Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effects of operant heart rate conditioning on cognitive elaboration and attitude change.

A psychophysiological investigation was conducted to assess the relationships among heart rate, affect-laden thought processes, and attitudes. Twenty subjects were trained for five days to raise and lower heart rate by means of a discriminative operant conditioning procedure. On the fifth day, communications that advocated positions with which undergraduates disagreed were presented during a raised, lowered, and basal (unaltered) heart rate trial. Results revealed that the heart rate conditioning procedure produced specific changes in heart rate, and affected the counterarguing (critical processing) to and acceptance of the persuasive communications; counterarguing and resistance to persuasion were greater during raised heart rate trials than during lowered heart rate trials. These findings are consistent with and suggest an extension of the Laceys' hypothesis concerning cardiac activity and cognitive elaboration, and provide evidence of the influence of affect-laden thought processes on evaluative reactions.
Intracellular killing of Listeria monocytogenes in the J774.1 macrophage-like cell line and the lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-resistant mutant LPS1916 cell line defective in the generation of reactive oxygen intermediates after LPS treatment

Listeria monocytogenes is a facultative intracellular pathogen and survives within phagocytic cells by escaping from phagosomes into the cytoplasm. It has been reported that, in vivo, L. monocytogenes is effectively eliminated through cell-mediated immunity, especially by macrophages which have been immunologically activated by cytokines such as gamma interferon (IFN-gamma). However, this killing mechanism for L. monocytogenes and the role of macrophage activation in this bacterial killing are unclear. We demonstrated the listericidal effect of oxidative radicals induced by lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and IFN-gamma, using a macrophage-like cell line, J774.1, and a mutant cell line, LPS1916. LPS1916 cells do not exhibit normal generation of O2- and H2O2 after treatment with 0.1 microgram of LPS per ml, although J774.1 cells generate 100 times the normal level of oxidative radicals with the same LPS treatment. The growth of L. monocytogenes was strongly inhibited in J774.1 cells pretreated with 0.1 microgram of LPS per ml or the combination of 0.1 microgram of LPS per ml and 10 U of IFN-gamma per ml. On the other hand, in LPS1916 cells, the growth of L. monocytogenes was not inhibited by treatment with LPS only, although LPS1916 cells pretreated with the combination of LPS and IFN-gamma showed moderate inhibition of listerial growth. This killing was not influenced by treatment with NG-monomethyl-L-arginine, which is a strong inhibitor of nitrite oxide generation. Interestingly, J774.1 cells treated with LPS did not show enhanced intraphagosomal killing of a nonhemolytic strain of avirulent L. monocytogenes that lacks the ability to escape from phagosomes, and this killing was not influenced by treatment with NG-monomethyl-L-arginine either. These results suggest that the reactive oxygen radicals are more important than nitric oxide in the mechanism underlying the intracellular killing of virulent L. monocytogenes and that there seem to be different killing mechanisms for virulent and avirulent strains of L. monocytogenes in activated-macrophage cell lines.
Bilateral Traumatic Dislocation Without Fracture of the Lumbosacral Junction: Case Report and Review of the Literature

Study Design. Case report. Objective. The diagnosis and surgical management of a patient with a traumatic bilateral dislocation of the lumbosacral junction (L5-S1) without facet or pars interarticularis fracture is presented with a thorough review of the existing literature. Summary of Background Data. Lumbar fracture-dislocations have been widely reported. However, only five cases of lumbosacral junction dislocation without a fracture have been previously reported. Methods. A 23-year-old patient was involved in a high-energy occupational injury and presented with complaints of back pain and inability to ambulate. Neurological assessment confirmed adequate motor strength (4+/5 bilaterally), normal perianal and lower extremity sensation, and urinary retention (postvoid residual: 1000 mL). Imaging studies revealed bilateral L5-S1 facet dislocation (bilateral jumped facets) without articulating processes or pars interarticularis fractures. Three-column ligamentous injury was confirmed on magnetic resonance imaging with complete tear of the ligamentum flavum, anterior and posterior longitudinal ligaments, interspinous and supraspinous ligaments, and avulsion of the L5 spinous process. The patient underwent bilateral facetectomies, diskectomy, laminectomies, and reduction of slippage with interbody and posterolateral transpedicular instrumented fusion. Results. At 1-year follow-up, the patient reported mild back pain well controlled with naproxen. He continued to report good improvement in his daily function. Conclusion. A careful clinical examination and imaging assessment must be done for appropriate diagnosis and treatment of this rare type of injury. Reduction in the face of intact articulating processes and pars interarticularis is challenging because of acting heavy forces on the lumbosacral joint. Facetectomies, nerve root decompression, and circumferential instrumented fusion are ways to decompress the neural elements, restore alignment, and maintain segmental stability.
Evidence that Glucose Load Is an Important Determinant of Plasma Insulin Response in Normal Subjects

Two consecutive oral glucose tolerance tests were performed on twelve healthy, malemedical students, in which each subject received 20 and 40 gm. of glucose per square meter body surface area. The tests were conducted one week apart, and the sequence in which the two glucose loads was given was randomized. The larger glucose load elicited anincrease in both plasma glucose and immunoreactive insulin response. However, the increase in the plasma insulin response was much greater than the increase in plasma glucoseresponse. Thus, the insulinogenic index, denned as the plasma insulin level divided bythe plasma glucose level, significantly increased as the glucose load increased. These results indicate that glucose load is an important determinant of plasma insulin response, and that in any individual the plasma insulin response is not a simple linear function of coexisting plasma glucose concentration.
An Introduction to Genome Annotation

Genome projects have evolved from large international undertakings to tractable endeavors for a single lab. Accurate genome annotation is critical for successful genomic, genetic, and molecular biology experiments. These annotations can be generated using a number of approaches and available software tools. This unit describes methods for genome annotation and a number of software tools commonly used in gene annotation. © 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
A Study on Relationship between Personality Traits and Employment Factors of College Students.

The goal of vocational education is to enhance students’ professional knowledge, technical skills, and professional ethics to make them readily available for employment and capable of satisfying the needs of economic constructions. Vocational education plays an important role in guiding and assisting students in seeking employment. However, in addition to school education, individual personality traits largely affect students’ employment. This paper used students at a college in Taiwan to investigate the relationship between students’ personality traits and their employment factors.
Power components in a circuit under nonsinusoidal conditions

In order to determine apparent power and its components the currents and voltages are presented in the shape of orthogonal functions. On this ground values of active and reactive powers are determined as components of a scalar product of the voltage and current vectors. An example of calculation of powers in thyristor controlled RL -load is presented. Here the vector of input voltage is formed taking into consideration the potentialities of the source of electric energy appearing in nocurrent time intervals. The expression for total power under nonsinusoidal conditions is presented as a generalized form of known expression for an apparent power of fundamental harmonic. Also the calculation of an exchange power Qex for the circuit under consideration is given.
Applications of selective neutrality tests to molecular ecology

This paper reviews how statistical tests of neutrality have been used to address questions in molecular ecology are reviewed. The work consists of four major parts: a brief review of the current status of the neutral theory; a review of several particularly interesting examples of how statistical tests of neutrality have led to insight into ecological problems; a brief discussion of the pitfalls of assuming a strictly neutral model if it is false; and a discussion of some of the opportunities and problems that molecular ecologists face when using neutrality tests to study natural selection.
Alkali Metals in Addition to Acidic pH Activate the EvgS Histidine Kinase Sensor in Escherichia coli

ABSTRACT Two-component signal transduction systems (TCSs) in bacteria perceive environmental stress and transmit the information via phosphorelay to adjust multiple cellular functions for adaptation. The EvgS/EvgA system is a TCS that confers acid resistance to Escherichia coli cells. Activation of the EvgS sensor initiates a cascade of transcription factors, EvgA, YdeO, and GadE, which induce the expression of a large group of acid resistance genes. We searched for signals activating EvgS and found that a high concentration of alkali metals (Na+, K+) in addition to low pH was essential for the activation. EvgS is a histidine kinase, with a large periplasmic sensor region consisting of two tandem PBPb (bacterial periplasmic solute-binding protein) domains at its N terminus. The periplasmic sensor region of EvgS was necessary for EvgS activation, and Leu152, located within the first PBPb domain, was involved in the activation. Furthermore, chimeras of EvgS and PhoQ histidine kinases suggested that alkali metals were perceived at the periplasmic sensor region, whereas the cytoplasmic linker domain, connecting the transmembrane region and the histidine kinase domain, was required for low-pH perception.
Empathizing and systemizing in males, females and autism: A test of the neural competition theory

Sex differences exist in empathizing (females showing a stronger drive than males), and this contrasts with sex differences in systemizing (males showing a stronger drive). Systemizing occurs when one analyses or constructs a system according to rules that govern that system. In this chapter we re-analyse data from the Empathy Quotient (EQ) and Systemizing Quotient (SQ) to test if empathy and systemizing “compete” in the brain. We conclude that they do, because there is no difference between the sexes in the measure of C (combined scores). This suggests that females’ relatively high empathizing score compensates for their less developed systemizing score, and conversely males’ high systemizing score compensates for their less well-developed empathizing score. Whilst many psychiatric conditions entail an impairment in empathy, autism and Asperger Syndrome (AS) may be specific in entailing an impairment in empathy alongside a heightened drive to systemizing, controlling for IQ and sex. This difference-score (between EQ and SQ) is tested for its power to classify individuals with AS. Finally, we propose a classification of 5 different ‘brain types’ based on such difference scores, which broadly correspond to the maleand female-typical brain, the extremes of these, and a final brain type which is ‘balanced’ (no difference between EQ and SQ). Future research should test the neural basis of these 5 cognitively-defined brain types in order to understand their developmental and anatomical characteristics further.
Migration of bone marrow lymphocytes demonstrated by selective bone marrow labeling with thymidine‐H3

Thymidine‐H3 was injected into the femoral and tibial marrow (labeled marrow) of guinea pigs while the hind limb circulation was arrested temporarily and non‐radioactive thymidine was administered systemically. Blood and lymphoid tissue radioautographs were subsequently examined for the presence of marrow‐derived labeled cells.
Vinyl chloride: how many unknown problems?

The chemistry, biotransformation, toxicology, and carcinogenlctty of vinyl chloride have been reviewed. There is little doubt that this chemical produces angiosarcoma in both animals and man. However, the conditions for cancer Induction in man cannot at this point in time be related to ambient exposure levels. An increase in reported cases of vinyl chloride‐induced cases of liver malfunction, angiosarcoma, Raynaud's syndrome, scleroderma, and acroosteolysis should be expected in the near future due to past exposures. The exposure of the general population to vinyl chloride‐propelled aerosols and household products may be a contributor to these disease states. Occupational exposures will probably decrease as VC/PVC plants meet the new exposure standard of 1 ppm. However, epldemiological surveys should be continued to ascertain the latent period and the degree of exposure involved in angiosarcoma development. Animal experiments should be initiated to determine the relationship of short exposures at high con.
Inhibition of HIV-1 Infectivity through an Innate Mechanism Involving Naturally Occurring IgM Anti-Leukocyte Autoantibodies1

In prior studies, we show that naturally occurring IgM anti-leukocyte autoantibodies (IgM-ALA) bind to CD3, CD4, CCR5, and CXCR4 receptors. These observations prompted us to determine whether IgM-ALA have a role in inhibiting HIV-1 infectivity by inhibiting viral entry into cells. We show that purified IgM, but not IgG, from individual sera of both normal and HIV-1 infected individuals is highly inhibitory (>95%) to HIV-1 viral infectivity both in vitro using PHA plus IL-2 activated PBL and in vivo using the human PBL-SCID mouse. Inhibition was observed with physiological doses of purified serum IgM and even after IgM was added 3 days postinfection in the in vitro assays. Absorbing purified serum IgM either with leukocytes or immobilized recombinant CD4 significantly decreased (>80%) the inhibitory effect on HIV-1 infectivity. IgM inhibited by >90% syncytia formation with the X4-IIIB infected SupT-1 cells indicating therefore that IgM inhibits viral attachment to core-receptors. IgM mediated anti-HIV-1 activity was highly specific as only certain IgM-ALA, obtained from human B cell clones inhibited HIV-1. IgM from certain HIV-1 infected individuals were not inhibitory to some R5-HIV-1 viral strains indicating that certain HIV-IgM may lack Abs reactive to strain specific coreceptor epitopes. These data indicate that an innate immune mechanism which is present from birth i.e., IgM-ALA, has a role in inhibiting HIV-1 viral entry into cells. Validation of this data with other in vivo models will be needed to determine whether in vivo administration or enhancement of IgM-ALA, e.g., through a vaccine, could prolong the asymptomatic state in HIV-1 infected individuals.
Robust surface modelling of visual hull from multiple silhouettes

Reconstructing depth information from images is one of the actively researched themes in computer vision and its application involves most vision research areas from object recognition to realistic visualisation. Amongst other useful vision-based reconstruction techniques, this thesis extensively investigates the visual hull (VH) concept for volume approximation and its robust surface modelling when various views of an object are available. Assuming that multiple images are captured from a circular motion, projection matrices are generally parameterised in terms of a rotation angle from a reference position in order to facilitate the multi-camera calibration. However, this assumption is often violated in practice, i.e., a pure rotation in a planar motion with accurate rotation angle is hardly realisable. To address this problem, at first, this thesis proposes a calibration method associated with the approximate circular motion. With these modified projection matrices, a resulting VH is represented by a hierarchical tree structure of voxels from which surfaces are extracted by the Marching cubes (MC) algorithm. However, the surfaces may have unexpected artefacts caused by a coarser volume reconstruction, the topological ambiguity of the MC algorithm, and imperfect image processing or calibration result. To avoid this sensitivity, this thesis proposes a robust surface construction algorithm which initially classifies local convex regions from imperfect MC vertices and then aggregates local surfaces constructed by the 3D convex hull algorithm. Furthermore, this thesis also explores the use of wide baseline images to refine a coarse VH using an affine invariant region descriptor. This improves the quality of VH when a small number of initial views is given. In conclusion, the proposed methods achieve a 3D model with enhanced accuracy. Also, robust surface modelling is retained when silhouette images are degraded by practical noise.
Theme-Based Multi-class Object Recognition and Segmentation

In this paper, we propose a new theme-based CRF model and investigate its performance on class based pixel-wise segmentation of images. By including the theme of an image, we also propose a new texture-environment potential to represent texture environment of a pixel, which alone gives satisfactory recognition results. The pixel-wise segmentation accuracy is remarkably improved by introducing texture potential. We compare our results to recent published results on the MSRC 21-class database and show that our theme-based CRF model significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art. Especially, by assigning a theme for each image, our model obtains greatly improved accuracy of structured classes with high visual variability and fewer training examples, the accuracy of which is very low in most related works.
Expression of fatty acid binding proteins 3 and 5 genes in rat pancreatic islets and INS-1E cells: Regulation by fatty acids and glucose

Fatty acids binding proteins (FABPs) are involved in uptake, binding, transport and metabolism of fatty acids (FAs). Although FAs are known to stimulate insulin secretion from pancreatic islets when transiently elevated, while contributing to islet loss of function, lipotoxicity and apoptosis when chronically elevated, almost nothing is known regarding the FABPs in this tissue. The present study aimed at exploring the expression pattern and regulation of FABPs in rat islets and the insulin-secreting INS-1E cells. Rat islets and INS-1E cells expressed the heart/muscle type (FABP3) and the epidermal type (FABP5) genes. Different FAs significantly enhanced the expression of both FABPs. High glucose concentration induced a similar elevation of both FABP mRNA levels, and similarly to its effect on insulin 1 mRNA. Addition of oleic or palmitic acids to glucose did not render a further effect. FABP3 gene expression increased in response to PPARα agonist, while FABP5 increased in response to PPARα and PPARγ agonists, and decreased in response to a PPARβ agonist. Beta-oxidation of FAs is required for the gene expression of both FABP genes in INS-1E cells. Inhibition of CPT-1 by etomoxir inhibited the oleic acid-induced FABP 3 and 5 gene expression, while activation of AMPK by metformin amplified the oleic-induced expression of both FABPs. FABP3 and 5 gene transcription required de novo protein synthesis, since inhibition by cycloheximide significantly decreased both FABP mRNAs. These data show a complex interrelationship between glucose and FAs in the control of FABP gene expression and that FABP3 and 5 may play a role in insulin secretion.
Sliding set points for body weight in ground squirrels during the hibernation season.

The duration of the hibernation season of 13-lined ground squirrels, Citellus tridecemlineatus, repeatedly aroused over the winter, was only slightly less than that of undisturbed animals. The aroused animals ate more than eight times as much food during the middle of their hibernation season. This suggests that ground squirrels compensate by increased food intake for extra energy expenditure forced on them by repeated arousals. Aroused animals deprived of food lost weight at a greater rate than undisturbed animals. When food was returned they gained weight rapidly. However, weights did not return to predeprivation levels, but only to levels appropriate for the stage of the cycle at the time food was returned. These findings suggest that, even when ground squirrels are losing weight over the winter, they regulate their weight, but at a level that progressively declines. The underlying mechanisms probably depend on adjustments to the balance between medial and lateral hypothalamic areas.
Induction of Manganese Superoxide Dismutase by Nuclear Translocation and Activation of SIRT1 Promotes Cell Survival in Chronic Heart Failure*

Oxidative stress plays a pivotal role in chronic heart failure. SIRT1, an NAD+-dependent histone/protein deacetylase, promotes cell survival under oxidative stress when it is expressed in the nucleus. However, adult cardiomyocytes predominantly express SIRT1 in the cytoplasm, and its function has not been elucidated. The purpose of this study was to investigate the functional role of SIRT1 in the heart and the potential use of SIRT1 in therapy for heart failure. We investigated the subcellular localization of SIRT1 in cardiomyocytes and its impact on cell survival. SIRT1 accumulated in the nucleus of cardiomyocytes in the failing hearts of TO-2 hamsters, postmyocardial infarction rats, and a dilated cardiomyopathy patient but not in control healthy hearts. Nuclear but not cytoplasmic SIRT1-induced manganese superoxide dismutase (Mn-SOD), which was further enhanced by resveratrol, and increased the resistance of C2C12 myoblasts to oxidative stress. Resveratrol's enhancement of Mn-SOD levels depended on the level of nuclear SIRT1, and it suppressed the cell death induced by antimycin A or angiotensin II. The cell-protective effects of nuclear SIRT1 or resveratrol were canceled by the Mn-SOD small interfering RNA or SIRT1 small interfering RNA. The oral administration of resveratrol to TO-2 hamsters increased Mn-SOD levels in cardiomyocytes, suppressed fibrosis, preserved cardiac function, and significantly improved survival. Thus, Mn-SOD induced by resveratrol via nuclear SIRT1 reduced oxidative stress and participated in cardiomyocyte protection. SIRT1 activators such as resveratrol could be novel therapeutic tools for the treatment of chronic heart failure.
Glacier surge in West Kunlun Shan, NW tibet detected by Synthetic Aperture Radar

We detected glacier surge in West Kunlun Shan (WKS) located to the northern-western Tibetan plateau. We used several SAR archive data from 1990s and detected surface velocity field based on offset tracking with parallel flow assumption. We also used Landsat optical image from 1970s to detect terminus position of glaciers. Our results revealed velocity variation and terminus change caused by glacier surge. We examined 36 glaciers in WKS and identified 5 glaciers as surge-type glacier. These 5 glaciers gradually accelerated and decelerated during our observation period, accompanied with advance of terminus. The lower part of some glaciers became stagnant after surging. This stagnant profile appeared other glaciers that we did not identified as surge-type. We could not detect velocity variation these glaciers but clearly terminus were advanced/retreated from 1976 to 2011.