Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
EFFECTS OF TRPM8 CHANNELS’ INHIBITION ON CONCIOUS CYSTOMETRY AND SINGLE-UNIT MECHANOSENSITIVE BLADDER AFFERENT ACTIVITIES IN NOVEL EX VIVO MODEL OF THE RAT

Hypothesis / aims of study It has been reported that transient receptor potential melastatin 8 (TRPM8) ion channels are expressed in the dorsal root ganglion (DRG), urothelial cells, and sensory nerve fibers in the urothelium and suburothelial space of the rat bladder, and these channels overexpressed with bladder outle t obstruction (1). TRPM8 channels are expressed also in urothelial cells of the human bladder and DRG (2). Moreover, overexpression of TRPM8-immunoreactive nerve fibers in the patients with painful bladder syndrome and detrusor overactivity has been demonstrated (3). These findings suggest that TRPM8 might be involved in the bladder sensory transduction and also pathophysiology of the development of hypersensitive bladder disorders, such as overactive bladder (OAB) and bladder pain syndrome (BPS). The aim of the present study was to determine the role of TRPM8 channel in activation of bladder mechanosensory transduction by using RQ00203078 (RQ), a novel selective TRPM8 antagonist developed by RaQalia Pharma Inc., on conscious cystometry (CMG) and single-unit mechanosensitive bladder afferent activities (SAAs) measurement in a newly established ex vivo rat model.
COMPARISON OF FACTORS INFLUENCING CHINESE PEOPLE IN BANGKOK INTENTION TO USE TWO ONLINE PAYMENT APPLICATIONS IN THAILAND

Thailand is the biggest travel destination for Chinese people, and more and more Chinese people come to Thailand to invest, travel, study and live. In addition to this, the trend for online payment application is more and more popular. Therefore, the main objective for this study was to find out and determined the factors influencing Chinese people in Bangkok intention to use Alipay and K-PLUS online payment application in Thailand. The factors that we studied were ease of use, convenience, system quality and usefulness. The survey method is applied questionnaire to collect data from a total of 385 respondents who had used both Alipay and K-PLUS online payment application in Thailand. The researcher applied both descriptive and inferential analysis to analyze the general information and test hypotheses. As the results, the researcher found out that ease of use, convenience, system quality and usefulness all has a significant positive influence on intention to use Alipay and K-PLUS online payment application.
The Heterogeneous Employment Outcomes of First- and Second-generation Immigrants in Belgium

This paper provides a comprehensive quantitative assessment of the employment performance of first- and second-generation immigrants in Belgium compared to that of natives. Using detailed quarterly data for the period 2008-2014, we find not only that first-generation immigrants face a substantial employment penalty (up to -36% points) vis-a-vis their native counterparts, but also that their descendants continue to face serious difficulties in accessing the labour market. The social elevator appears to be broken for descendants of two non-EU-born immigrants. Immigrant women are also found to be particularly affected. Among key drivers of access to employment, we find: i) education for the descendants of non-EU-born immigrants, and ii) proficiency in the host country language, citizenship acquisition, and (to a lesser extent) duration of residence for first-generation immigrants. Finally, estimates suggest that around a decade is needed for the employment gap between refugees and other foreign-born workers to be (largely) suppressed.
Different Forms of Work and Different Conditions of Work in a NEO-Liberal Market Economy

Casualization refers to the systematic replacement of full-time and part-time staff with staff employed on an ad hoc basis. Regular work is not provided but the casual worker is expected to be available when required. Theoretically, casualization leads to the reduction of an organization’s operational costs by increasing the ease with which workers can be included and excluded from the workforce. Therefore, a casual worker is a worker on a temporary employment contract with generally limited entitlements to benefits and little or no security of employment. The main attribute is the absence of a continuing relationship of any stability with an employer, which could lead to their not being considered “employees” at all. Casual workers differ from other non-permanent workers in that they often possess fewer rights and less protection). A plethora of terms have been deployed to define and account for the growth of this type of irregular employment contract. For example, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has used terms like disguised employment or triangular employment relationship to define the emergence of sub-contractors, independent contractors, home-based workers and all manner of “in-formalised” work. Based on this argument, this study tends to examine the different forms of work as well as the different conditions of work in a neo-liberal market. The paper was guided by the neo-liberal theory.
Factors impacting heart failure patients’ knowledge of heart disease and self-care management

Background: Heart failure (HF) contributes significantly to the morbidity and mortality of the ageing population and is one of the leading causes of re-hospitalization in Singapore. Studies have shown that patient education covering HF and self-care management can lead to greater compliance with treatment regimens, resulting in lower re-hospitalization rates. This study aimed to measure HF patients’ knowledge on the disease and self-care management, and to explore factors influencing their knowledge level. Methods: A questionnaire adapted from the Dutch Heart Failure Knowledge Scale (DHFKS) was completed by 187 patients who were recruited from a tertiary center’s outpatient HF clinic. Data from the survey were analyzed using SPSS (version 22). Results: Knowledge of HF in general had the highest score and that of HF symptoms/recognition of HF symptoms the lowest. The knowledge deficit identified was mainly on therapeutic regimens and HF symptoms/recognition of HF symptoms. The respondents’ knowledge was significantly related to their educational level and whether they had received HF education. Conclusion: For HF patient education to be effective, the program has to be customized to cater to different target groups and individuals. There is a need to develop patient teaching materials and a program with consideration to the patients’ educational levels, demographic, and comorbidity backgrounds.
Genetic parameters for body weight, body condition score and lameness in Austrian dairy cows

This study is part of a larger project whose overall objective is to evaluate the possibilities for genetic improvement of efficiency in Austrian dairy cattle. Efficiency is understood as a combination of already existing traits of milk, beef and functional traits and traits aiming at feed efficiency and health. In the year 2014 a one-year data collection was carried out. Data of approximately 5,400 cows, i.e. 3,100 Fleckvieh (dual purpose Simmental), 1,300 Brown Swiss, 1,000 Holstein kept on 167 farms were recorded. In addition to routine performance recording, data on new traits like body weight, body measures, lameness, claw health, subclinical ketosis and data about feed quality and feed intake was collected. The specific objective of this study was to estimate genetic parameters for body weight, body condition score and lameness in Austrian Fleckvieh, Brown Swiss and Holstein cows. Heritabilities of body weight and body condition score were moderate and ranged from 0.35 to 0.44 and 0.18 to 0.34, respectively. For lameness lower heritabilities were found (0.03 to 0.07). Body weight and body condition score were moderately correlated, with estimates ranging from 0.39 to 0.58. Moderate genetic correlations were also found between body weight and lameness (0.57 to 0.63), indicating that animals that are heavier have more lameness. Genetic correlation estimates between body condition score and lameness were not significant.
A Review on Drug Induced Hepatotoxicity and Alternative Therapies

In today’s world, liver diseases are serious health problem. Liver plays key role in regulating the nutritional state and the energy balance in the body. Nutritional supplements and traditional medicinal plants can provide many invaluable drugs to the modern drug industry. Hepatoprotective agents, nutritional supplements and herbal formulations with scientifically documented hepatocellular proliferation activities can be included in treatment for liver diseases. Due to their efficacy and safety, these therapies are in great demand in the developed world for primary health care. With the availability of modern techniques, it is now possible to standardize, optimize, and test these herbal plants and nutritional supplements clinically, for their effective use. Many medicinal plants and nutritional supplements are being used since ancient time owing to their spectrum of activities like antimicrobial, cytotoxic, anti-diabetic, antiinflammatory etc. Treatment of liver disorders can be revitalised by developing standardized and clinically tested alternative medicines with high safety and efficacy profile. This review provides up-to-date information about drug-induced hepatotoxicity and hepatoprotective effects of different interventions (Nutritional supplements, Medicinal plants and Herbal formulations) for liver disease or hepatotoxicity.
Invariants of singularities, generating sequences and toroidal structures

Over the last few decades, multiplier ideals and their associated jumping numbers have become an important topic in the field of birational geometry of complex algebraic varieties and in singularity theory. In this PhD Thesis we describe the multiplier ideals and the jumping numbers associated with an irreducible germ of quasi-ordinary hypersurface and also with a plane curve singularity. The approach is motivated by a theorem of Howald describing multiplier ideals a Newton non-degenerate hypersurface singularity in terms of a Newton polyhedron. We prove a version of Howald? s result by using that one has toroidal embedded resolutions for these singularities. The structure of these resolutions is determined by the embedded topological type. The method passes by a precise description of the generating sequences associated with the divisorial valuations associated with the exceptional prime divisors appearing in their toroidal embedded resolutions. The main result in both cases is that multiplier ideals are generated by generalized monomials in the maximal contact curves, also called semi-roots, and their generalizations in the quasi-ordinary hypersurface case. As an application of this study, we obtain algorithms to compute basis of the multiplier ideals and the set of jumping numbers.
Modulating the cellular context broadly reshapes the mutational landscape of a model enzyme

Protein mutational landscapes are shaped by the cellular environment, but key factors and their quantitative effects are often unknown. Here we show that Lon, a quality control protease naturally absent in common E. coli expression strains, drastically reshapes the mutational landscape of the metabolic enzyme dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR). Selection under conditions that resolve highly active mutants reveals that 23.3% of all single point mutations in DHFR are advantageous in the absence of Lon, but advantageous mutations are largely suppressed when Lon is reintroduced. Protein stability measurements demonstrate extensive activity-stability tradeoffs for the advantageous mutants and provide a mechanistic explanation for Lon’s widespread impact. Our findings suggest possibilities for tuning mutational landscapes by modulating the cellular environment, with implications for protein design and combatting antibiotic resistance.
Knowledge and attitude toward antibiotics among the Saudi population

Background: Antibiotics are life-saving drugs that can lose its potency due to antimicrobial resistance. It remains a major health concern that should be sought and studied to minimize and slow the progression of antibiotic resistance. Therefore, the present study was aimed to measure the level of awareness regarding antibiotics among the Saudi population. Methodology: A cross-sectional study was conducted through the year 2019 using an online form distributed through social media to collect the responses. The statistical package for the social sciences (version 21.0) was used to analyze the data. Results: A total of 763 responses were analyzed. Females were more than males with percentages of 60.4% and 39.6%, respectively. University education was indicated by the majority of the participants (73.4%). Concerning the knowledge and attitude scoring system, only 10.4% scored a good level of knowledge, 40.8% were in the moderate level of knowledge group and 48.9% had a poor level of knowledge. Age was significantly associated with knowledge score ( p = 0.021) Furthermore, the living region significantly was associated with awareness scores ( p = 0.000). Conclusion: The level of awareness regarding antibiotics use in Saudi Arabia was found to be low with only 10.4% of the subjects who scored a good level of knowledge. Age was found to affect knowledge significantly ( p = 0.021). Hereby, we recommend implanting educational programs to raise awareness and conducting similar studies to measure the effectiveness of the educational plans.
Reweighted Compressed Sensing-Based Smart Grids Topology Reconstruction With Application to Identification of Power Line Outage

Smart grid (SG) can automatically collect a large amount of data of different power parameters through different sensors, which has become the future trend of power systems, especially for real-time monitoring needs. However, due to the limitation of detection technology and measurement cost, direct measurement of SG topology is difficult. Thus, reconstructing the topology of SG through measurement data is important yet challenging. In this article, we leverage a graph theory-based power network model and propose to transform the SG topology reconstruction (SGTR) problem into a sparse recovery problem. By exploiting the framework of compressed sensing, the network structure can be reconstructed from a small number of observations. In order to enhance the reconstruction performance, we extract three underlying features of the SG, namely, the symmetry feature, diagonal feature, and cluster feature. Thus, the symmetric reweighting of modified clustered orthogonal matching pursuit method was proposed to integrate these three features simultaneously to improve the performance of SGTR. In order to verify the efficiency of the proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments based on the MATPOWER benchmark toolbox. Compared with some state-of-the-art methods, we find that the reconstruction performance of the proposed method is obviously improved. In addition, based on the reconstructed SG topology, a sparse solution based on QR decomposition was also proposed to locate the power line outages accurately.
Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Esophageal cancer (EC) is the eighth most common cancer worldwide, with 482,000 new cases in 2008, and the sixth most common cause of death from cancer, with 406,000 deaths.1 In China, the crude mortality rate of EC in 2005 was 15.2/100,000 which represented 11.2% of all cancer deaths and ranked as the fourth most common cause of cancer death.2 According to the GLOBOCAN project in 2008, China was estimated to account for 53.6% of new cases and 51.7% of deaths worldwide.1 Thus, China has a great disease burden from EC. Over the past few decades, a number of prognostic factors for EC
Diesel Biodegradation Capacities and Biosurfactant Production in Saline-Alkaline Conditions by Delftia sp NL1, Isolated from an Algerian Oilfield

Abstract In this study, a diesel oil-degrading bacterium was isolated from an oilfield water injection (water-bearing formations, 1,205 m depth) in Algeria. The bacterial strain, designated NL1, was cultivated on diesel oil as sole carbon and energy sources. Molecular analyses of the 16S rRNA gene sequence (KY397882) placed NL1 strain closely related to distinct cultivated species of the Delftia genus. Optimal diesel oil biodegradation by Delftia sp NL1 strain occurred at pH 11, 40 °C, 2 M NaCl and initial hydrocarbon concentration of 5% (v/v) as sole carbon source. GC-MS analyses evidenced that strain Delftia sp NL1 was able to degrade more than 66.76% of diesel oil within only 7 days. On the other hand, and in the same conditions, biosurfactant production by Delftia sp NL1 was also evaluated evidencing high emulsifying capacity (E24 = 81%), ability to lower the surface tension of growing media (with the value of 25.7 mN m−1), and production of glycolipids (8.7 g L−1) as biosurfactants. This research presents indigenous strain Delftia sp NL1 for diesel degradation and synthesis of biosurfactant in extreme conditions. In this sense, strain NL1 is a good candidate for possible in situ oil recovery and in wastewater treatment in refineries and oil terminals in petroleum industry.
Variations in Soil Physico-Chemical Properties along Slope Position Gradient in Secondary Vegetation of the Hilly Region, Guilin, Southwest China

Understanding the variation of soil physico-chemical properties along slope position gradients is essential for vegetation restoration and reconstruction, but how slope positions impact the soil physico-chemical properties in the secondary vegetation of hilly regions is poorly understood. To address these uncertainties, we examined the changes in soil physico-chemical properties and their relationships along the slope position gradient in secondary vegetation of the hilly region in Guilin, southwest China. The results showed that except for the soil water content, soil total phosphorus and soil total potassium which reached the highest value at the footslope, other soil physico-chemical properties reached the highest content in the middle slope, and most of the soil physico-chemical properties showed the lowest content in the upper slope or footslope. Moreover, Pearson’s correlation analysis revealed that there were no significant correlations between most of the soil physico-chemical properties and that the correlations between soil physico-chemical properties were not consistent across different slope positions. Additionally, the principal component analysis showed that the first 4 principal components together explained 84.32% of the total variation and might be interpreted as the change of soil total nitrogen, soil organic matter, soil available nitrogen, soil available potassium, soil water content and soil total potassium. Overall, our results strongly demonstrated that slope positions showed significant effects on most of the soil physico-chemical properties and would provide an important reference for the formulation of restoration strategies in different slope positions to facilitate vegetation restoration and reconstruction and the sustainable development of the ecological environment in the hilly region.
GC-Steering: GC-Aware Request Steering and Parallel Reconstruction Optimizations for SSD-Based RAIDs

Solid-state disk (SSD)-based redundant array of independent disks (RAIDs) have been widely deployed in high-end enterprize systems to provide high-performance and highly reliable storage for data-intensive computing. However, SSD-based RAIDs suffer from significant performance degradation whenever user I/O requests conflict with the ongoing garbage collection (GC) operations which introduce tail latency. Moreover, the performance characteristics of SSDs make the traditional HDD-based RAID reconstruction algorithms are not compatible with or suitable for SSD-based RAIDs. In this article, we proposed GC-aware request steering (GC-Steering), a scheme aware of the GC process within an SSD-based RAID, to significantly boost the performance and reliability of SSD-based RAIDs. GC-Steering effectively outsources the popular read requests and all write requests addressed to the SSD currently in the GC state to a staging space, such as a dedicated spare SSD or the reserved space of each SSD within the RAID. GC-Steering also accelerates the performance of the failure-recovery process by both request steering and parallel recovery. Our extensive evaluations on a lightweight GC-Steering prototype driven by HPC-like and real-world enterprize workloads show that the GC-Steering scheme significantly reduces the average response time by an average of 63.3% and 65.8%, compared with the state-of-the-art local GC and global GC schemes. Moreover, the GC-Steering scheme also significantly reduces the average response times by an average of 62.3% during RAID reconstruction than the normal state.
1-DOF Finger Mechanism Design for Anthropomorphic Prosthetic Hand with Similarity Criteria for Human Hand Finger Movement

Development of prosthetic hands continues to be made to get prosthetic which has special characteristics, namely anthropomorphism. The anthropomorphic prosthetic design refers to the improvement and development of the design to the stage of the similarity of the prosthetic movement to human hand movements. This study carries the design of the anthropomorphic 1-DOF prosthetic finger mechanism to get prosthetic at an affordable price. The optimization criteria for the similarity of movement with the human hand are formulated with two objective functions, namely the similarity of the range of motion and the total length of the finger that is completed simultaneously. The human hand movement that is a reference is the movement of conical object grasping on a standard size conical according to the maximum hand-held diameter anthropometry of an Indonesian people.
Rôles physiopathologiques de l'aldostérone : Apport des modèles animaux

Si la définition d’hormone minéralocorticoïde, c’est-à-dire modulant la réabsorption du sodium dans les cellules rénales, est toujours d’actualité pour l’aldostérone, ces dernières années ont vu l’émergence d’une série de problématiques soulevées par la mise en évidence de nouvelles cellules cibles, épithéliales ou non, où le rôle de l’hormone reste mal connu. Son implication en pathologie s’est élargie de façon spectaculaire (fibrose et insuffisance cardiaque, troubles de la mémoire, maladies génétiques affectant la pression artérielle), renouvelant l’intérêt de l’analyse de son mécanisme d’action dans des perspectives pathogéniques multiples, et stimulant la recherche de modèles cellulaires et animaux susceptibles de faire progresser les connaissances, ou encore d’offrir des outils pour tester de nouvelles approches thérapeutiques.