Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multispectral Plasmon Induced Transparency in a Defective Metasurface Plasmonic Nanostructure

The investigation of plasmon induced transparency (PIT) resonances is performed in a system based on defective and complete silver nanostrips. The response of metasurface systems to electromagnetic fields under normal incidence is endowed by unique features, including some exquisite spatial phenomena. These phenomena are embodied in confined light-matter hybrid modes where the defective silver nanostrip excites superradiant dipole and quadrupole modes, resulting in a PIT window. Moreover, multispectral PIT resonances are observed, which involves quadrupole mode as superradiant to excite the proximity nanostrip. It can reveal much about the defective metasurface structure, such as exact tuning of the gap distance between these two nanostrips, variation in defect parameters and modulating in electric polarization angles of excitation. Still, our research realizes multiple PIT resonances in one nanostructure, which may have interesting applications of plasmonic switching devices in highly integrated circuits.
Investigation of speed sensors accuracy for process and aging compensation

Process, Voltage, Temperature and Aging variations have become an important issue for advanced technology nodes and thus very accurate speed sensors have become necessity for adaptive compensation schemes. This paper presents experimental results of different speed sensors that can be used for process and aging compensation. Replica of critical path in ring oscillator and a dedicated design of a sub-set functional critical path are compared with regard to microprocessor speed for reference. Measurements and simulations are performed on large sample sets for varied range of temperatures. Accuracy of speed compared to reference circuit to be monitored is discussed.
Constructing Domain-Specific Search Engines With No Programming

We propose a demonstration of myDIG (my Domain-specific Insight Graphs), a system that allows non-technical domain experts, including those with no programming experience, to construct a domain-specific search engine over a raw corpus of webpages. myDIG has been developed and refined over multiple years under the DARPA MEMEX program, and has undergone rigorous user testing with actual domain experts from investigative agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). All components of myDIG are open-source, and the product of fundamental research.
Party Competition and Emotive Rhetoric

When do parties use emotive rhetoric to appeal to voters? In this article, we argue that politicians are more likely to employ positive affect (valence) in their rhetoric to appeal to voters when parties are not ideologically distinct and when there is uncertainty about public preferences. To test these propositions, our article uses well-established psycholinguistic affect dictionaries to generate scores from three time series of political text: British party manifestos (1900-2015) and annual party leaders’ speeches (1977-2014) as well as U.S. Presidents’ State of the Union addresses (1880-2016). Our findings corroborate our expectations and have important implications for the study of party competition by illuminating the role of valence in the way politicians communicate their policies.
Edinburgh Research Explorer Effects of pirbuterol and sodium nitroprusside on pulmonary haemodynamics in hypoxic cor pulmonale

The acute haemodynamic effects of oral pirbuterol (a beta-agonist) were contrasted with those of sodium nitroprusside, a vasodilator, in six patients with hypoxic chronic bronchitis and emphysema. Sodium nitroprusside (1-5 mg/kg intravenously) reduced mean pulmonary arterial pressure and total pulmonary vascular resistance significantly (p <0-01) without change in cardiac output or right ventricular ejection fraction, measured by radionuclide ventriculography. Oral pirbuterol (22 5mg) produced a greater reduction in total pulmonary vascular resistance than sodium nitroprusUniversity of Edinburgh, Edinburgh W MAcNEE, MB, MRCP, senior registrar, department of respiratory medicine C G WATHEN, MB, MRCP, clinical lecturer, department of medicine W J HANNAN, PHD, senior physicist, department of medical physics D C FLENLEY, PHD, FRCPED, professor, department of respiratory medicine A L MUIR, MD, FRCPED, reader, department of medicine Correspondence to: Dr W MacNee, Department of Respiratory Medicine, City Hospital, Edinburgh EH1O 5SB. side, largely as a result of increasing cardiac output. Right ventricular ejection fraction also increased significantly after pirbuterol (p <0 01). Pirbuterol in a lower dosage (15 mg by mouth) in six further patients with hypoxic chronic bronchitis and emphysema produced similar changes in total pulmonary vascular resistance and right ventricular ejection fraction. Nine of the patients who were studied acutely thereafter received pirbuterol 15 mg thrice daily for six weeks, which produced a significant fall in systolic pulmonary arterial pressure and a rise in right ventricular ejection fraction (p <0 01), without a significant fall in arterial oxygen tension. Pirbuterol acts as a vasodilator on the pulmonary circulation in these patients and may in addition improve right ventricular performance by an inotropic action.
Evaluation of treatment with a combination of azathioprine and prednisone in dogs with meningoencephalomyelitis of undetermined etiology: 40 cases (2000-2007).

OBJECTIVE To evaluate outcome of treatment with a combination of azathioprine and prednisone in dogs with meningoencephalomyelitis of undetermined etiology (MUE). DESIGN Retrospective case series. ANIMALS 40 dogs. PROCEDURES Medical records of dogs with MUE treated with prednisone and azathioprine were evaluated with regard to response, survival, and adverse effects. RESULTS All dogs improved during treatment. Twenty-four (60%) dogs had a complete response (resolution of clinical signs), and the other 16 (40%) dogs had a partial response (improvement but not resolution of signs). Most dogs that achieved a complete response remained neurologically normal. Six dogs remained stable after a partial response. Eleven dogs had a relapse of clinical signs. Twenty dogs died during the study period, 18 survived, and 2 were lost to follow-up monitoring. Median survival time was 1,834 days (range, 50 to 2,469 days). Survival time was significantly longer for dogs that had a complete response than for those that did not. Survival time was significantly shorter for dogs that relapsed than for those that did not. The most common adverse effects included weight gain, thinning of the hair, and elevated activities of liver enzymes, all of which may have been attributed to concurrent corticosteroid administration. Less common adverse effects included diabetes mellitus, keratoconjunctivitis sicca, mammary gland adenoma, lymphoma, and hepatic masses. CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE Azathioprine appeared to be a safe and potentially effective adjunct to prednisone for treatment of dogs with MUE. Prospective, double-blinded, controlled studies with histologic confirmation are warranted to substantiate these findings.
Identifying Relevant Literature for Precision Medicine Using Deep Neural Networks

The aim of precision medicine is to select the best treatments for different patient groups, considering individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle. Regarding genetic variability, valuable information about variants and how they affect protein-protein interactions is available in the scientific literature. Extracting and curating this information in an efficient manner requires the application of text mining algorithms. In this paper, we describe deep learning classifiers for selecting, from the literature, documents containing information regarding the impact of genetic mutations on protein-protein interactions. Crossvalidation results in the BioCreative VI Precision Medicine task corpus reached a precision of 0,698, recall of 0,735 and f-score of 0,715. Keywords—document triage; gene mutations; protein interactions; deep learning; long short term memory networks
The hidden half: ecology and evolution of cryptobenthic fishes on coral reefs

Teleost fishes are the most diverse group of vertebrates on Earth. On tropical coral reefs, their species richness exceeds 6000 species; one tenth of total vertebrate biodiversity. A large proportion of this diversity is composed of cryptobenthic reef fishes (CRFs): bottom‐dwelling, morphologically or behaviourally cryptic species typically less than 50 mm in length. Yet, despite their diversity and abundance, these fishes are both poorly defined and understood. Herein we provide a new quantitative definition and synthesise current knowledge on the diversity, distribution and life history of CRFs. First, we use size distributions within families to define 17 core CRF families as characterised by the high prevalence (>10%) of small‐bodied species (<50 mm). This stands in strong contrast to 42 families of large reef fishes, in which virtually no small‐bodied species have evolved. We posit that small body size has allowed CRFs to diversify at extremely high rates, primarily by allowing for fine partitioning of microhabitats and facilitation of allopatric reproductive isolation; yet, we are far from understanding and documenting the biodiversity of CRFs. Using rates of description since 1758, we predict that approximately 30 new species of cryptobenthic species will be described per year until 2050 (approximately twice the annual rate compared to large fishes). Furthermore, we predict that by the year 2031, more than half of the described coral reef fish biodiversity will consist of CRFs. These fishes are the ‘hidden half’ of vertebrate biodiversity on coral reefs. Notably, global geographic coverage and spatial resolution of quantitative data on CRF communities is uniformly poor, which further emphasises the remarkable reservoir of biodiversity that is yet to be discovered. Although small body size may have enabled extensive diversification within CRF families, small size also comes with a suite of ecological challenges that affect fishes' capacities to feed, survive and reproduce; we identify a range of life‐history adaptations that have enabled CRFs to overcome these limitations. In turn, these adaptations bestow a unique socio‐ecological role on CRFs, which includes a key role in coral reef trophodynamics by cycling trophic energy provided by microscopic prey to larger consumers. Although small in body size, the ecology and evolutionary history of CRFs may make them a critical component of coral‐reef food webs; yet our review also shows that these fishes are highly susceptible to a variety of anthropogenic disturbances. Understanding the consequences of these changes for CRFs and coral reef ecosystems will require us to shed more light on this frequently overlooked but highly diverse and abundant guild of coral reef fishes.
The High Prevalence of Poor Physical Health and Unhealthy Lifestyle Behaviours in Individuals with Severe Mental Illness

Recent mental health care policy has addressed the need for health care professionals to consider the physical health of consumers. Mental health nurses are particularly well-placed for this role. To provide mental health nurses with practical information, this narrative review summarises evidence from recent research on the physical health of individuals with Serious Mental Illness (SMI). In those with SMI, the international prevalence of obesity, the metabolic syndrome, diabetes mellitus, symptoms of cardiovascular disease, and respiratory disease all exceed that of the general population by at least two times, and HIV prevalence may be increased by as much as eight times. This increased prevalence of chronic disease may be largely responsible for an increased risk of death of up to five times, resulting in as much as 30 years of potential life lost. Of particular concern, the recent evidence suggests that for physical health and increased mortality, the gap between individuals with SMI and the general population is worsening. Unhealthy lifestyle behaviours undoubtedly play a role in the development of poor physical health and chronic disease, and the present review indicates that low physical activity, poor diet, smoking, alcohol and substance abuse, and risky sexual behaviour are common in individuals with SMI. This narrative review demonstrates that the prevalence of poor physical health and health behaviours in people with SMI far exceed that observed in the general population, and reinforces the urgent need for mental health nurses to address physical health concerns in patients.
THE CONFORMATIONAL SPACE FOR PROTEIN FOLDING WITH SEQUENTIAL MONTE CARLO By

Computational methods for protein structure prediction from amino acid sequence are of vital importance in modern applications, for example protein design in biomedicine. Efficient sampling of conformations according to a given energy function remains a bottleneck, yet is a vital step for energy-based structure prediction methods. While the Protein Data Bank of experimentally determined 3-D protein structures has steadily increased in size, structure predictions for new proteins tend to be unreliable in the amino acid segments where there is low sequence similarity with known structures. In this paper we introduce a new method for building such segments of protein structures, inspired by sequential Monte Carlo methods. We apply our method to examples of real 3-D structure predictions and demonstrate its promise for improving low confidence segments. We also provide applications to the prediction of reconstructed segments in known structures, and to the assessment of energy function accuracy. We find that our method is able to produce conformations that have both low energies and good coverage of the conformational space, and hence can be a useful tool for protein design and structure prediction.
Dual Role of the Lymphocytic Choriomeningitis Virus Intergenic Region in Transcription Termination and Virus Propagation

ABSTRACT Each genome segment of the prototypic arenavirus lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV), encodes two genes in ambisense orientation, separated by an intergenic region (IGR). The 3′ ends of subgenomic viral mRNAs have been mapped to a stem-loop structure within the IGR, suggesting structure-dependent transcription termination. We have studied the role of the LCMV IGR by using a minigenome (MG) rescue system based on RNA analogues of the short genome segment. An ambisense MG coding for chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT) and green fluorescent protein reporter genes instead of the nucleoprotein and glycoprotein open reading frames, respectively, served as a template for synthesis of full-length anti-MG (aMG) replicate and subgenomic size mRNA for reporter gene expression. An analogous MG without IGR was amplified by the virus polymerase with equal efficiency, but subgenomic mRNA was undetectable. Reporter gene expression from IGR-deficient aMG CAT-sense RNA of genomic length was approximately 5-fold less efficient than that from subgenomic CAT mRNA derived from an IGR-containing MG, but at least 100-fold more efficient than that from a T7 RNA polymerase transcript with the same sequence. Therefore, in the absence of IGR-mediated transcription termination, a fraction of full-length aMG RNA appears to behave as bona fide mRNA. Unexpectedly, MGs without IGR were dramatically impaired in their ability to passage reporter gene activity via infectious virus-like particles. These data suggest that the LCMV IGR serves individual functions in transcription termination for enhanced gene expression and in the virus assembly and/or budding, which are required for the efficient propagation of LCMV infectivity.
Impact of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection on the progression of liver fibrosis in hepatitis C virus infected patients

Objectives: To compare the rate of hepatic fibrosis progression in hepatitis C virus (HCV) infected and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-HCV coinfected patients, and to identify factors that may influence fibrosis progression. Patients and methods: A total of 153 HCV infected and 55 HCV-HIV coinfected patients were identified from two London hospitals. Eligible patients had known dates of HCV acquisition, were HCV-RNA positive, and had undergone a liver biopsy, which was graded using the Ishak score. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to identify factors associated with fibrosis progression rate and the development of advanced fibrosis (stages 3 and 4). Results: The estimated median fibrosis progression rate was 0.17 units/year (interquartile range (IQR) 0.10–0.25) in HIV-HCV coinfected and 0.13 (IQR 0.07–0.17) in HCV monoinfected patients (p=0.01), equating to an estimated time from HCV infection to cirrhosis of 23 and 32 years, respectively. Older age at infection (p<0.001), HIV positivity (p=0.019), higher alanine aminotransferase (ALT) level (p=0.039), and higher inflammatory activity (p<0.001) on first biopsy were all independently associated with more rapid fibrosis progression. ALT was correlated with histological index (r=0.35, p<0.001). A CD4 cell count ⩽250×106/l was independently associated with advanced liver fibrosis (odds ratio 5.36 (95% confidence interval 1.26–22.79)) and was also correlated with a higher histological index (r=−0.42, p=0.002). Conclusion: HIV infection modifies the natural history of HCV by accelerating the rate of fibrosis progression by 1.4 fold, and the development of advanced fibrosis threefold. A low CD4 cell count was independently associated with advanced disease and correlated with higher histological index, which suggests that early antiretroviral therapy may be of benefit in slowing HCV progression in coinfected patients.
The Aborted Microspores (AMS)-Like Gene Is Required for Anther and Microspore Development in Pepper (Capsicum annuum L.)

Pepper (Capsicum annuum L.) is an economically important vegetable crop worldwide. Although many genes associated with anther and pollen development have been identified, little is known about the mechanism of pollen abortion in pepper. Here, we identified and isolated two putative aborted microspore (AMS) isoforms from pepper flowers: CaAMS1 and CaAMS2. Sequence analysis showed that CaAMS2 was generated by retention of the fourth intron in CaAMS1 pre-mRNA. CaAMS1 encodes a putative protein with a basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) domain belonging to the MYC subfamily of bHLH transcription factors, and it is localized to the nucleus. Truncated CaAMS2-1 and CaAMS2-2 are produced by alternative splicing. Quantitative real-time PCR analysis showed that CaAMS (referred to CaAMS1 and CaAMS2-2) was preferentially expressed in stamens and its expression level gradually decreases with flower development. RNA in situ hybridization analysis showed that CaAMS is strongly expressed in the tapetum at the tetrad and uninucleate stages. Downregulation of CaAMS led to partial shortened filaments, shriveled, indehiscent stamens and abortive pollens in pepper flowers. Several genes involved in pollen exine formation were downregulated in defective CaAMS-silenced anthers. Thus, CaAMS seems to play an important role in pepper tapetum and pollen development by regulating a complex genetic network.
Evaluation of patients with coronary artery disease

Summary Quantification of myocardial perfusion scintigraphy is often performed to assist physicians in detecting coronary artery disease (CAD). Modern software and hardware packages provide improvements able to shorten scan time and/or reduce administered activity, without compromising image quality in radionuclide myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI). Recently, multifocal collimators were introduced with dedicated reconstruction software, named IQ-SPECT, able to shorten considerably scan time. The aim of our study was to compare this new protocol to the already validated standard ones. Patients, methods: We enrolled 43 patients with suspected or diagnosed CAD. All patients underwent a two-days protocol radionuclide myocardial perfusion scan at rest and after a standard stress test (exercise or dipyridamole) after administering 99mTc-tetrofosmin. Images were acquired on a 2-head gamma camera and reconstructed with attenuation correction. All the images were scored using a 17-segments model by three experienced physicians, blind to clinical data and to acquisition and processing modality. Results, conclusion: No significant differences were recorded in perfusion scores on paired t-test and Wilcoxon among the full-time images reconstructed with standard protocol or IQSPECT, both overall on a 17-segments evaluation and when considering different territories of distribution. MPI with IQ-SPECT protocol can be acquired at about a quarter scan time without disagreement compared to full time scan acquisition performed with standard protocols.
Risk and countermeasure analysis of network-based global airplane tracking system

The mysterious disappearance of MH370 flight is incredible in current air traffic management (ATM) with the rapid development of modern communication technology. In this paper, the vulnerabilities of communication technology and safety management on airplane tracking are explored through several existing methods and means. Then the proposals, for airborne communication, navigation, and surveillance system and safety management from internal and external factors, are put forward respectively to improve the ability of emergency response and disaster recovery for flight.
Comparison of the protective effects of melatonin and amifostine on radiation-induced epiphyseal injury

Purpose: We compared the effects of amifostine and melatonin in preventing radiation-induced epiphyseal growth plate injury in rats. Materials and methods: Four-week-old (65–85 g), growing male Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly assigned to receive radiation alone, at 25 Gy in three fractions (group R), or this dose of fractionated radiation proceeded by prophylactic amifostine 200 mg/kg i.p. (group A), melatonin 15 mg/kg i.p. (group M), or amifostine + melatonin (group AM). The right rear extremity of each animal was irradiated while the contralateral leg was shielded from radiation, as a control. Bone growth based on the length of the tibia, femur, and overall limb was calculated 6 weeks after the treatment. Results: In groups R, A, M, and AM, the mean growth loss (GL) for the overall limb was 56.9 ± 8.1%, 46.8 ± 7.7%, 36.6 ± 4.3%, and 38.5 ± 5.1%, respectively. The limb length discrepancies (LLD) in groups R, A, M, and AM were 13.8 ± 1.4%, 10.5 ± 0.3%, 7.4 ± 0.7%, and 8.8 ± 1.1%, respectively. Differences in LLD were significant between each treatment group and group R (range: p = 0.0001–0.001). Differences in either of mean GL and LLD were not significant between groups M and AM; however both of these groups had significantly less GL and LLD than group A. Conclusions: We observed a superior radioprotective function of melatonin over amifostine in preventing radiation-induced epiphyseal growth plate injury, without any increase in radioprotective effect by adding amifostine to melatonin.