Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CHRNA 5 as negative regulator of nicotine signaling in normal and cancer bronchial cells : effects on motility , migration and p 63 expression

Annette M.Krais, Agnès H.Hautefeuille, Marie-Pierre Cros, Vladimir Krutovskikh, Jean-Marie Tournier, Philippe Birembaut, Amélie Thépot, Anupam Paliwal, Zdenko Herceg, Paolo Boffetta, Paul Brennan and Pierre L.Hainaut Group of Molecular Carcinogenesis, Group of Epigenetics, International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), 150 Cours Albert Thomas, 69372 Lyon Cedex 08, France and INSERM UMRS-903, IFR 53, Université de Reims, Reims, France, Group of Lifestyle, Environment and Cancer; and Group of Genetic Epidemiology, International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), 150 Cours Albert Thomas, 69372 Lyon Cedex 08, France
Effect of pre-emptive dexketoprofen trometamol on acute cortisol, inflammatory response and oxidative stress to hot-iron disbudding in calves.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of dexketoprofen trometamol (DEX) on acute cortisol, inflammatory response and oxidative stress following hot-iron disbudding in calves. Twelve male Holstein Friesian dairy calves, weighing between 52 and 82 kg and 6-8 weeks of age were used for disbudding procedure. While calves (n = 6) in DEX group were treated with DEX (IV, 2 mg/kg) 30 min before disbudding, calves (n = 6) in control group were received only 0.9% saline (IV, 2 mg/kg). All calves were disbudded by an electrically heated hot-iron dehorner under local anaesthesia. The heart and respiratory rate were recorded before and after disbudding. Blood samples were collected at 30 min before and 15, 30 and 60 min after disbudding for analysis of serum cortisol, tumour necrosis factor alpha, interleukin-1 beta, interleukin-6, total antioxidant activity, malondialdehyde, glutathione and nitric oxide. In both groups, cortisol concentration was immediately increased after disbudding but dropped to lower level than baseline at 60 min after disbudding in DEX group (P<0.05). It was concluded that combination of a lidocaine and DEX may decrease or prevent acute cortisol, inflammatory response and oxidative stress during disbudding procedure.
NEW ASPECTS OF COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH ON SOIL POLLUTION , FOOD SAFETY AND SOIL REMEDIATION TECHNIQUES IN ASIA

Soil pollution and food safety issues are major challenges for discussion in Asia resulting from previous industrial development without suitable regulations. Over the years, a nationwide comprehensive survey to understand the distribution of heavy metal contaminated soil was conducted in many Asian countries. Included in this survey are descriptions of Taiwan’s experiences and related databases. Rice is the staple food in many Asian countries. Many paddy soils were contaminated by illegal discharges of wastewater from local factories. Results from field studies in Taiwan showed that rice variety and soil Cd concentration are major factors affecting edible rice safety. The Indica type rice absorbed more Cd from contaminated soil than Japonica type. The most contaminated were brown rice and polished rice when the soil Cd concentration extracted by HCl was higher than 2 mg/kg. No relationship could be found between soil Cd and brown rice Cd. The Cu and Zn concentrations in brown rice were in a fixed range under a wide range of soil Cu and Zn. These relationships coincides the plateau theory. The concentration of Cu and Zn in rice is not proportional to its concentration in the soil. When the total Cr and Ni concentration of rural soils reached 250 and 600 mg/kg, rice yield will decrease. But the Cr and Ni concentration in polished rice were less than 4 and 14 mg/kg, respectively. In paddy soil and rice uptake system, Pb solubility and mobility is very low, however rice yield will decrease by 20% as soil total Pb approached 2,000 mg/kg. When the total As concentration of rural soil reached 60 mg/kg, rice production will be significantly reduced. To explain the relationship between heavy metal concentration in soil and plants, six hypotheses (i.e., single-metal abrupt toxicity threshold, soil-plant barrier, clean sludge concept, uptake plateau concept, aging effect, and absence of evidence) were proposed from previous research findings. The regulations of heavy metal in contaminated soils, the main reasons of the development of legislations, and the strategies for monitoring and remedial actions in USA, UK, Netherlands, Germany, Japan, China, and Taiwan were also compared in this article. Finally, concerning the high toxicity and mobility of Cd, its transmission in food chain and human intake of Cd from all pathways were also analyzed.
Results Effect of Shigella flexneri actin-based motility on mitochondria

Eukaryotic cells are densely packed with macromolecular complexes and intertwining organelles, continually transported and reshaped. Intriguingly, organelles avoid clashing and entangling with each other in such limited space. Mitochondria form extensive networks constantly remodeled by fission and fusion. Here, we show that mitochondrial fission is triggered by mechanical forces. Mechano-stimulation of mitochondria – via encounter with motile intracellular pathogens, via external pressure applied by an atomic force microscope, or via cell migration across uneven microsurfaces – results in the recruitment of the mitochondrial fission machinery, and subsequent division. We propose that MFF, owing to affinity for narrow mitochondria, acts as a membrane-bound force sensor to recruit the fission machinery to mechanically strained sites. Thus, mitochondria adapt to the environment by sensing and responding to biomechanical cues. Our findings that mechanical triggers can be coupled to biochemical responses in membrane dynamics may explain how organelles orderly cohabit in the crowded cytoplasm. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.30292. 00
Trade and Currency Weapons

The debate on trade wars and currency wars has re-emerged since the Great recession of 2009. We study the two forms of non-cooperative policies within a single framework. First, we compare the elasticity of trade flows to import tariffs and to the real exchange rate, based on product level data for 110 countries over the 1989-2013 period. We find that a 1 percent depreciation of the importer's currency reduces imports by around 0.5 percent in current dollar, whereas an increase in import tariffs by 1 percentage point reduces imports by around 1.4 percent. Hence the two instruments are not equivalent. Second, we build a stylized short-term macroeconomic model where the government aims at internal and external balance. We find that, in this setting, monetary policy is more stabilizing for the economy than trade policy, except when the internal transmission channel of monetary policy is muted (at the zero-lower bound). One implication is that, in normal times, a country will more likely react to a trade "aggression" through monetary easing rather than through a tariff increase. The result is reversed at the ZLB.
The Estimation of School Effects

The increasing public demand to hold schools accountable for their effects on student outcomes lends urgency to the task of clarifying statistical issues pertaining to studies of school effects. This article considers the specification and estimation of school effects, the variability of effects across schools, and the proportion of variation in student outcomes attributable to differences in school context and practice. We present a statistical model that defines two different types of school effect: one appropriate for parents choosing schools for their children, the second for agencies evaluating school practice. Studies of both types of effect are viewed as quasi-experiments posing formidable obstacles to valid causal inference. A multilevel decomposition of variance within and between schools has important and perhaps counterintuitive implications for school evaluation. The potential for unbiased estimation depends on the type of effect under consideration because the two types of school effect have markedly different data requirements. Commonly used estimators of each effect are shown to be biased and, in some cases, inconsistent. Analyses of survey data from Scotland illustrate the recommended techniques. We conclude with a brief discussion of the role of school evaluation in a broader agenda of research in support of school improvement.
Introduction and summary of the thesis

Much applied economic research concerns complex data structures that need to be properly modelled. It is especially common with hierarchical structures such as children nested within families, pupils nested within schools, individuals nested within regional areas, or measurements nested within individuals. Failure to take into account such structures, in models, can lead to incorrect inferences. The failure to properly model also makes it impossible to capture the complexity that exists in the real world. What is known as multilevel analysis has been developed, and offer, when appropriate, model-based methods that deal with this issue. The four papers presented in Chapters 1-4 deal with complex hierarchical data structures that are common in the empirical economic literature and estimated with appropriate multilevel models.
FINAL version Self-perceived chronic stress and self-rated health as mediating markers for the association with cardiovascular disease risk : The Malmö Preventive Project

Cardiovascular (CVD) is one of the most common causes of mortality. Apart from known causal risk factors such as smoking, obesity, dyslipidaemia and hypertension, chronic psychological stress has been suggested as a possible independent risk marker, also because the CVD burden follows a social gradient. Another self-reported variable is self-rated health (SRH) which in many studies has ben shown to predict morbidity and mortality in otherwise healthy subjects. Aims This study aimed to investigate a possibly interaction effect of self-perceived chronic stress and SRH on CVD risk. We also wanted to investigate if social class modified this effect. Subjects and methods Data were analyzed from a population based cohort study consisting of 10,868 men and 2741 women from Malmö, southern Sweden, with a mean followed up time for 27 years. Subjects were screened at baseline for traditional biochemical and physical risk factors for CVD and filled a self-administered questionnaire containing ratings of psychological and lifestyle related factors. Subjects were then followed in both national and regional registries for first CVD event. The influence of self-perceived chronic stress and SRH were analyzed in a Cox regression model with stepwise adjustment for other risk factors. Interaction effects between stress/SRH were also tested. Results In all, 3252 men and 320 women suffered a CVD event during follow-up. In the total cohort (n=13,609) the hazard ratio for CVD was 1.28 (95% CI; 1.06-1.55) among subjects reporting both chronic stress and poor SRH compared to the reference group (no stress, optimal SRH). Men who reported poor SRH with or without stress had a HR of 1.53 (CI 1.24-1.87) and 1.21 (1.03-1.41) respectively after full adjustments for other risk factors. There were no associations among women. No significant interaction effect between stress/SRH was found in either sex. Conclusion Self-perceived chronic stress and poor self-rated health are both independent, longterm cardiovascular risk markers in middle-aged men, but not in women. The biological mediators of this increased risk pattern have still not been well characterized.
Reply to Romero and Soria François Recanati

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Reply to Romero and Soria François Recanati
Learning Model Predictive Control for Autonomous Racing Improvements and Model Variation in Model Based Controller

In this work, an improved Learning Model Predictive Control (LMPC) architecture for autonomous racing is presented. The controller is reference free and is able to improve lap time by learning from history data of previous laps. A terminal cost and a sampled safe set are learned from history data to guarantee recursive feasibility and non-decreasing performance at each lap. Improvements have been proposed to implement LMPC on autonomous racing in a more efficient and reliable way. Improvements have been done on three aspects. Firstly, system identification has been improved to be run in a more efficient way by collecting feature data in subspace, so that the size of feature data set is reduced and time needed to run sorting algorithm can be reduced. Secondly, different strategies have been proposed to improvemodel accuracy, such as least mean square with/without lifting and Gaussian process regression. Thirdly, for reducing algorithm complexity, methods combining different model construction strategies were proposed. Also, running controller in a multi-rate way has also been proposed to reduced algorithm complexity when increment of controller frequency is necessary. Besides, the performance of different system identification strategies have been compared, which include strategy from newton’s law, strategy from classical system identification and strategy from machine learning. Factors that can possibly influence converged result of LMPC were also investigated, such as prediction horizon, controller frequency. Experiment results on a 1:10 scaled RC car illustrates the effectiveness of proposed improvements and the difference of different system identification strategies.
Improved three-phase power flow method for calculation of power losses in unbalanced radial distribution network

Recently, the need for improving the efficiency of distribution network in terms of power losses is being emphasised. A large share of total power losses refers to low-voltage networks which are usually unbalanced. For the power flow analysis, it is necessary to use three-phase modelling. This study presents modelling of distribution network elements and their implementation in backward/forward sweep (BFS) power flow method. An improvement of the BFS method is developed by using the breadth-first search method for network renumbering and creation of modified incidence matrix. The improved method minimises the read elements of each iteration and results in a significant reduction in total calculation time without accuracy loss. This improvement makes this method more suitable for using in real-time calculations. The proposed method is used for calculation of power losses in unbalanced and symmetrical network which are compared. The purpose of this test is to show the advantage of a three-phase power flow analysis compared with a symmetrical model.
The Effects of Centering Method on Parameter Estimates and Variance Explained in Multilevel Models.

This paper uses data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) dataset to demonstrate practical examples of the ways in which the method used for centering level-1 variables in multilevel models affects the findings. Demonstrations compare raw metric scaling, grand mean centering, and group mean centering for successively more complex models. Comparisons are made of parameter estimates, their significance levels, and increments in variance explained. Findings show that results are generally similar for raw metric scaling and grand mean centering, and these results differ from those obtained under group mean centering. Two methods are demonstrated for estimating incremental variance explained by nested models. The ways in which centering can be used to examine between-groups and within-groups effects are also shown. (Contains 6 tables, 2 figures, and 11 references.) (Author) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. The Effects of Centering Method on Parameter Estimates and Variance Explained in Multilevel Models Judith A. Koenig Robert W. Lissitz, Ph.D. University of Maryland
Synergistic activation of eIF 4 A by eIF 4 B and eIF 4 G

eIF4A is a key component in eukaryotic translation initiation; however, it has not been clear how auxiliary factors like eIF4B and eIF4G stimulate eIF4A and how this contributes to the initiation process. Based on results from isothermal titration calorimetry, we propose a two-site model for eIF4A binding to an 83.5 kDa eIF4G fragment (eIF4G-MC), with a highand a low-affinity site, having binding constants KD of 50 and 1000 nM, respectively. Small angle X-ray scattering analysis shows that the eIF4G-MC fragment adopts an elongated, welldefined structure with a maximum dimension of 220 Å, able to span the width of the 40S ribosomal subunit. We establish a stable eIF4A–eIF4B complex requiring RNA, nucleotide and the eIF4G-MC fragment, using an in vitro RNA pull-down assay. The eIF4G-MC fragment does not stably associate with the eIF4A–eIF4B–RNA-nucleotide complex but acts catalytically in its formation. Furthermore, we demonstrate that eIF4B and eIF4G-MC act synergistically in stimulating the ATPase activity of eIF4A.
The Chinese are Here: Firm Level Analysis of Import Competition and Performance in Sub-Saharan Africa

This study uses firm level data on 19 Sub-Saharan Africa countries between 2004 and 2016 to provide a rigorous analysis on the impact of Chinese import competition on productivity, skills, and performance of firms. , We measure import competition and ports accessibility at the city-industry level to identify the relevance of firms’ location in determining the impact of Chinese imports competition. To address endogeneity concerns, a time-varying instrument for Chinese imports based on the interaction between an exogenous geographic characteristic and a shock in transportation technology is developed. The results show that imports competition has a positive impact on firm performance, mainly in terms of productivity catch-up and skills upgrading. Of particular interest is the finding that the effects of import competition from China are stronger for more remote firms that have lower port accessibility, an indication that Chinese imports in remote areas improves productivity of laggard firms, employment, and intensity of skilled workers. Our findings indicate that African firms are improving their performance as a consequence of the higher Chinese import intensity, mainly through direct competition and the use of higher quality inputs of production sourced from China.
Embedding the Pi-Calculus into a Concurrent Functional Programming Language

Correctness of program transformations and translations in concurrent programming is the focus of our research. In this case study the relation of the synchronous pi-calculus and a core language of Concurrent Haskell (CH) with asynchronous communication is investigated. We show that CH embraces the synchronous pi-calculus. The formal foundations are contextual semantics in both languages, where mayas well as should-convergence are observed. We succeed in defining and proving smart properties of a particular translation mapping the synchronous pi-calculus into CH. This implies that pi-processes are error-free if and only if their translation is an error-free CH-program Our result shows that the chosen semantics is not only powerful, but can also be applied in concrete and technically complex situations. The developed translation uses private names. We also automatically check potentially correct translations that use global names instead of private names. As a complexity parameter we use the number of MVars introduced by the transformation, where MVars are synchronized 1-place buffers. The automated refutation of incorrect translations leads to a classification of potentially correct translations, and to the conjecture that one global MVar is insufficient.
RAILCON ' 16 TOWARDS AUTONOMOUS OBSTACLE DETECTION IN FREIGHT RAILWAY

In order to increase the quality of rail freight, as well as its effectiveness and capacity, a level of automation of railway cargo haul at European railways needs to be increased. An important part of the autonomous operation of cargo haul at European railways shall be a complete, safe and reliable obstacle detection system to be used mainly for initiation of long distance forward-looking braking and short distance wagon recognition for shunting onto buffers. Such obstacle detection system shall be integrated into Autonomous Train Operation (ATO) module and it shall be a multi sensory system in order to provide fail safe and reliable obstacle detection at short (up to 20 m) and long range (up to 1000 m) during day and night operation, as well as operation during impaired visibility (such as in the case of fog and bad weather condition). In this paper, the state-of-the art in obstacle detection in railway as well as problems and lacks that should be overcome to achieve such autonomous obstacle detection are presented.
Perceived stress and coping strategies in high school gifted students in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Abstract Mental disorders in adolescents are a major emerging public health challenge. Gifted students may experience more stress, anxiety, and adjustment problems than non-gifted students due to several reasons. This study investigated the prevalence of stress, coping strategies, and their association in high school gifted students. A cross-sectional study among 535 students from Le Hong Phong high school for the gifted was conducted. Participants completed a self-report questionnaire containing questions about background information, the Perceived Stress Scale to assess stress perception, and the Coping Strategies Inventory to evaluate coping strategies. Among 500 completed questionnaires included in the analysis, the prevalence of perceived stress was 28.4%, including 21.4% moderate stress and 7.0% severe stress. Problem solving was the most preferred strategy (2.6 ± 0.6), followed by wishful thinking (2.5 ± 0.9) and cognitive restructuring (2.4 ± 0.7). Students who had higher level of stress, experienced excessive parental control or parental aspiration for their academic performance were more likely to have disengagement strategies such as wishful thinking, social withdrawal, and self-criticism. In contrast, higher likelihood of having engagement coping strategies was found in students who had good relationship with teachers and peers and those who joined extracurricular activities. In overall, the prevalence of perceived stress in Vietnamese high school gifted students was high, but not all students chose proper stress coping strategies. School-based routine screening and intervention should be conducted, focusing on providing students with proper stress coping strategies.
INFO-RNA—a server for fast inverse RNA folding satisfying sequence constraints

INFO-RNA is a new web server for designing RNA sequences that fold into a user given secondary structure. Furthermore, constraints on the sequence can be specified, e.g. one can restrict sequence positions to a fixed nucleotide or to a set of nucleotides. Moreover, the user can allow violations of the constraints at some positions, which can be advantageous in complicated cases. The INFO-RNA web server allows biologists to design RNA sequences in an automatic manner. It is clearly and intuitively arranged and easy to use. The procedure is fast, as most applications are completed within seconds and it proceeds better and faster than other existing tools. The INFO-RNA web server is freely available at http://www.bioinf. uni-freiburg.de/Software/INFO-RNA/