Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Anti-inflammatory effect of Gyeji-tang in a chronic obstructive pulmonary disease mouse model induced by cigarette smoke and lipopolysaccharide

Abstract Context Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a chronic inflammatory lung disease associated with respiratory symptoms and narrowing of airways. Gyeji-tang (GJT) is a traditional Asian medicine that has been used to relieve early-stage cold symptoms, headache, and chills. Objective We examined the effect and potential molecular action mechanism of GJT in a mouse model of COPD induced by cigarette smoke (CS) plus lipopolysaccharide (LPS). Materials and methods COPD was induced in C57BL/6J mice via daily exposure to CS for 1 h for 8 weeks and intranasal administration of LPS on weeks 1, 3, 5, and 7. GJT (100 or 200 mg/kg) or roflumilast (5 mg/kg) was administrated daily for the final 4 weeks of COPD induction. Results Administration of GJT significantly suppressed the CS/LPS-induced increases in: the numbers of total cells and macrophages in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid; the expression levels of tumour necrosis factor-α, interleukin (IL)-6, IL-1β, and IL-8; the activities (phosphorylation) of nuclear factor kappa B and signal transducer and activator of transcription 3; and the expression levels of the structural remodelling markers, transforming growth factor beta, matrix metallopeptidase (MMP)-7, and MMP-9. Discussion and conclusions These results demonstrate that GJT prevents the lung inflammation and airway remodelling induced by CS plus LPS exposure in mice, suggesting that GJT may have therapeutic potential for the treatment of COPD.
17β‐hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 2 activity, expression and cellular localization in abdominal adipose tissues from women

Context: 17β‐hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 2 (17β‐HSD2) may be involved in the local modulation of estradiol (E2) availability in adipose tissues. Objective: To assess the conversion of E2 into estrone (E1) as well as the expression of 17β‐HSD2 and its localization in omental (OM) and subcutaneous (SC) adipose tissues obtained from women. Methods: Rates of 14C‐E1 formation from 14C‐E2 were measured in OM and SC adipose tissue homogenates from 29 women. Specific 17β‐HSD2 inhibitor EM‐919 was tested in OM and SC adipose tissue homogenates (n = 6). 17β‐HSD2 mRNA expression was measured in whole OM and SC adipose tissues (n = 14). Cellular localization of the enzyme was examined using immunohistochemistry. Anthropometric measurements were obtained and body composition as well as body fat distribution were measured. Results: Significant 14C‐E1 formation from 14C‐E2 in OM and SC tissue homogenates was detected. The rate of 14C‐E1 formation was significantly higher in OM than SC adipose tissue (p < .0001). The conversion of 14C‐E2 to 14C‐E1 was significantly inhibited by EM‐919 in OM (p < .05) and SC (p < .05) adipose tissues. Significantly higher expression of 17β‐HSD2 mRNA in OM versus SC fat was found (p = .03). 17β‐HSD2 was localized in the vasculature of OM and SC tissues. Significant negative associations were detected between OM 17β‐HSD2 activity and body mass index, WC, lean body mass as well as SC adipose tissue areas. Conclusion: 17β‐HSD2 converts E2 to E1 in OM and SC adipose tissues of women. The activity of this enzyme decreases with increasing adiposity.
A review of microbial‐environmental interactions recorded in Proterozoic carbonate‐hosted chert

The record of life during the Proterozoic is preserved by several different lithologies, but two in particular are linked both spatially and temporally: chert and carbonate. These lithologies capture a snapshot of dominantly peritidal environments during the Proterozoic. Early diagenetic chert preserves some of the most exceptional Proterozoic biosignatures in the form of microbial body fossils and mat textures. This fossiliferous and kerogenous chert formed in shallow marine environments, where chert nodules, layers, and lenses are often surrounded by and encased within carbonate deposits that themselves often contain kerogen and evidence of former microbial mats. Here, we review the record of biosignatures preserved in peritidal Proterozoic chert and chert‐hosting carbonate and discuss this record in the context of experimental and environmental studies that have begun to shed light on the roles that microbes and organic compounds may have played in the formation of these deposits. Insights gained from these studies suggest temporal trends in microbial‐environmental interactions and place new constraints on past environmental conditions, such as the concentration of silica in Proterozoic seawater, interactions among organic compounds and cations in seawater, and the influence of microbial physiology and biochemistry on selective preservation by silicification.
Arterial spin labeling signal in the CSF: Implications for partial volume correction and blood–CSF barrier characterization

For better quantification of perfusion with arterial spin labeling (ASL), partial volume correction (PVC) is used to disentangle the signals from gray matter (GM) and white matter within any voxel. Based on physiological considerations, PVC algorithms typically assume zero signal in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Recent measurements, however, have shown that CSF‐ASL signal can exceed 10% of GM signal, even when using recommended ASL labeling parameters. CSF signal is expected to particularly affect PVC results in the choroid plexus. This study aims to measure the impact of CSF signal on PVC perfusion measurements, and to investigate the potential use of PVC to retrieve pure CSF‐ASL signal for blood–CSF barrier characterization. In vivo imaging included six pCASL sequences with variable label duration and post‐labeling delay (PLD), and an eight‐echo 3D‐GRASE readout. A dataset was simulated to estimate the effect of CSF‐PVC with known ground‐truth parameters. Differences between the results of CSF‐PVC and non‐CSF‐PVC were estimated for regions of interest (ROIs) based on GM probability, and a separate ROI isolating the choroid plexus. In vivo, the suitability of PVC‐CSF signal as an estimate of pure CSF was investigated by comparing its time course with the long‐TE CSF signal. Results from both simulation and in vivo data indicated that including the CSF signal in PVC improves quantification of GM CBF by approximately 10%. In simulated data, this improvement was greater for multi‐PLD (model fitting) quantification than for single PLD (~1–5% difference). In the choroid plexus, the difference between CSF‐PVC and non‐CSF‐PVC was much larger, averaging around 30%. Long‐TE (pure) CSF signal could not be estimated from PVC CSF signal as it followed a different time course, indicating the presence of residual macrovascular signal in the PVC. The inclusion of CSF adds value to PVC for more accurate measurements of GM perfusion, and especially for quantification of perfusion in the choroid plexus and study of the glymphatic system.
Measurement of wave propagation through a tube using dual transducers for elastography in arteries

Objective. Measuring waves induced with acoustic radiation force (ARF) in arteries has been studied over the last decade. To date, it remains a challenge to quantitatively assess the local arterial biomechanical properties. The cylindrical shape and waveguide behavior of waves propagating in the arterial wall pose complexities to determining the mechanical properties of the artery. Approach. In this paper, an artery-mimicking tube in water is examined utilizing three-dimensional measurements. The cross-section of the tube is measured while a transducer is translated over 41 different positions along the length of the tube. Motion in the radial direction is calculated using two components of motion which are measured from the two orthogonal views of the cross-section. This enables more accurate estimation of motion along the circumference of tube. Main results. The results provide more information to categorize the motion in tube wall into two types of responses: a transient response and a steady state response. The transient response is caused by ARF application and the waves travel along the length of the tube for a relatively short period of time. This corresponds to the axial and circumferential propagating waves. The two circumferential waves travel along the circumference of tube in CW (clockwise) and CCW (counter-clockwise) direction and result in a standing wave. By using a directional filter, the two waves were successfully separated, and their propagation was more clearly visualized. As a steady state response, a circumferential mode is generated showing a symmetric motion (i.e. the proximal and distal walls move in the opposite direction) following the transient response. Significance. This study provides a more comprehensive understanding of the waves produced in an artery-mimicking tube with ARF application, which will provide opportunities for improving measurement of arterial mechanical properties.
Livestock and rodents within an endemic focus of Visceral Leishmaniasis are not reservoir hosts for Leishmania donovani

Leishmaniasis on the Indian subcontinent is thought to have an anthroponotic transmission cycle. There is no direct evidence that a mammalian host other than humans can be infected with Leishmania donovani and transmit infection to the sand fly vector. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the impact of sand fly feeding on other domestic species and provide clinical evidence regarding possible non-human reservoirs through experimental sand fly feeding on cows, water buffalo goats and rodents. We performed xenodiagnosis using colonized Phlebotomus argentipes sand flies to feed on animals residing in villages with active Leishmania transmission based on current human cases. Xenodiagnoses on mammals within the endemic area were performed and blood-fed flies were analyzed for the presence of Leishmania via qPCR 48hrs after feeding. Blood samples were also collected from these mammals for qPCR and serology. Although we found evidence of Leishmania infection within some domestic mammals, they were not infectious to vector sand flies. Monitoring infection in sand flies and non-human blood meal sources in endemic villages leads to scientific proof of exposure and parasitemia in resident mammals. Lack of infectiousness of these domestic mammals to vector sand flies indicates that they likely play no role, or a very limited role in Leishmania donovani transmission to people in Bihar. Therefore, a surveillance system in the peri-/post-elimination phase of visceral leishmaniasis (VL) must monitor absence of transmission. Continued surveillance of domestic mammals in outbreak villages is necessary to ensure that a non-human reservoir is not established, including domestic mammals not present in this study, specifically dogs.
Exploring the security and privacy risks of chatbots in messaging services

The unprecedented adoption of messaging platforms for work and recreation has made it an attractive target for malicious actors. In this context, third-party apps (so-called chatbots) offer a variety of attractive functionalities that support the experience in large channels. Unfortunately, under the current permission and deployment models, chatbots in messaging systems could steal information from channels without the victim's awareness. In this paper, we propose a methodology that incorporates static and dynamic analysis for automatically assessing security and privacy issues in messaging platform chatbots. We also provide preliminary findings from the popular Discord platform that highlight the risks that chatbots pose to users. Unlike other popular platforms like Slack or MS Teams, Discord does not implement user-permission checks---a task entrusted to third-party developers. Among others, we find that 55% of chatbots from a leading Discord repository request the "administrator" permission, and only 4.35% of chatbots with permissions actually provide a privacy policy.
Understanding the Mental Health Information Communication among the Seniors in China: Text Mining Analysis

Ageing has become a worldwide challenge, especially in China, and mental disorders are always associated with ageing. Although previous studies have focused on a certain issue or a certain group of the population, more research on the mental health of the seniors needs to be done from a comprehensive perspective. This paper studies the mental health information communication among the Chinese seniors. Text mining methods were used for content analysis to find the main topic of mental health and social network analysis was applied to explore the connection between the seniors to study their communication. Results show that the senior online communities develop several active networks to communicate their mental health concerns, however their information communication remains at a shallow stage. This study could assist researchers on further study and provide practitioners with pertinent measures.
Continuous Prediction of Acute Kidney Injury from Patients with Sepsis in ICU Settings: A Sequential Transduction Model Based on Attention

Septic patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) are highly susceptible to acute kidney injury (AKI), which leads to reduced survival in these patients. It is thus necessary to develop a model that can predict the risk of AKI in septic patients in real time. Although continuous or near-continuous risk assessment is likely necessary, few risk models have been designed for this purpose. Therefore, we constructed a model to continuously predict sepsis-induced AKI in ICU. Our proposed model optimally achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 79.5 and an area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) of 65.0, performed better than other methods, including logistic regression, XGBoost, and RNN, on a full set of performance evaluation processes. Discrimination as well as DCA were also shown the proposed algorithm performed superior to other methods.
Noninvasive and Cuffless Blood Pressure Estimation Using Photoplethysmography Index

Noninvasive and cuffless blood pressure estimation is crucial for the early prevention, diagnosis and treatment of hypertension and related cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. The noninvasive cuffless blood pressure measurement method based on pulse wave transit time (PTT) has been widely studied due to its noninvasive, low cost and simple operation. However, a single PTT cannot accurately track various changes in blood pressure. Therefore, it is necessary to explore new parameters other than PTT that can reflect blood pressure changes and be used for blood pressure estimation. This paper proposes the use of systolic area (SA) to estimate blood pressure, a feature that can be obtained from the photoplethysmographic signal (PPG). At the same time, we try to compare this feature with the pulse wave at half amplitude (PWHA) and the pulse wave amplitude (AM), which are also obtained from PPG, and use the method of multiple linear regression to fuse them. In addition, we did a controlled experiment to compare the traditional PTT-based method with the method based on these feature fusions. The results showed that when SA is used alone for BP estimation, for SBP and DBP, the accuracy is 0.004±6.55 mmHg and -0.09±3.52 mmHg, respectively. When PWHA, SA, AM and PTT are combined, for SBP and DBP, the accuracy is 0.29±4.97 mmHg and -0.14±3.06 mmHg, respectively. These results demonstrate that SA is a promising feature, and the method based on the above four features fusion can greatly improve the accuracy of blood pressure estimation. At the same time, it is also possible to rely solely on PPG signal to estimate blood pressure.
Are we ready for metaverse?: a measurement study of social virtual reality platforms

Social virtual reality (VR) has the potential to gradually replace traditional online social media, thanks to recent advances in consumer-grade VR devices and VR technology itself. As the vital foundation for building the Metaverse, social VR has been extensively examined by the computer graphics and HCI communities. However, there has been little systematic study dissecting the network performance of social VR, other than hype in the industry. To fill this critical gap, we conduct an in-depth measurement study of five popular social VR platforms: AltspaceVR, Horizon Worlds, Mozilla Hubs, Rec Room, and VRChat. Our experimental results reveal that all these platforms are still in their early stage and face fundamental technical challenges to realize the grand vision of Metaverse. For example, their throughput, end-to-end latency, and on-device computation resource utilization increase almost linearly with the number of users, leading to potential scalability issues. We identify the platform servers' direct forwarding of avatar data for embodying users without further processing as the main reason for the poor scalability and discuss potential solutions to address this problem. Moreover, while the visual quality of the current avatar embodiment is low and fails to provide a truly immersive experience, improving the avatar embodiment will consume more network bandwidth and further increase computation overhead and latency, making the scalability issues even more pressing.
Internet scale reverse traceroute

Knowledge of Internet paths allows operators and researchers to better understand the Internet and troubleshoot problems. Paths are often asymmetric, so measuring just the forward path only gives partial visibility. Despite the existence of Reverse Traceroute, a technique that captures reverse paths (the sequence of routers traversed by traffic from an arbitrary, uncontrolled destination to a given source), this technique did not fulfill the needs of operators and the research community, as it had limited coverage, low throughput, and inconsistent accuracy. In this paper we design, implement and evaluate revtr 2.0, an Internet-scale Reverse Traceroute system that combines novel measurement approaches and studies with a large-scale deployment to improve throughput, accuracy, and coverage, enabling the first exploration of reverse paths at Internet scale. revtr 2.0 can run 15M reverse traceroutes in one day. This scale allows us to open the system to external sources and users, and supports tasks such as traffic engineering and troubleshooting.
MalNet: a binary-centric network-level profiling of IoT malware

Where are the IoT C2 servers located? What vulnerabilities does IoT malware try to exploit? What DDoS attacks are launched in practice? In this work, we conduct a large scale study to answer these questions. Specifically, we collect and dynamically analyze 1447 malware binaries on the day that they become publicly known between March 2021 and March 2022 from VirusTotal and MalwareBazaar. By doing this, we are able to observe and profile their behavior at the network level including: (a) C2 communication, (b) proliferation, and (c) issued DDoS attacks. Our comprehensive study provides the following key observations. First, we quantify the elusive behavior of C2 servers: 91% of the time a server does not respond to a second probe four hours after a successful probe. In addition, we find that 15% of the live servers that we find are not known by threat intelligence feeds available on VirusTotal. Second, we find that the IoT malware relies on fairly old vulnerabilities in its proliferation. Our binaries attempt to exploit 12 different vulnerabilities with 9 of them more than 4 years old, while the most recent one was 5 months old. Third, we observe the launch of 42 DDoS attacks that span 8 types of attacks, with two types of attacks targeting gaming servers. The promising results indicate the significant value of using a dynamic analysis approach that includes active measurements and probing towards detecting and containing IoT botnets.
Causal impact of Android go on mobile web performance

The rapid growth in the number of entry-level smartphones and mobile broadband subscriptions in developing countries has served as a motivation for several projects focused on improving mobile users' quality of experience (QoE). One such initiative is the development of Android Go, a customized operating system designed to run over entry-level smartphones. Today, more than 80% entry-level Android smartphones run Android Go. Despite its growing popularity, its effectiveness in improving the Web QoE remains unclear. This paper presents the first independent empirical analysis of Android Go's causal impact on mobile Web performance. We use a combination of controlled experiments and a set of methodological approaches from the econometrics literature to find unbiased estimates of the average causal effect. Our analysis provides insights that have implications for different stakeholders in the ecosystem of entry-level devices.
Challenges in decentralized name management: the case of ENS

DNS has often been criticized for inherent design flaws, which make the system vulnerable to attack. Further, domain names are not fully controlled by users, meaning that they can easily be taken down by authorities and registrars. Due to this, there have been efforts to build a decentralized name service that gives greater control to domain owners. The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a major example. Yet, no existing work has systematically studied this emerging system, particularly regarding security and misbehavior. To address this gap, we present the first large-scale measurement study of ENS. Our findings suggest that ENS has shown growth during its four years' evolution. We identify several security issues, including traditional name system problems, as well as new issues introduced by the unique properties of ENS. We find that attackers are abusing the system with thousands of squatting ENS names, a number of scam blockchain addresses and indexing of malicious websites. We further develop a new record persistence attack, to find that 22,716 . eth names (3.7% of all names) are vulnerable to name hijacking. Our exploration suggests that our community should invest more effort into the detection and mitigation of issues in decentralized name services.
A first-look at segment routing deployment in a large european ISP

This extended abstract discusses our first attempt in revealing the deployment and usage of Segment Routing with MPLS as forwarding plane (Sr-Mpls), in a large European ISP. To do so, we study a longitudinal traceroute like dataset. Early results show that Sr-Mpls is mainly used in interworking with classic MPLS tunnels.