Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Up‐regulation of granulomatous inflammation in interleukin‐6 knockout mice infected with Rhodococcus aurantiacus

After intravenous injection of Rhodococcus aurantiacus normal mice develop non‐necrotic granulomas, the formation of which is dependent on endogenous interferon‐γ (IFN‐γ). In the early phase of R. aurantiacus infection a high level of endogenous interleukin‐6 (IL‐6) is detected in the spleen extracts, though its importance is unknown. Using IL‐6 knockout (IL‐6−/−) mice, we studied the role of IL‐6 in granulomatous inflammation induced by R. aurantiacus. The size of granulomas generated in IL‐6−/− mice was significantly larger than that of wild‐type (IL‐6+/+) mice at 2 weeks postinjection (p.i). Moreover, central necrosis of the granuloma was observed in IL‐6−/− mice but not in IL‐6+/+ controls. Titres of endogenous IFN‐γ and tumour necrosis factor‐α (TNF‐α) were markedly increased in the spleens and livers of IL‐6−/− mice in comparison with IL‐6+/+ mice at days 1 through 3 p.i. In vivo administration of either an anti‐IFN‐γ monoclonal antibody (mAb) or anti‐TNF‐α mAb to IL‐6−/− mice reduced the number and size of granulomas, and prevented formation of necrotic granulomas. In addition, the production of endogenous IFN‐γ and TNF‐α in the early phase of R. aurantiacus infection by IL‐6−/− mice was suppressed by treatment with recombinant IL‐6 (rIL‐6). This suppression of IFN‐γ and TNF‐α production was followed by a reduction in the number and size of central necrotic granulomas at 2 weeks p.i. These findings suggest that overproduction of IFN‐γ and TNF‐α induces central necrotic granuloma formation in IL‐6−/− mice, and that IL‐6 down‐regulates granulomatous inflammation reaction in response to R. aurantiacus infection by modulating production of IFN‐γ and TNF‐α.
Microbial ecology of plaque in rats with naturally occurring gingivitis

The microbial ecology of adherent plaque was investigated in relation to the pathological findings of gingivitis in plaque-susceptible rats. Plaque developed in the gingiva of the lower incisor in plaque-susceptible rats, but not in plaque-resistant rats, after they were fed a commercial powder diet. With increase in plaque volume, the total counts of bacteria increased 10(9) to 10(11)/g. In the first 3 months, Bacteroides species increased and became the predominant population. Streptococcus species also increased at the same time. After 9 months, Fusobacterium species and oral Treponema species were recognized in increasing numbers. The anaerobic bacteria increased in proportion with the progression of plaque development. Bacteroides intermedius, Fusobacterium nucleatum, Streptococcus salivarius, and other species were isolated. Acute gingivitis was observed within 3 months, and subacute-chronic gingivitis was observed between 2 and 12 months. These findings suggest that proportional changes in the gingival plaque flora may uniquely contribute to the development of gingival inflammation in this experimental model.
Physicians’ perceptions of adherence to prophylactic clotting factor infusions

Summary. The objective of this study was to investigate whether paediatric Haemophilia Treatment Centre (HTC) physicians are concerned about poor adherence to prophylaxis and if such concerns decrease prescription of prophylaxis in patients with haemophilia. Fifty‐nine HTC physicians completed a written survey based on self‐report of individual practice. Fifty‐one (86%) prescribed prophylaxis on a routine basis. Overall, 32 (54%) believed that 76–100% of the patients on prophylaxis infuse ≥80% of the recommended prophylaxis doses and 25 (42%) believed that 51–75% of the patients infuse ≥80% of the doses. Physicians utilize multi‐modal methods to make this assessment. Forty‐eight (81%) respondents identified that perceptions of patient non‐adherence decrease their prescription of prophylaxis. In fact, 30% decided not to prescribe prophylaxis for individual patients within the last year secondary to concerns about non‐adherence. Strategies should be developed to improve the implementation of prophylaxis.
Thioautotrophic bacterial endosymbionts are degraded by enzymatic digestion during starvation: Case study of two lucinids Codakia orbicularis and C. orbiculata

The Caribbean bivalves Codakia orbicularis (Linné, 1758) and C. orbiculata (Montagu, 1808) live in seagrass beds of Thalassia testudinum and harbor intracellular sulfur‐oxidizing gamma‐proteobacteria. These bacterial symbionts fix CO2 via the Calvin Benson cycle and provide organic compounds to the bivalve. During experimentally induced starvation, no reduced sulfur compounds and no organic particle food are available; the symbionts could be considered as the sole nutrient source of the host bivalve. A previous study has shown that the intracellular bacterial population decreased considerably during starvation and that bacterial endosymbionts were not released by the bivalves. In this study, the activity of two lysosomal marker enzymes (acid phosphatase and arylsulfatase) was detected using cytochemical experiments coupled with energy‐dispersive X‐ray transmission electron microscopy during sulfide and organic particle starvation. The degradation of bacterial endosymbionts began after 2 weeks of starvation in C. orbiculata and after 3 weeks in C. orbicularis. Degradation processes seem to be continuous over several months and could be responsible for the disappearance of the bacterial endosymbionts within the gills during starvation. These data suggest that the host use symbionts as a nutrient source to survive a hunger crisis. The carbon transfer from the symbionts to the host could be flexible and could consist in transfer of organic matter, “milking,” under normal feeding conditions and digestion of the symbionts under starved conditions. Microsc. Res. Tech. 78:173–179, 2015. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Analyzing the Determinants of Cash Holdings of Small and Medium-Sized Entities in Nigeria

Purpose: This paper aims to report the results of an empirical investigation on the determinants of the cash holdings for small and medium-sized entities. The paper considers the different explanatory factors of SMEs cash holdings for a sample of Nigerian SMEs. SMEs are springboard of the Nigerian economy contributing to gross domestic product, employment generation and industrialization.Methodology: the study employed panel data regression analysis using secondary data on a sample of 311 Nigerian SMEs for the period 2007 - 2013. &Result: The finding which is robust of endogeneity shows statistically significant association between cash conversion cycle, account receivables period, return on assets and board size with SMEs cash holdings. Also found a significant relationship between cash holdings with firm size, leverage, growth opportunities and firm age. &Implication: Thus, the result of the study indicates that Nigerian SMEs with shorter cash conversion cycle and low growth opportunities hold more cash. & Similarly, SMEs with small board of directors accumulate large cash balance. & Further, SMEs with higher profitability keep large cash balance. & This study contributes to existing literature on the determinants of SMEs cash holdings more specifically in developing economies. & However, this study is limited to non-financial and non-service SMEs. & Future study should extend the investigation to financial and services firms. Similarly the structure of the paper and scope of further study may be extended to include the effects of more corporate governance mechanisms.
Fast and Exact Fiber Surfaces for Tetrahedral Meshes

Isosurfaces are fundamental geometrical objects for the analysis and visualization of volumetric scalar fields. Recent work has generalized them to bivariate volumetric fields with fiber surfaces, the pre-image of polygons in range space. However, the existing algorithm for their computation is approximate, and is limited to closed polygons. Moreover, its runtime performance does not allow instantaneous updates of the fiber surfaces upon user edits of the polygons. Overall, these limitations prevent a reliable and interactive exploration of the space of fiber surfaces. This paper introduces the first algorithm for the exact computation of fiber surfaces in tetrahedral meshes. It assumes no restriction on the topology of the input polygon, handles degenerate cases and better captures sharp features induced by polygon bends. The algorithm also allows visualization of individual fibers on the output surface, better illustrating their relationship with data features in range space. To enable truly interactive exploration sessions, we further improve the runtime performance of this algorithm. In particular, we show that it is trivially parallelizable and that it scales nearly linearly with the number of cores. Further, we study acceleration data-structures both in geometrical domain and range space and we show how to generalize interval trees used in isosurface extraction to fiber surface extraction. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm over previous work, both in terms of accuracy and running time, with up to two orders of magnitude speedups. This improvement enables interactive edits of range polygons with instantaneous updates of the fiber surface for exploration purpose. A VTK-based reference implementation is provided as additional material to reproduce our results.
Diversification Strikes Again: Evidence from Global Equity Factors

The benefits of country diversification are well-established. This article shows that the same benefits extend to equity factors, such as value, size, momentum, investment, and profitability. Specifically, country factor portfolios reflect both common variation, which we define as the global factor, and local variation. On average, a US investor could enjoy a 30% reduction in portfolio volatility by investing globally. We also document three other properties of equity factors. Like major asset classes, diversification benefits may not been uniform across regions, and factor portfolios of different countries tend to be more correlated during bear stock markets. However, unlike asset classes, the correlations of factor portfolios across countries have not been increasing over the last two decades, making global equity factors particularly desirable additions to a portfolio.
Gabapentin Treatment of Neurogenic Overactive Bladder

Objective: Detrusor overactivity is a well-recognized and distressing medical condition affecting both men and women, with a significant prevalence in the population and with a higher incidence rate in people older than 70 years. This pathological condition is characterized by irritative symptoms: urinary urgency, with or without incontinence, and urinary frequency, often seriously compromising the quality of life of the people who have it. The complaint of these symptoms is defined by the International Continence Society (www.continet.org) as "overactive bladder. " Many neurological patients experience irritative symptoms of the lower urinary tract related to their disease, and this condition drastically limits their social life. Various drugs have been introduced in therapy protocols to treat neurogenic detrusor overactivity; however, in many cases, the outcomes of these treatments have proven to be unsatisfactory. This fact is probably related to the incomplete understanding of the pathophysiological aspects of detrusor overactivity. Recent studies suggest the possible role in the detrusor overactivity pathogenesis of bladder receptors, afferent pathways, and spinal cord interneurons; consequently, the modulation of bladder receptor and/or spinal cord centers activity has been proposed as a possible approach to control involuntary detrusor contractions, using drugs capable of acting on bladder afferent pathways. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of gabapentin, an anticonvulsive agent used by neurologists in the treatment of epilepsy and neurogenic pain, in the treatment of detrusor overactivity of neurogenic origin. Methods: Sixteen patients affected by neurogenic overactive bladder were enrolled in the study. The clinical outcomes were assessed by symptomatic score evaluations, voiding diary, and urodynamic test before and after 31 days of gabapentin treatment. Results: The preliminary results showed significant modifications of urodynamic indexes, particularly of the detrusor overactivity, whereas the symptomatic score evaluation and the voiding diary data demonstrated a significant lowering of the irritative symptoms. Furthermore, we did not record significant adverse effects and no patient interrupted the drug treatment. Conclusions: These data support the rationale that detrusor overactivity may be controlled by modulating the afferent input from the bladder and the excitability of the sacral reflex center and suggest a novel method to treat overactive bladder patients.
Approximate Bayesian computation for estimating rate constants in biochemical reaction systems

To study the dynamic properties of complex biological systems, mathematical modeling has been used widely in systems biology. Apart from the well-established knowledge for modeling techniques, there are still some difficulties while understanding the dynamics in system biology. One of the major challenges is how to infer unknown parameters in mathematical models based on the experimentally observed data sets. This is extremely difficult when the experimental data are sparse and the biological systems are stochastic. To tackle this problem, in this work we revised one computation method for inference called approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) and conducted extensive computing tests to examine the influence of a number of factors on the performance of ABC. Based on simulation results, we found that the number of stochastic simulations and step size of the observation data have substantial influence on the estimation accuracy. We applied the ABC method to two stochastic systems to test the efficiency and effectiveness of the ABC and obtained promising approximation for the unknown parameters in the systems. This work raised a number of important issues for designing effective inference methods for estimating rate constants in biochemical reaction systems.
DSM generation on the shade of tree area of aerial photogrammetry

In aerial photogrammetry, a shooting area is occasionally covered by tree. The shade of trees prevent us from obtaining spatial information. The texture and color of the tree can be so homogenous that it is difficult to accurately extract the feature points. This problem makes it difficult to generate a DSM using aerial photogrammetry. This study attempted to determine a method for improving the accuracy of 3D information obtained from under a shade of tree. We used photos that were shot from under the tree, and combined scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) and structure from motion (SfM) algorithms to conduct image-based modelling through the reconstruction of spatial geometry to produce a 3D point cloud. Data fusion was conducted to generate an entire DSM by integrating point cloud into a DSM map by using aerial photogrammetry. We assessed the accuracy of a DSM of the entire study area to extract feature points from study area as the control points in a data fusion of the point cloud and the DSM produced by aerial photogrammetry.
Identification of novel variants in transforming growth factor‐beta 1 (TGFB1) gene and association analysis with bone mineral density

Human transforming growth factor‐beta1 (TGFB1) is a family of polypeptides that regulate cell growth, cell differentiation, and cell function as a multifunctional regulator of cellular activity. TGFB1 is produced by osteoblasts and stored in substantial amounts in the bone matrix, which is an important regulator of both skeletal development and homeostasis of bone metabolism. In the present study, we identified four new polymorphisms in TGFB1 and examined whether these polymorphisms are risk factors for osteoporosis. We have sequenced all exons including in the promoter region up to –1,800bp to identify additional genetic polymorphisms in TGFB1. Four novel polymorphisms were newly identified: one in 5' region (g.14129555underscore;14129557dupAGG), one in promoter region (g.14128838C>T), and two in intron (g.14106505G>A and g.14106215G>A). Two known SNPs (g.14128554C>T and g.14127139T>C) were also confirmed. The frequencies of each SNP were 0.479 (g.14129555underscore;14129557dupAGG), 0.007 (g.14128838C>T), 0.478 (g.14128554C>T), 0.476 (g.14127139T>C), 0.016 (g.14106505G>A), and 0.004 (g.14106215G>A) in the Korean population (n=1,885), respectively. Haplotypes and their frequencies were estimated by EM algorithm, and linkage disequilibrium coefficients (∣D'∣ and r2) between polymorphism pairs were calculated. We analyzed genetic associations of TGFB1 polymorphisms and haplotypes with spinal bone mineral density (BMD) value of 433 postmenopausal Korean women. By statistical analysis, we could not find any associations with spinal BMD. The information from this study of the critical TGFB1 would be useful for genetic studies of other diseases. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Study of substrate noise and techniques for minimization

This paper presents a study of substrate noise effects on analog circuits and a technique for minimizing substrate noise. Measured data of a 0.25 /spl mu/m CMOS test chip reveals that substrate noise couples through circuit asymmetries and nonlinearity, degrading analog circuit performance. An active substrate noise shaping circuit implemented on the same test chip demonstrates over 10 dB improvement in SNDR in the 0-20 kHz band of a delta-sigma modulator for substrate noise generated by an inverter array.
Population based study of hospitalised fall related injuries in older people

Objective: This study aimed to identify the distribution of fall related injury in older people hospitalised for acute treatment of injury, in order to direct priorities for prevention. Setting: A follow up study was conducted in the Brisbane Metropolitan Region of Australia during 1998. Methods: Medical records of patients aged 65 years and over hospitalised with a fall related injury were reviewed. Demographic and injury data were analysed and injury rates calculated using census data as the denominator for the population at risk. Results: From age 65, hospitalised fall related injury rates increased exponentially for both males and females, with age adjusted incidence rates twice as high in women than men. Fractures accounted for 89% of admissions, with over half being to the hip. Males were significantly more likely than females to have fractured their skull, face, or ribs (p<0.01). While females were significantly more likely than males to have fractured their upper or lower limbs (p<0.01), the difference between proportions of males and females fracturing their hip was not significant. Males were more likely than females (p<0.01) to have fall related head injuries (13% of admissions). Compared with hip fractures, head injuries contributed significantly to the burden of injury in terms of severity, need for intensive care, and excess mortality. Conclusions: The frequency and impact of hip fractures warrants continued emphasis in falls program interventions for both males and females to prevent this injury. However, interventions that go beyond measures to slow and protect against bone loss are also needed to prevent fall related head injuries.
Band Engineered Charge Trap Layer for highly Reliable MLC Flash Memory

A novel multi-level charge trap flash memory with band engineering concept on the trap layer is firstly demonstrated. The engineered band structure, Si<sub>3</sub>N<sub>4</sub>/Al<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub>/Si<sub>3</sub>N<sub>4</sub> (NAN) was adopted as a trap layer in place of single Si<sub>3</sub>N<sub>4</sub> layer in TANOS structure (Y. Shin et al., 2005). Compared to the reference structure of single Si<sub>3</sub>N<sub>4</sub> trap layer, charge trap flash memory based on NAN trap layer shows larger memory window (~10 V), which is ideal for multi-level application. In addition, highly reliable operation is obtained due to lower program/erase voltages, superior endurance, and smaller room/high temperature pre-/post-cycling charge loss (DeltaVth <0.5 V).
Optimizing BRDF orientations for the manipulation of anisotropic highlights

This paper introduces a system for the direct editing of highlights produced by anisotropic BRDFs, which we call anisotropic highlights. We first provide a comprehensive analysis of the link between the direction of anisotropy and the shape of highlight curves for arbitrary object surfaces. The gained insights provide the required ingredients to infer BRDF orientations from a prescribed highlight tangent field. This amounts to a non‐linear optimization problem, which is solved at interactive framerates during manipulation. Taking inspiration from sculpting software, we provide tools that give the impression of manipulating highlight curves while actually modifying their tangents. Our solver produces desired highlight shapes for a host of lighting environments and anisotropic BRDFs.
Handgrip Strength and Malnutrition (Undernutrition) in Hospitalized Versus Nonhospitalized Children Aged 6–14 Years

Background: Diagnosing undernutrition in hospitalized pediatric populations is crucial to provide timely nutrition interventions. Handgrip strength (HGS), a measurement of muscle function, is a reliable indicator of undernutrition. However, limited research exists on HGS in hospitalized pediatric patients. The primary aim of this study was to determine if HGS differed between hospitalized children within 48 hours of admission and nonhospitalized children. A secondary purpose was to describe the association of HGS with height, weight, body mass index (BMI), mid upper arm circumference (MUAC), activity level, disease severity, nutrition risk, and nutrition intervention. Methods: One hundred nine hospitalized and 110 nonhospitalized patients aged 6–14 years participated in this cross-sectional nonequivalent control group design study. Weight, height, MUAC, and HGS were measured within 48 hours of hospital admission for the hospitalized group or immediately following a well-child visit for the control group. Results: Based on analysis of covariance, the HGS was estimated to be 12.4 ± 0.37 kgF (mean ± SE) for hospitalized subjects and 13.1 ± 0.37 for nonhospitalized subjects (P = .2053). HGS was associated with age (P < .0001), height (P < .0001), dominant hand (P < .0001), and MUAC z scores (P = .0462). Conclusion: HGS was not significantly different between hospitalized and nonhospitalized participants, although anthropometric measurements were similar between groups. A strong relationship was demonstrated between HGS and BMI and MUAC z scores. Further research is needed that examines serial HGS measurements, feasibility in hospitalized patients, and the association of HGS measurements and nutrition risk.