression. Direct intratumor injection of DISC/mGM-CSF also inhibited the growth of CT26 tumor cells implanted on the contralateral flank or seeded into the lungs following i.v. injection of tumor cells (experimental lung metastasis). Proliferation of splenocytes in response to Con A was impaired in progressor and tumor-bearer, but not regressor, mice. A potent tumor-specific CTL response was generated from splenocytes of all mice with regressing, but not progressing tumors following in vitro peptide stimulation; this response was specific for the gp70 AH-1 peptide SPSYVYHQF and correlated with IFN-γ, but not IL-4 cytokine production. Depletion of CD8+ T cells from regressor splenocytes before in vitro stimulation with the relevant peptide abolished their cytolytic activity, while depletion of CD4+ T cells only partially inhibited CTL generation. Tumor regression induced by DISC/mGM-CSF virus immunotherapy provides a unique model for evaluating the immune mechanism(s) involved in tumor rejection, upon which tumor immunotherapy regimes may be based.
Angiogenesis in pituitary adenomas

Angiogenesis, which is the formation of new blood vessels from preexisting capillaries, plays an important role in tumor growth and metastasis. In this review, the focus is on angiogenesis in pituitary adenomas. Angiogenesis of pituitary adenomas has been assessed by studying tumor microvessel density using specific immunohistochemical markers to clarify the relationship between angiogenesis and tumor behavior. Unlike other organs, pituitary adenomas have significantly lower vascular densities as compared to nontumorous adenohypophysis, suggesting that the lack of significant angiogenesis may play a role in the slow pace of pituitary tumor growth and rarity of metastases. In addition, the relationship between microvessel density and various factors in pituitary adenomas is reviewed, including tumor types, age and sex, invasiveness, malignancy, several proliferative markers (MIB‐1 or Ki‐67). However, further studies will be needed, since many studies have reached opposite conclusions. Angiogenesis is a complex multistep process and several factors are found to be involved in each step of neovascularization, such as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF), and various other cytokines. VEGF and bFGF (or FGF‐2), which are the most potent angiogenesis inducers among them, have been studied by immunohistochemistry, in situ hybridization, or in vitro studies in normal or adenomatous pituitaries and these results are also discussed in this review. Microsc. Res. Tech. 60:236–243, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Bounded consensus of leader-following multi-agent systems with sampling delay for double-integrator dynamics

The authors are concerned with the bounded consensus tracking problems of leader-following multi-agent systems with sampling delay for double-integrator dynamics. Based on the delay decomposition approach, the augmented matrix method and some other technologies, the necessary and sufficient conditions are obtained which guarantee that each agent can track the time-varying reference state of the virtual leader. Some numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.
INOVAÇÃO NA PRODUÇÃO DA CARNE BOVINA: UMA REVISÃO SISTEMÁTICA DA LITERATURA

A inovacao e retratada pela literatura como crucial para a economica atual, sendo fator chave para criar uma vantagem competitiva sustentavel. Consequentemente, o interesse nesse tema tem estimulado um aumento exponencial de estudos que abordam a inovacao em diferentes areas. Considerando o exposto, esta pesquisa teve como objetivo analisar como as publicacoes cientificas tratam a inovacao na producao de carne bovina. Para tanto, realizou-se uma revisao sistematica nos artigos publicados na base de dados Scopus que atendiam aos criterios de busca previamente definidos. Os achados sugerem que as inovacoes sao importantes meios para o setor de producao de carne bovina, haja vista que possibilitam alem do aumento da produtividade, adaptacao a alteracoes do contexto, bem como, promovem a compreensao de como as inovacoes tecnologicas permitem minimizar danos ambientais causados pela producao animal.
Harmonic analysis associated with spatio-temporal transformations

The paper presents new developments in harmonic analysis associated with the motion transformations embedded in digital signals. In this context, harmonic analysis provides motion analysis with a complete theoretical construction of perfectly matching concepts and a related toolbox leading to fast algorithms. This theory can be built from only two assumptions: an associative structure for the local motion transformations expressed as Lie group and a principle of optimality for the global evolution expressed as a variational extremal. Motion analysis means not only detection, estimation, interpolation, and tracking but also propagators motion-compensated filtering, signal decomposition, and selective reconstruction. The optimality principle defines the trajectory and provides the appropriate equations of motion, the selective tracking equations, the selective constants of motion to be tracked, and all the symmetries to be imposed on the system. The harmonic analysis provides new special functions, orthogonal bases, PDEs, ODEs and integral equations. The tools to be developed rely on group representations, continuous and discrete wavelets, the estimation theory (prediction, smoothing and interpolation) and filtering theory (Kalman filters, motion-based convolutions, integral transforms). All the algorithms are supported by fast and parallelizable implementations based on the FFT and dynamic programming.
Specific and nonspecific activities of the visual system in rabbits.

Although it has been shown that the rises in cortical activities by 3 and 5/sec flash stimulations verified in the frequency response of the visual cortex of unanesthetized rabbits (MIMURA and SATO, 1965) can be correlated with the excitability changes of 5/sec (BIsHOP, 1933) or 4-5/sec (PEARLMAN, 1963) in the visual cortex of the rabbit, it was not ascertained whether these excitability changes originated from the cortex itself or from subcortical structures nor was it ascertained whether it was from the specific or the nonspecific system. The present study is an attempt to solve the above problems through observations on the pattern of response to repetitive flash stimulations in the specific and non-specific systems of the cortex and subcortical structures of anesthetized and unanesthetized rabbits.
The place of diatoms in the biofuels industry

In spite of attractive attributes, diatoms are underrepresented in research and literature related to the development of microalgal biofuels. Diatoms are highly diverse and have substantial evolutionarily-based differences in cellular organization and metabolic processes relative to chlorophytes. Diatoms have tremendous ecological success, with typically higher productivity than other algal classes, which may relate to cellular factors discussed in this review. Diatoms can accumulate lipid equivalently or to a greater extent than other algal classes, and can rapidly induce triacylglycerol under Si limitation, avoiding the detrimental effects on photosynthesis, gene expression and protein content associated with N limitation. Diatoms have been grown on production scales for aquaculture for decades, produce value-added products and are amenable to omic and genetic manipulation approaches. In this article, we highlight beneficial attributes and address potential concerns of diatoms as biofuels research and production organisms, and encourage a greater emphasis on their development in the biofuels arena.
Chapter 8 Object Detection

Over the past twenty years, data-driven methods have become a dominant paradigm for computer vision, with numerous practical successes. In difficult computer vision tasks, such as the detection of object categories (for example, the detection of faces of various gender, age, race, and pose, under various illumination and background conditions), researchers generally learn a classifier that can distinguish an image patch that contains the object of interest from all other image patches. Ensemble learning methods have been very successful in learning classifiers for object detection. The task of object detection, however, poses new challenges for ensemble learning, which we will discuss in detail in Sect. 8.2. We summarize these challenges into three aspects: scale, speed, and asymmetry. Various research contributions have been made to overcome these difficulties. In this chapter, we mainly focus on those methods that use the cascade classifier structure together with ensemble learning methods (e.g., AdaBoost). The cascade classifier structure for object detection was first proposed by Viola and Jones [41], who presented the first face detection system that could both run in real-time and achieve high detection accuracy. We will describe this work in Sect. 8.3, with ensemble learning methods being one of the key components in this system.