Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Isolation and characterization of head and neck cancer-derived peritumoral and cancer-associated fibroblasts

Introduction Head and neck squamous cell carcinomas (HNSCC) are characterized by strong cellular and molecular heterogeneity and treatment resistance entailing poor survival. Besides cell-intrinsic properties, carcinoma cells receive important cues from non-malignant cells within the tumor microenvironment (TME). Cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) are a major component of the TME that impact on the molecular make-up of malignant cells and have a decisive function in tumor progression. However, the potential functionality of fibroblasts within tumor-adjacent, macroscopically normal tissue remains poorly explored. Methods Here, we isolated primary peritumoral fibroblasts (PtFs) from macroscopically normal tissue in vicinity of primary human papillomavirus-negative and -positive oropharyngeal HNSCC and compared their phenotype and functionality with matched CAFs (n = 5 pairs) and with human oral fibroblasts (hOFs). Results Expression patterns of CD90, CD73, CD105, smooth muscle actin, Vimentin, and S100A4 were comparable in PtFs, CAFs, and hOFs. Cell proliferation and doubling times of CAFs and PtFs were heterogeneous across patients (n =2 PtF>CAF; n = 1 CAF>PtF; n = 2 CAF=PtF) and reflected inferior growth than hOFs. Furthermore, PtFs displayed an reduced heterogeneity in cell size compared to matched CAFs, which were characterized by the presence of single large cells. Overall, conditioned supernatants from CAFs had more frequently growth-promoting effects on a panel of carcinoma cell lines of the upper aerodigestive tract carcinoma cell lines (Cal27, Cal33, FaDu, and Kyse30), whereas significant differences in migration-inducing effects demonstrated a higher potential of PtFs. Except for Kyse30, CAFs were significantly superior to hOFs in promoting proliferation, while PtFs induced stronger migration than hOFs in all carcinoma lines tested. Analysis of soluble factors demonstrated significantly increased VEGF-A production in CAFs (except in pat.8), and significantly increased PDGF-BB production in PtFs of two patients. Tube formation assays confirmed a significantly enhanced angiogenic potential of conditioned supernatants from CAFs compared to hOFs on human umbilical vascular endothelial cells (HUVECs) in vitro. Discussion Hence, matched CAFs and PtFs present in HNSCC patients are heterogeneous in their proliferation-, migration-, and angiogenesis-promoting capacity. Despite this heterogeneity, CAFs induced stronger carcinoma cell proliferation and HUVEC tube formation overall, whereas PtFs promoted migration of tumor cells more strongly.
Justifications of emotional responses to eliciting situations: A narratological approach to the CAD hypothesis

The CAD hypothesis holds that there is mapping between the three moral emotions (contempt, anger and disgust) and the three moral codes of community, autonomy and divinity. Different from previous designs to establish correlations between emotions and eliciting situations which instantiate moral codes, this paper takes a narratological approach to the CAD hypothesis by examining the relationships between the three moral emotions and moral judgment relating to the three moral codes in the context of eliciting situations. First, similarity data pertaining to eliciting situations were collected by using the Order k/n-1 with fixed K method. Second, the participants were instructed to write down both their responses and justifications of their responses to the eliciting situations. A narratological analysis of the justifications of responses show that they vary along three variables: narrator, character, and basis (mostly in the form of moral judgment). The descriptive statistics of participants’ responses and of their justifications show that more than a half of responses are in the categories of anger (24.8%), disgust (20.7), and contempt (7.7%) and that about 60% of justifications contain a component of moral judgment based on the three moral codes of autonomy (30.03%), divinity (18.1), and community (11.82%). Correspondence analyses among eliciting situations, emotional responses and the three variables of justifications, together with results from the Multidimensional Scaling analysis of the similarity data, show that the CAD hypothesis is largely supported if mappings are set between the emotions in question and moral judgment concerning the eliciting situations (the basis variable of justification) and that the hypothesis is conditioned by the variable of character.
Women for science and science for women: Gaps, challenges and opportunities towards optimizing pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV-1 prevention

Preventing new HIV infections remains a global challenge. Young women continue to bear a disproportionate burden of infection. Oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), offers a novel women-initiated prevention technology and PrEP trials completed to date underscore the importance of their inclusion early in trials evaluating new HIV PrEP technologies. Data from completed topical and systemic PrEP trials highlight the role of gender specific physiological and social factors that impact PrEP uptake, adherence and efficacy. Here we review the past and current developments of HIV-1 prevention options for women with special focus on PrEP considering the diverse factors that can impact PrEP efficacy. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of inclusion of female scientists, clinicians, and community advocates in scientific efforts to further improve HIV prevention strategies.
Analysis of single-nucleotide polymorphisms in genes associated with triple-negative breast cancer

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a rare variant of breast cancer (BC) known to be aggressive and refractory. TNBC lacks effective early diagnostic and therapeutic options leading to poorer outcomes. The genomic landscape and alterations leading to BC and TNBC are vast and unclear. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are a widespread form of genetic alterations with a multi-faceted impact on multiple diseases, including BC and TNBC. In this study, we attempted to construct a framework that could identify genes associated with TNBC and screen the SNPs reported in these genes using a set of computational predictors. This framework helped identify BRCA1, BRCA2, EGFR, PIK3CA, PTEN, and TP53 as recurrent genes associated with TNBC. We found 2%–29% of reported SNPs across genes to be typed pathogenic by all the predictors in the framework. We demonstrate that our framework prediction on BC samples identifies 99% of alterations as pathogenic by at least one predictor and 32% as pathogenic by all the predictors. Our framework could be an initial step in developing an early diagnosis of TNBC and potentially help improve the understanding of therapeutic resistance and sensitivity.
Volatile organic compounds shape belowground plant–fungi interactions

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs), a bouquet of chemical compounds released by all life forms, play essential roles in trophic interactions. VOCs can facilitate a large number of interactions with different organisms belowground. VOCs-regulated plant-plant or plant-insect interaction both below and aboveground has been reported extensively. Nevertheless, there is little information about the role of VOCs derived from soilborne pathogenic fungi and beneficial fungi, particularly mycorrhizae, in influencing plant performance. In this review, we show how plant VOCs regulate plant-soilborne pathogenic fungi and beneficial fungi (mycorrhizae) interactions. How fungal VOCs mediate plant–soilborne pathogenic and beneficial fungi interactions are presented and the most common methods to collect and analyze belowground volatiles are evaluated. Furthermore, we suggest a promising method for future research on belowground VOCs.
Zygospores of the green alga Spirogyra: new insights from structural and chemical imaging

Zygnematophyceae, a class of streptophyte green algae and sister group to land plants (Embryophytes) live in aquatic to semi-terrestrial habitats. The transition from aquatic to terrestrial environments requires adaptations in the physiology of vegetative cells and in the structural properties of their cell walls. Sexual reproduction occurs in Zygnematophyceae by conjugation and results in the formation of zygospores, possessing unique multi-layered cell walls, which might have been crucial in terrestrialization. We investigated the structure and chemical composition of field sampled Spirogyra sp. zygospore cell walls by multiple microscopical and spectral imaging techniques: light microscopy, confocal laser scanning microscopy, transmission electron microscopy following high pressure freeze fixation/freeze substitution, Raman spectroscopy and atomic force microscopy. This comprehensive analysis allowed the detection of the subcellular organization and showed three main layers of the zygospore wall, termed endo-, meso- and exospore. The endo- and exospore are composed of polysaccharides with different ultrastructural appearance, whereas the electron dense middle layer contains aromatic compounds as further characterized by Raman spectroscopy. The possible chemical composition remains elusive, but algaenan or a sporopollenin-like material is suggested. Similar compounds with a non-hydrolysable character can be found in moss spores and pollen of higher plants, suggesting a protective function against desiccation stress and high irradiation. While the tripartite differentiation of the zygospore wall is well established in Zygnematopyhceae, Spirogyra showed cellulose fibrils arranged in a helicoidal pattern in the endo- and exospore. Initial incorporation of lipid bodies during early zygospore wall formation was also observed, suggesting a key role of lipids in zygospore wall synthesis. Multimodal imaging revealed that the cell wall of the sexually formed zygospores possess a highly complex internal structure as well as aromatics, likely acting as protective compounds and leading to impregnation. Both, the newly discovered special three-dimensional arrangement of microfibrils and the integration of highly resistant components in the cell wall are not found in the vegetative state. The variety of methods gave a comprehensive view on the intricate zygospore cell wall and its potential key role in the terrestrial colonization and plant evolution is discussed.
Targets of histone H3 lysine 9 methyltransferases

Histone H3 lysine 9 di- and trimethylation are well-established marks of constitutively silenced heterochromatin domains found at repetitive DNA elements including pericentromeres, telomeres, and transposons. Loss of heterochromatin at these sites causes genomic instability in the form of aberrant DNA repair, chromosome segregation defects, replication stress, and transposition. H3K9 di- and trimethylation also regulate cell type-specific gene expression during development and form a barrier to cellular reprogramming. However, the role of H3K9 methyltransferases extends beyond histone methylation. There is a growing list of non-histone targets of H3K9 methyltransferases including transcription factors, steroid hormone receptors, histone modifying enzymes, and other chromatin regulatory proteins. Additionally, two classes of H3K9 methyltransferases modulate their own function through automethylation. Here we summarize the structure and function of mammalian H3K9 methyltransferases, their roles in genome regulation and constitutive heterochromatin, as well as the current repertoire of non-histone methylation targets including cases of automethylation.
Higher education personnel’s perceptions about telepresence robots

The interest towards using telepresence robots in a variety of educational contexts is growing, as they have a great potential to enhance the educational experience of remote learners and provide support for teachers. This paper describes a study, examining the perception of Georgian university personnel about the use of telepresence robots in education. This exploratory research aimed to obtain evidence-based information on how the personnel (16 persons) from eight Georgian universities perceived the telepresence robots’ role in enhancing learning and teaching, and what challenges, benefits, opportunities, weaknesses and threats would characterise these robots. The results of the study revealed that the university personnel perceived telepresence robots to have a great potential to enhance educational activities. In addition, the participants indicated the major challenges, benefits, opportunities, weaknesses and threats, regarding integrating telepresence robotics into the teaching and learning in Georgia. Recommendations for future research are also presented.
Environmental Remediation of Contaminated Wastewater with Ammonium Using Clay-Based Adsorbents

Due to a lack of water treatment technology, developing and emerging nations have become significant polluters and water shortage is exacerbated by pollution. Ammonium toxicity is a huge global environmental concern with no clear solution. Population growth and industrialization destroy the ecosystem. Common and industrial products contain ammonium ions. Water pollution damages fish and other aquatic life. An inexpensive and green wastewater treatment method is adsorption. Adsorbent polymers that remove ammonium ions from wastewater have been explored. Ammonium ions are very hazardous when deposited into surface waters. Surfaces of bentonite and montmorillonite clay may attach sodium ammonium ions. They are cheap and abundant, therefore used to treat drain water. Bentonite outperformed montmorillonite in eliminating ammonium ions from water. Bentonite and montmorillonite clays were used to remove residual ammonium ions. These are utilized for bentonitic and montmorillonitic clays. Both clays were absorbed in a neutral pH, and it was free of sulfuric acid, ammonium ions, and phosphorus ions. Montmorillonitic clay boosted TDS by nearly 10% whereas bentonitic clay only raised TDS by 1%. Adsorption may inexpensively filter water and the surface charge of adsorbents affect their adsorption capacity. Ammonium ions may be recycled, and several bioreactors can remove ammonium ions from liquid and solid phases. Iterate over several models and the Freundlich isotherm model outperforms the Langmuir model by 5%. And bentonite clay adsorbs better due to iron oxide content.
Generalisation of the Sinai anomalous diffusion law

Sinai has considered a novel one-dimensional walk with a random bias field E on each site. He has shown that when the field is taken with equal probability to be +E,, or -E, the RMS displacement R ((x2))"' increases with time t by the anomalously slow law R -(log t)'. Here we introduce long-range correlation between the random fields on each site by choosing a 'string' of k sites to have the same value of E, where k is chosen from the power law distribution P (k) = k-O. We find that the Sinai law is generalised to the form R - (log I)', where J sticks at the Sinai value y = 2 for p 2. However, for 1 < p < 2, y varies continuously with p as y = p/( p - 1). We interpret this result physically in terms of a novel crossover between the physics underlying the Sinai effect and the physics of biased diffusion.
Research on the Role of Abstraction in Computer Programming

Nowadays, a growing number of schools are trying to introduce computer programming into their learning activities. It is presented as a mean of engagement throughout the learning process. This research is an ongoing attempt to better understand what characterizes computer programming, considered as a human activity, with a special focus on the role it may or may not play in the development of abstraction. A total of 19 subjects, each with a minimum of five years of cumulated programming experience, have accepted to take part in an individual 45-minute semi-structured interview which includes three themes: their background related to computer programming, their perception on the cognitive and affective components of this activity, and their perception on computer programming lessons for everybody from childhood. Here we propose a preliminary analysis of one of these interviews. In the end this research will help clarifying cognitive and affective components involved in computer programming.
Theoretical Development of Nonlinear Spring Models for the Second Harmonics on an Interface between Two Solids

Based on the exact solutions for the second-harmonic generations of the fundamental longitudinal and transverse waves propagating normally through a thin elastic layer between two solids, the approximate representations termed as 'nonlinear spring models' relating the stresses and displacements on both sides of the interface are rigorously developed by asymptotic expansions of the wave fields for an elastic layer in the limit of small thickness to wavelength ratio. The applicability for the so-called nonlinear spring models is numerically analyzed by comparison with exact solutions for the second harmonic wave reflections. The present nonlinear spring models lay a theoretical foundation to evaluate the interfacial properties by nonlinear acoustic waves.
Huge splitting of polariton states in microcavities under stress

The application of inhomogeneous stress, used to trap polaritons in a microcavity, results in a splitting between different polarization states of the polaritons. The splitting of the polariton states arises primarily from the splitting of the exciton states in the quantum wells embedded inside the microcavity due to the electron-hole exchange interaction and the mixing of the light- and heavy-hole excitons with stress. The new mixed exciton states have different oscillator strengths, thereby enhancing the splitting of the lower polaritons by a factor of four more than previously reported exciton spin splittings. We observe splittings between the different polarizations, at normal incidence, of almost 1 meV. The physical explanation and a corresponding simulation for the fine structure splitting of the polaritons observed in stressed microcavities are presented.
Outliers analysis and one class classification approach for planetary gearbox diagnosis

An application of outlier analysis for diagnosis of gearboxes working under non-stationary operating conditions is considered. The analysis is performed using quite large data characterizing (by 15 power spectrum amplitudes) two gearboxes, one in bad and the other in good condition. Analysis of Mahalanobis Distances in the two data sets shows that both of them are highly heterogeneous and non-Gaussian. A mapping of the data from the set 'good' to two dimensions by the non-linear Neuroscale method permits to visualize the data in a plane. Using the derived mapping, some decision boundaries (DBs) – permitting to identify a given fraction alpha = 0.05 of low density outliers – are constructed for the 'good' set. This is done using three methods: 1. Parzen kernel density, 2. mixture of Gaussians and 3. Suport Vector Data Description (SVDD). Each of the obtained DBs was tested using the bad data. For all 3 methods more than 98% of the bad data points were found outside the DBs constructed for the 'good' set.
Question Types and Intents in Human Dialogues

—This project proposes to preprocess the existing EmpatheticDialogues dataset, consisting of 25K conversations, into a new version that comprises dialogues which contain empathetic questions in the ﬁnal listener’s turn. The dialogues were then annotated according to the empathetic question in the ﬁnal turn, following a ﬁne-grained taxonomy of 9 question types and 12 question intents. The annotation was performed through a set of techniques: manual annotation, pre-trained sentence-similarity classiﬁers based on siamese and triplet networks, and BERT-based classiﬁers. This project describes the workﬂow employed to preprocess the original empathetic dialogues, perform manual annotation on a small subset of dialogues, apply the pre-trained sentence-similarity classiﬁers to extend the manually-annotated data by a number of additional examples, and train the BERT-based classiﬁers to annotated the rest of the data points. Although the labels were highly unbalanced for both question types and intents in the extended manually-labelled dataset, the BERT-based classiﬁers achieved accuracies of 78% for types and 75% for intents, eventually being used to label the rest of the data points. The resulting dataset was conﬁrmed to follow the typical human social interaction patterns after its quality evaluation was performed through visualisation techniques.
Health Talk: Understanding Practices of Popular Professional YouTubers

Practices related to health are circulated widely on YouTube. With a health psychology perspective, we present a study to understand health and wellbeing-related practices of a group of popular, professional YouTubers from the audio-visual content they produce. We first identify, via polytextual thematic analysis, six thematic health-related categories, and use them to label a set of 2500 YouTube videos. Agreement among three independent annotators was acceptable for these health-related categories. We then present an analysis of speech transcriptions and visual content, demonstrating that distinctive patterns exist for these health-related categories. These include linguistic markers and specific scene types and objects. Finally, with an interpretability focus, we study the feasibility of classifying health-related video categories in a binary setting, and compare performance across features, finding best accuracy for linguistic features (74-87%), and various patterns of linguistic and visual relevance used for the classification of health categories. The results shows promise to support mixed-methods research in health psychology, combining manual analysis and data-driven methods. More generally, our work contributes to the understanding of current health practices shared and promoted on social video.
Automatic Registration of Coastal Remotely Sensed Imagery by Affine Invariant Feature Matching with Shoreline Constraint

A new approach based on Affine Invariant Feature Matching (AIFM) with a filtering technique is proposed for automatic registration of remotely sensed image in coastal areas. The novelty of this approach is an automatic filtering technique using RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) with shoreline constraint for AIFM to remove all wrong matches and simultaneously keep as many correct matches as possible. To implement it, a progressive threshold strategy (from small value to large value) is presented to determine an appropriate RANSAC threshold, in which the progressive process is guided by shoreline constraint. The proposed approach (with filtering) is compared with standard AIFM (without filtering) using two typical image pairs in coastal areas. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach can always provide much better matching results than standard AIFM.