Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
EFFECTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL HEAVY METALS ON NERUAL STEM CELL SURVIVAL AND DIFFERENTIATION

Heavy metals are usually found in the environment (air, water, land, food chains), but their concentrations have been increasing due to increased industrialization and improper waste disposal. Many heavy metals have been characterized for their toxic effects, including developmental toxicity, mental retardation, neurological impairment such as blindness, neuromuscular weakness, altered neurobehavioral development, neurocognitive deficits and many other related disorders, in both human beings and animals. In this study, we seek to understand the specific effects of cadmium, mercury and lead on neural stem cell (NSC) survival and differentiation, to gain further insight on their toxic effects during embryogenesis. NSCs are self-renewing, multi-potent resident brain cells, which differentiate into various neural and glial lineages depending on the spatial-temporal cues and signaling molecules they receive. Here we investigated the effects of cadmium, lead and mercury on embryonic rat NSC differentiation and neurite outgrowth in a 3D environment over a 14 day culture period. Type I collagen was used to create an extracellular 3D microenvironment for NSC culture, and various concentrations (0.01 nM – 10 μM) of metal ions were added. NSC survival, differentiation and neurite outgrowth into various neural and glial lineages was assessed both qualitatively and quantitatively, at various time points. Results suggest the tremendous adverse impact
Ketamine-induced bladder dysfunction

Introduction: Ketamine is a non-competitive antagonist that acts on N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors in the brain and has been used as an anaesthetic agent since the 1960s. It has more recently become popular as a party drug due to it’s hallucinogenic effects, however ketamine abusers can develop significant lower urinary tract symptoms with associated damage to the lining of the bladder that can be difficult to treat and can be referred to as ketamine-induced cystitis (KIC). Aims: i) To explore the neurogenic effects of ketamine, ii) To analyse histological features of ketamine cystitis specimens, iii) To contribute to existing preliminary evidence urothelial cells that express cKit are absent from ketamine-cystitis specimens. Methods: Immunolabelling of KIC specimens was performed to study specific biomarkers that included nerve growth factor receptor (NGFR), nerve filament protein (NFP), smooth muscle actin (SMA), vimentin, and cKit. Neuronal cell lines (B104 and LAN-5) were used to establish in vitro bioassays to study the effects of ketamine and NGF on neurite outgrowth. Normal human urothelial (NHU) cells were cultured in vitro and treated with ketamine to assess cKit protein expression using both RT-PCR and western blotting. Results: NGFR was seen to be upregulated in both urothelium and stroma of KIC specimens. SMA was expressed in urothelial cells however this was not seen in correlation with vimentin. cKit was absent in some KIC specimens, corroborated with decreased protein expression in vitro, however cKit transcript was upregulated in ketamine treated NHU cells. Neuronal cells treated with ketamine showed an increase in neurite outgrowth over the control (p<0.05). Conclusions: Upregulation of NGFR appears to be present in KIC specimens and could explain painful bladder symptoms. Whether this is caused directly or indirectly by ketamine has yet to be established. There is an absence of cKit expressing cells in the urothelium from some KIC specimens which requires further investigation.
Relevance Measurements in Online Signed Social Networks

Measuring relevance for two nodes is fundamental to social network analysis, which has been proven to benefit many network analysis tasks and applications such as link prediction, node classification, community detection, search and recommendations. The majority of existing relevance measurements focused on unsigned social networks (or networks with only positive links). However, social media provides mechanisms that allow online users to specify negative links in addition to positive ones. For example, Slashdot users can create foe links; users in Epinions can establish distrust relations; while users in Facebook and Twitter can block or unfriend others. Thereby, social networks with both positive and negative links (or signed social networks) have become ubiquitous in social media and attracted increasing attention in recent years. On the one hand, it is evident from recent studies that negative links have added value in a number of analytical tasks. On the other hand, the availability of negative links challenges existing relevance measurements designed for unsigned networks. Hence, we need dedicated relevance measurements for signed social networks. In this paper, we present an initial and comprehensive investigation on signed relevance measurements and design numerous relevance measurements for signed social networks from both local and global perspectives. Empirical experiments on four real-world signed social networks demonstrate the importance of negative links in building signed relevance measurements and their effects on social network analysis tasks.
Determination of optical parameters in biological tissues and application to medical imaging

Cheng Chen, Determination of Optical Parameters in Biological Tissues and Application to Medical Imaging (Under the direction of Dr. Xin-Hua Hu) Department of Physics, August, 2008 Quantitative characterization of biological tissues through determination of optical parameters has attracted intensive research efforts due to its fundamental importance and potential applications in medicine. Defined by the radiative transfer theory, these optical parameters and their spectra can provide optical markers for early detection of lesions such as skin cancers. The goal of this dissertation research is to develop a reflectance imaging method to inversely determine the optical and geometric parameters of skin tissues through phantom study. The dissertation research consists of three major parts: an experimental system to acquire diffuse reflectance images in a wide spectral range; mathematical models to simulate/calculate light-tissue interaction; inverse determination of optical parameters. To achieve the above goal, we have constructed a reflectance imaging system and developed a voxel-based Monte Carlo model to simulate light transportation in heterogeneous media. Various techniques have been investigated, including a diffusion model, to increase the simulation speed. Optical parameters of two types of homogeneous phantoms made in our laboratory were inversely determined based on both Monte Carlo and diffusion models with full-field illumination in a spectral window from 500nm to 950nm for validation of the imaging method. In these cases, we proved the uniqueness of the inverse solution of the optical parameters within the investigated ranges of these parameters. Furthermore, the determination of thickness of an embedded region in heterogeneous tissue phantoms was investigated using the reflectance imaging method. As a preliminary study, multispectral reflectance images of eight patients with pigmented lesions in skin have been processed to extract optical parameters of the pigmented lesion region to demonstrate the feasibility of our reflectance imaging method. The reflectance imaging method developed in this dissertation provides a new approach to determine the optical parameters of turbid media and biological tissues under full-field illumination condition. When combined with multispectral measurement and multivariate analysis, the reflectance imaging method has significant potentials on in vivo diagnosis of skin cancers and non-invasive detection due to its capacity for quantitative analysis. Determination of Optical Parameters in Biological Tissues and Application to Medical Imaging
Application of Surface Electromyography in the Dynamics of Human Movement

The duration of sEMG activity corresponds to the duration of muscle activation. The amplitude is the level of signal activity and varies with the amount of electrical activity detected in the muscle; it provides information about intensity of muscle activation. The observed sEMG frequency is due to a wide range of factors: muscle composition, characteristics of the action potential of the active muscles fibers, the intramuscular coordination process and electrode properties [22, 23, 28].
Aloe vera in dentistry- a review

Aloevera has been long time used for its many beneficial properties. It is still in use for its wide range for ailments. It promotes more rapid wound healing and pain relief. It has anti bacterial, anti viral, antifungal, antioxidant effect. Aloevera has shown multiple uses in dentistry. This review article is about the different use of aloevera in field of dentistry and its side effect.
Effects of Interaction of Electromagnetic Waves in Complex Particles

The majority of natural materials (rocks, soil, wood, etc.) are inhomogeneous and have a complex structure. Very often they are conglomerates or aggregates, i.e. made of small grains stuck together. This is especially typical for planetary aerosols and all types of cosmic dust (interstellar, circumstellar, interplanetary, cometary, etc.). Cosmic dust, specifically, cometary will be the main test object for this paper. This is related to the fact that cosmic dust is usually studied through remote sensing, specifically through the study of electromagnetic waves it scatters and emits. Due to this, the field of light scattering by cosmic dust has always been at the frontier of the study of interaction of electromagnetic waves with non-spherical and inhomogeneous particles. It has inspired publication of the scholarly books by van de Hulst (1957), Schuerman (1980), Kokhanovsky (2001), Hovenier et al. (2004), Voshchinnikov (2004), Borghese et al. (2010), and Mishchenko et al. (2000, 2002, 2010) and numerous book chapters, e.g., Mukai (1989), Lien (1991), Gustafson (1999), Gustafson et al. (2001), Kolokolova et al. (2004a, b). To consider the scattering of electromagnetic waves by an object of complex structure, we will determine this object as a configuration of discrete finite constituents. They will be called inclusions in the case of inhomogeneous particles, or monomers in the case when they are constituent particles of an aggregate. Their volume is large enough that we may ignore their atomic structure and characterize their material by a specified complex refractive index, m=n+i┢, whose real part is responsible for the refraction and imaginary part for the absorption of the light by the material. The surrounding medium is assumed to be homogeneous, linear, isotropic, and, in the case of aggregates, non-absorbing. Although we discuss some approximations, our consideration is based on the Maxwell equations fully describing the interaction of the electromagnetic radiation with the material. The non-linear optical effects, non-elastic scattering, quickly-changing illumination and morphology of the scattering object are beyond the scope of our study. As mentioned above, our test example will be cosmic dust that typically can be presented as aggregates of submicron monomers. In the optical wavelengths they are good
Automated Plausibility Analysis of Large Phylogenies

Our ability to infer large phylogenetic trees that contain up to tens of thousands of species, gives rise to novel challenges in computational phylogenetics. Phylogenetic accuracy decreases as we add more and more taxa while keeping the number of sites in an alignment fixed. In addition, it is difficult, if not impossible to visually inspect such large phylogenies in order to determine whether they “make sense” or not. So, how can we assess the biological plausibility of a huge phylogeny? Here, we develop an automated plausibility assessment approach and introduce the algorithm Plausibility-Check. Our algorithm tries to determine whether a comprehensive phylogenetic tree T is plausible or not by comparing it to a set of substantially smaller and hence, more trustworthy, reference trees that contain a proper subset of the taxa in T . This is done by calculating and averaging over all topological distances between the small reference trees and the large tree. The most compute-intensive operation is the extracting of the subtrees that are induced by the taxon (sub-)set of a small reference tree in the large tree T . This is a prerequisite for calculating the topological distance between the
Novel Anti-Cancer Peptides Comprising Three Amino Acids

Background: The NPxY motif common to all β integrin cytoplasmic domains forms part of a canonical recognition sequence for phosphotyrosine-binding domains which are protein modules present in a wide variety of signaling and cytoskeletal proteins. We have recently reported that a non-naturally occurring peptide, RSKAKNPLYR, derived from the β6 integrin cytoplasmic domain inhibits cancer cell growth in vitro and proposed that this may be due, at least in part, to the inhibition of c-Src activity [1]. In the present study we examined the role of the NPLY motif within RSKAKNPLYR in terms of its requirement for inhibition of cancer cell growth. Materials and Methods: The effects of peptide modifications to RSKAKNPLYR on in vitro proliferation of human cancer cell lines (colorectal HT29, prostate DU145, breast MCF-7 and ovarian A2780) were evaluated using the MTT cell growth assay. Passage of peptide across the plasma membrane was assessed by means of confocal microscopy using FITC-labelled peptide. The effect of peptide on kinase activity was assessed in cell-free in vitro kinase assays. Results: The NPLY motif within RSKAKNPLYR was found to be essential for the growth inhibitory effect of this peptide. However, modified forms of this peptide in which all amino acids except the charged residues arginine and lysine were replaced by single non-polar amino acids such as alanine or valine were equally effective at inhibiting cancer cell proliferation. Moreover, these peptides inhibited not only c-Src activity as seen for RSKAKNPLYR but also the activity of members of the PKB/Akt kinase family. Conclusion: Novel decapeptides comprising only three amino acids have anti-cancer effects without the requirement for an integrin-based NPLY motif. These peptides inhibit the activity of not only c-Src but also members of the Akt family of kinases and may be useful as potential anti-cancer agents when used either alone or in combination with compounds previously reported to inhibit c-Src kinase activity.
Electronic and Structural Distortions in Graphene Induced by Carbon Vacancies and Boron Doping

We present an ab initio—DFT/GGA—study on the structural and electronic distortions of modified graphene by the creation of vacancies, the inclusion of boron atoms, and the coexistence of both, by means of total energy and band structure calculations. In the case of coexistence of boron atoms and vacancy, the modified graphene presents spin polarization only when B atoms locate far from vacancy. Thus, when a boron atom fills single and divacancies, it suppresses the spin polarization of the charge density. In particular, when B atoms fill a divacancy, a new type of rearrangement occurs, where a stable BC4 unit is formed inducing important out-of-plane distortions to graphene. All these findings suggest that new chemical modifications to graphene and new types of vacancies can be used to modify its electronic properties.
Entrepreneurial Teams, Gender, and New Venture Survival: Contexts and Institutions

The link between new venture survival and the presence of founding teams is investigated, in particular the effect of the gender composition of teams. Furthermore, we study venture survival, gender, and institutional change. A unique longitudinal database is employed, covering a large number of Swedish ventures established during 6 specific years, 1930-2005. These data capture the initial gender diversity of start-ups. The contextualization of entrepreneurship involves situational and temporal boundaries, and we elaborate on contextual factors at different levels of analysis. Our results show that ventures founded by teams have a higher probability of surviving, but show no overall team gender homogeneity/heterogeneity effect. However, we find some support for the fact that ventures founded by all-female teams have lower survival chances. Nevertheless, the clearest negative effect is found for female solo start-ups. Furthermore, our results support the fact that institutional transformation may gradually have increased the likelihood of ventures founded by females to survive.
Conversion potential: a metric for evaluating search engine advertising performance

Purpose This research is based on the premise that current metrics for search engine advertising (SEA) are misleading and do not sufficiently allow managers to evaluate traffic and conversions simultaneously. This study aimed to conceptually develop and assess conversion potential (CvP) as a unifying construct for both measuring and evaluating the performance of SEA campaigns. Design/methodology/approach A data set of nearly seven million records covering almost three years of a multi-million-dollar keyword marketing campaign from a major US retailer was used to validate the construct of CvP. Findings Results empirically validate how CvP measures both campaign traffic and sales in SEA, using the optimization factor of ad rank, which is one of many possible factors. Research limitations/implications Although the data set is large and covers a lengthy period of time, it is limited to one company in the retail sector. Practical implications The research instantiates CvP as a metric for overall SEA account performance while demonstrating that it is a practical tool for future campaign planning. The metric simultaneously incorporates a sales ratio and a traffic ratio. Originality/value This is the first study to formalize and provide a working definition of CvP in the academic literature. The contribution is a theoretical and practical managerial framework to mutually evaluate, measure and make decisions about SEA efforts.
Some Warning Behaviors Discriminate Between School Shooters and Other Students of Concern

A typology of 8 warning behaviors for targeted violence— dynamic and superordinate patterns which may indicate accelerating risk of violence—were tested in a small sample of German school shooters (n 9) and students of concern (n 31) to see if any warning behaviors would be significantly different between the groups. Five warning behaviors were found to occur with significantly greater frequency in the school shooters and discriminate between the samples: pathway, fixation, identification, novel aggression, and last resort. All effect sizes were large ( .50). The findings are discussed in the context of school-shooting data from Germany and the United States and their implications for threat assessment.
The Nature of Urban Soils and Their Role in Ecological Restoration in Cities

Current and predicted trends indicate that an increasing proportion of the world’s population is living in urban and suburban places. The nature of the urban environment becomes an important factor if we are concerned with the restoration and preservation of biodiversity and ecosystems in and around cities. This article highlights the varied impacts of cities on soils and their implications for restoration planning and expectations of restoration “success. ” Urban soils exist in different historical and formational trajectories than their local nonurbanized counterparts due to direct anthropogenic disturbance and indirect environmental impacts from urbanization. Therefore, urban soils often exhibit altered physical, chemical, and biological characteristics in comparison to local nonurbanized soils. Several unique features of urban soils and urban ecosystems pose particular issues for ecological restoration or the improvement of degraded soil conditions in cities. The creation of novel soil types, conditions that promote invasion by non‐natives, the strong influence of past land use on soil properties, and the presence of strong interactions and alternative stable states set up unique difficulties for the restoration of urban soils. Soils in urban restorations are a medium that can be deliberately manipulated to improve site conditions or in the monitoring of soil conditions as indices of ecosystem status. Including an explicit role for strong manipulations of soils in urban ecosystems changes how we approach baselines, management, and reference conditions in urban ecological restoration. With an understanding of urban soil ecological knowledge, we can guide aspects of urban ecological restoration toward successful outcomes.
Examining the Association between Insomnia and Bowel Disorders in Canada: Is there a trend?

Objective: Sleep is critical for one’s health and well-being, including the prevention and/or management of certain chronic health conditions. If one suffers from insomnia (trouble falling asleep or staying asleep), he/she may be at risk of developing bowel disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome. To our knowledge, there is little information in Canada linking insomnia to bowel disorders. Our goal was use a population-based study to ascertain the association between insomnia and bowel disorders as well as to determine if a trend exists in the relationship. Methods: The data originated from the Canadian Community Health Survey Cycle 1.1. The outcome variable was whether an individual has a bowel disorder (yes/no response). The primary independent variable was individuals who reported having trouble sleeping most of the time (insomnia). Odds ratios were calculated to correlate the risk of suffering from a bowel disorder if one has insomnia. Results: We found there was a strong relationship between insomnia and bowel disorders (unadjusted odds ratio 3.73). This association remained statistically significant (adjusted odds ratio 2.79) even when adjusted for sex, age, self-perceived stress and the presence of chronic fatigue syndrome in our multivariate logistic regression model. The association had a step-wise trend such that the higher the frequency of trouble sleeping the greater the incidence of bowel disorder. Conclusions: We found a strong correlation between insomnia and the risk of suffering from a bowel disorder in the Canadian population. These results hint at the importance of obtaining quality sleep in managing bowel disorders.