Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Experiment on the effect of Artemisia sieversiana extract on hair loss prevention and cell growth

Objectives: This study aimed to examine the safety, effects on proliferation of hair papilla cells, and anti-inflammatory and antioxidant mechanisms of Artemisia sieversiana Ehrh. ex Willd. (AS) extract.Methods: Safety tests through purity testing, acute toxicity tests, and repeated toxicity tests were performed using AS extract (ASE) which had been dried for over two years. Cell culture and proliferation tests were conducted; VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor), bFGF (basic fibroblast growth factor), and EGF (epidermal growth factor) and protein expression analyses were performed for mechanistic evaluation; and inhibitory effects of ASE on the RNA expression of testosterone, 5α-reductase, and aromatase was assessed. The anti-inflammatory and antioxidant efficacy of ASE was confirmed by measuring the levels of nitric oxide, inflammatory mediators (TNF-α and PGE2), inflammatory cytokines (IL-1β, IL-6, and IL-8), and chemokine MCP-1.Results: The safety of ASE was confirmed. The mechanism of cell proliferation in human hair follicle dermal papilla cells involved the promotion of VEGF, bFGF, and EGF expression. ASE decreased mRNA expression of testosterone, 5α-reductase, and aromatase-1 in a concentration-dependent manner. PGE2 and TNF-α production by inflammatory mediators was also significantly decreased in a concentration-dependent manner, and inflammatory cytokine and chemokine expression was inhibited.Conclusions: ASE is suggested to promote papillary cell growth at the cellular level, to suppress expression of various enzymes involved in hair cycle and cell death, and to inhibit hair loss through anti-androgen, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant effects.
Hierarchical Classification using Neighbourhood Exploration for Sparse Text Tweets

Twitter has grown into a vast network of small informal text, and navigating it often becomes difficult for us. Here, we explore Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches to make the topic classification of tweets easier. We do so with the use case for filtering non-profit tweets among different categories which are arranged in a hierarchy. This paper proposes an efficient pipeline for filtering relevant tweets and a novel data augmentation strategy for sparse datasets. Our data augmentation technique shows a significant leap in the training metrics and the accuracy on the test data increases by 9.52% and the F1-score by 24.82%.
Nobiletin Alleviates Astrocyte Activation and Oxidative Stress Induced by Hypoxia In Vitro

Increasing evidence indicates that nobiletin (NOB) is a promising neuroprotective agent. Astrocyte activation plays a key role in neurodegenerative disorders. Thus, this study aims to investigate the effects of NOB on astrocyte activation and the potential mechanisms. In this study, astrocytes were exposed to hypoxia injury for 24 h to induce activation in vitro. Glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) was chosen as a marker of astrocyte activation. To evaluate the effects of NOB on the migration of activated astrocytes, we used a scratch wound healing assay and Transwell migration assay. In addition, the levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS), malondialdehyde (MDA), mitochondrial membrane potential, Nrf2 and HO-1 were measured to investigate the mechanisms of NOB in the activation of astrocytes. We found that NOB alleviated astrocyte activation and decreased GFAP expression during hypoxia. Simultaneously, NOB alleviated the migration of astrocytes induced by hypoxia. With NOB treatment, hypoxia-induced oxidative stress was partially reversed, including reducing the production of ROS and MDA. Furthermore, NOB significantly improved the mitochondrial dysfunction in activated astrocytes. Finally, NOB promoted Nrf2 nuclear translocation and HO-1 expression in response to continuous oxidative damage. Our study indicates, for the first time, that NOB alleviates the activation of astrocytes induced by hypoxia in vitro, in part by ameliorating oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction. This provides new insights into the neuroprotective effects of NOB.
Expression of Prostate-specific Membrane Antigen (PSMA) in Papillary Renal Cell Carcinoma - Overview and Report on a Large Multicenter Cohort

Prostate specific membrane antigen (PSMA) is an emerging diagnostic and therapeutic target in prostate cancer. 68Ga-PSMA-labeled hybrid imaging is used for the detection of prostate primary tumors and metastases. Therapeutic applications such as Lutetium-177 PSMA radionuclide therapy or bispecific antibodies that target PSMA are currently under investigation within clinical trials. The expression of PSMA, however, is not specific to prostate-tissue. It has been described in the neovascular endothelium of different types of cancer such as breast cancer, and clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC). The aim of this study was to analyze PSMA expression in papillary RCC (pRCC) type 1 and type 2, the most common non-ccRCC subtypes, and to evaluate the potential of PSMA-targeted imaging and treatment in pRCC. Formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tissue samples of primary tumors were analyzed for PSMA expression by immunohistochemistry. Out of n=374 pRCC specimens from the multicenter PANZAR consortium, n=197 pRCC type 1 and n=110 type 2 specimens were eligible for analysis and correlated with clinical data. In pRCC type 1 PSMA staining was positive in 4 of 197 (2.0%) samples whereas none (0/110) of the pRCC type 2 samples were positive for PSMA in this large cohort of pRCC patients. No significant PSMA expression was detected in pRCC. Reflecting current clinical evaluation of PMSA expression in RCC do not encourage further analysis in papillary subtypes.
In situ Co-Delivery of Doxorubicin and Cisplatin by Injectable Thermosensitive Hydrogels for Enhanced Osteosarcoma Treatment

Purpose Osteosarcoma is considered as the most common primary malignant bone tumor in children and adolescents, and the treatments including chemotherapy and surgery were far from satisfactory. Localized tumor treatments by hydrogels incorporating combined chemotherapeutic drugs have recently emerged as superior approaches for enhanced anti-tumor effects and reduced systemic toxicity. Methods A novel injectable thermosensitive poly (lactide-co- glycolide)-poly (ethylene glycol)-poly(lactide-co-glycolide) triblock copolymer hydrogel containing doxorubicin and cisplatin for the localized chemotherapy of osteosarcoma were synthesized and characterized. The in vitro drug release properties of the drugs-loaded hydrogels were investigated. To study the anti-tumor efficacy of hydrogels depots in vitro, the cytotoxicity and apoptosis rate against Saos-2 and MG-63 cells were evaluated by MTT, Annexin V and PCR methods. The in vivo synergistic anti-tumor efficacy of the multi-drugs co-loaded hydrogels was investigated by human osteosarcoma xenografts. Additionally, the systemic toxic side effects were evaluated by ex vivo histological analysis of the major organs of the mice. Results The PLGA-PEG-PLGA copolymer solution underwent a sol-gel transition at appropriate temperature and degraded in the PBS, presenting a friendly biocompatibility in vitro. The in vitro cell viability tests demonstrated that DOX and CDDP co-loaded hydrogels exhibited synergistic anti-proliferation effect, due to the sustained release of drugs from the drugs-loaded hydrogel. The treatment with DOX and CDDP co-loaded hydrogel led to the highest efficiency in inhibiting the tumor growth, enhanced tumor necrosis rate and increased regulation of the apoptosis-related gene expressions, indicating a synergistic anti-tumor efficacy in vivo. Additionally, ex vivo histological analysis of the nude mice exhibited low systemic toxicity. Conclusion The combination treatment of osteosarcoma by localized, sustained co-delivery of DOX and CDDP by PLGA-PEG-PLGA hydrogel may serve as a promising strategy for efficient clinical treatment of osteosarcoma.
Identification of Genes in Xanthomonas euvesicatoria pv. rosa That Are Host Limiting in Tomato

Xanthomonas euvesicatoria pv. rosa strain Xer07 causes a leaf spot on a Rosa sp. and is closely related to X. euvesicatoria pv. euvesicatoria (Xee) and X. perforans (Xp), causal agents of bacterial spot of tomato. However, Xer07 is not pathogenic on tomato and elicits a hypersensitive reaction (HR). We compared the genomes of the three bacterial species to identify the factors that limit Xer07 on tomato. Comparison of pathogenicity associated factors including the type III secretion systems identified two genes, xopA and xer3856, in Xer07 that have lower sequence homology in tomato pathogens. xer3856 is a homolog of genes in X. citri (xac3856) and X. fuscans pv. aurantifolii, both of which have been reported to elicit HRs in tomato. When xer3856 was expressed in X. perforans and infiltrated in tomato leaflets, the transconjugant elicited an HR and significantly reduced bacterial populations compared to the wildtype X. perforans strain. When xer3856 was mutated in Xer07, the mutant strain still triggered an HR in tomato leaflets. The second gene identified codes for type III secreted effector XopA, which contains a harpin domain that is distinct from the xopA homologs in Xee and Xp. The Xer07-xopA, when expressed in X. perforans, did not elicit an HR in tomato leaflets, but significantly reduced bacterial populations. This indicates that xopA and xer3856 genes in combination with an additional factor(s) limit Xer07 in tomato.
Poverty Risks after Relationship Dissolution and the Role of Children: A Contemporary Longitudinal Analysis of Seven OECD Countries

The divorce literature has consistently found that—especially women—are negatively affected by relationship dissolution in terms of material wellbeing. There is, however, considerable debate on whether these effects are persistent or temporary. We use fixed effects models and control for the socioeconomic status of individuals who separated between 2011 and 2018 in seven countries for which large scale longitudinal data has recently been harmonized in the Comparative Panel File. We find that the transitory nature of the effect of relationship dissolution on poverty risks for women is similar across countries, but also for some men. We further focus on the role of children in the immediate changes in poverty risks after separation, and again find significant differences between countries. We discuss these findings in light of social policies adopted by these countries, more specifically child and spousal support schemes. We find no distinguishable differences in these support schemes that adequately explain the observed dissimilarities. The implications of this study for the future study of the association between relationship dissolution and poverty are discussed and future pathways are suggested.
Nanofiltration Membranes Formed through Interfacial Polymerization Involving Cycloalkane Amine Monomer and Trimesoyl Chloride Showing Some Tolerance to Chlorine during Dye Desalination

Wastewater effluents containing high concentrations of dyes are highly toxic to the environment and aquatic organisms. Recycle and reuse of both water and dye in textile industries can save energy and costs. Thus, new materials are being explored to fabricate highly efficient nanofiltration membranes for fulfilling industrial needs. In this work, three diamines, 1,4-cyclohexanediamine (CHD), ethylenediamine (EDA), and p-phenylenediamine (PPD), are reacted with TMC separately to fabricate a thin film composite polyamide membrane for dye desalination. Their chemical structures are different, with the difference located in the middle of two terminal amines. The surface morphology, roughness, and thickness of the polyamide layer are dependent on the reactivity of the diamines with TMC. EDA has a short linear alkane chain, which can easily react with TMC, forming a very dense selective layer. CHD has a cyclohexane ring, making it more sterically hindered than EDA. As such, CHD’s reaction with TMC is slower than EDA’s, leading to a thinner polyamide layer. PPD has a benzene ring, which should make it the most sterically hindered structure; however, its benzene ring has a pi-pi interaction with TMC that can facilitate a faster reaction between PPD and TMC, leading to a thicker polyamide layer. Among the TFC membranes, TFCCHD exhibited the highest separation efficiency (pure water flux = 192.13 ± 7.11 L∙m−2∙h−1, dye rejection = 99.92 ± 0.10%, and NaCl rejection = 15.46 ± 1.68% at 6 bar and 1000 ppm salt or 50 ppm of dye solution). After exposure at 12,000 ppm∙h of active chlorine, the flux of TFCCHD was enhanced with maintained high dye rejection. Therefore, the TFCCHD membrane has a potential application for dye desalination process.
Clinical Application of Factor VIII:C to VWF:Ag Ratio for the Screening of Haemophilia A Carriers

Analyses of factor VIII procoagulant activity (FVIII:C) and the FVIII:C to VWF:Ag ratio (FVIII:C/VWF:Ag ratio) have been investigated as screening bioassays to detect haemophilia carriers. This study aimed to determine the validity of the FVIII:C/VWF:Ag ratio and FVIII:C analyses as screening tests. We reviewed the medical records of 137 genetically confirmed, proband haemophilia A patients and 179 of their familial females who had undergone carrier testing. The collected data included the severity and mutation type of F8 gene from probands and age, ABO blood type, FVIII:C, VWF:Ag, and the result of targeted gene analysis in females. We diagnosed 110 females as carriers, and their FVIII:C and FVIII:C/VWF:Ag ratio were lower than those in 69 non-carriers (FVIII:C: 59.3 IU/dL vs. 106.1 IU/dL, p = 0.000; FVIII:C/VWF:Ag ratio: 0.62 vs. 1.08, p = 0.000). In receiver operating characteristic analysis, the areas under the curve (AUC) of the FVIII:C/VWF:Ag ratio and FVIII:C were 0.936 and 0.876, respectively. The cut-off value of FVIII:C/VWF:Ag ratio (0.81) at the maximum Youden J index provided a sensitivity of 82.8% and specificity of 96.6%. The cut-off value of FVIII:C (83.8 IU/dL) showed a sensitivity of 81.8% and specificity of 79.7%. Considering the AUC, the FVIII:C/VWF:Ag ratio is a good screening test to detect haemophilia A carriers, as evidenced by its specificity of 96.6%; however, it may also induce false-negative results.
An Optimal Subspace Deconvolution Algorithm for Robust and High-Resolution Beamforming

Utilizing the difference in phase and power spectrum between signals and noise, the estimation of direction of arrival (DOA) can be transferred to a spatial sample classification problem. The power ratio, namely signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), is highly required in most high-resolution beamforming methods so that high resolution and robustness are incompatible in a noisy background. Therefore, this paper proposes a Subspaces Deconvolution Vector (SDV) beamforming method to improve the robustness of a high-resolution DOA estimation. In a noisy environment, to handle the difficulty in separating signals from noise, we intend to initial beamforming value presets by incoherent eigenvalue in the frequency domain. The high resolution in the frequency domain guarantees the stability of the beamforming. By combining the robustness of conventional beamforming, the proposed method makes use of the subspace deconvolution vector to build a high-resolution beamforming process. The SDV method is aimed to obtain unitary frequency matrixes more stably and improve the accuracy of signal subspaces. The results of simulations and experiments show that when the input SNR is less than −27 dB, signals of decomposition differ unremarkably in the subspace while the SDV method can still obtain clear angles. In a marine background, this method works well in separating the noise and recruiting the characteristics of the signal into the DOA for subsequent processing.
High Altitude Cerebral Edema: Improving Treatment Options

High altitude illness in its most severe form can lead to high altitude cerebral edema (HACE). Current strategies have focused on prevention with graduated ascents, pharmacologic prophylaxis, and descent at first signs of symptoms. Little is understood regarding treatment with steroids and oxygenation being commonly utilized. Pre-clinical studies with turmeric derivatives have offered promise due to its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties, but they warrant validation clinically. Ongoing work is focused on better understanding the disease pathophysiology with an emphasis on the glymphatic system and venous outflow obstruction. This review highlights what is known regarding diagnosis, treatment, and prevention, while also introducing novel pathophysiology mechanisms warranting further investigation.
Development of Free-Standing Titanium Dioxide Hollow Nanofibers Photocatalyst with Enhanced Recyclability

Titanium dioxide hollow nanofibers (THN) are excellent photocatalysts for the photodegradation of Bisphenol A (BPA) due to their extensive surface area and good optical properties. A template synthesis technique is typically employed to produce titanium dioxide hollow nanofibers. This process, however, involves a calcination procedure at high temperatures that yields powder-form photocatalysts that require post-recovery treatment before recycling. Meanwhile, the immobilization of photocatalysts on/into a membrane has been reported to reduce the active surface area. Novel free-standing TiO2 hollow nanofibers were developed to overcome those shortcomings. The free-standing photocatalyst containing 0.75 g of THN (FS-THN-75) exhibited good adherence and connectivity between the nanofibers. The recyclability of FS-THN-75 outperformed the THN calcined at 600 °C (THN-600), which retained 80% of its original weight while maintaining excellent degradation performance. This study recommends the potential application of free-standing TiO2 hollow nanofibers as high potential novel photocatalysts for the treatment of BPA in wastewater.
Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Symbiosis Differentially Affects the Nutritional Status of Two Durum Wheat Genotypes under Drought Conditions

Durum wheat is one of the most important agricultural crops, currently providing 18% of the daily intake of calories and 20% of daily protein intake for humans. However, being wheat that is cultivated in arid and semiarid areas, its productivity is threatened by drought stress, which is being exacerbated by climate change. Therefore, the identification of drought tolerant wheat genotypes is critical for increasing grain yield and also improving the capability of crops to uptake and assimilate nutrients, which are seriously affected by drought. This work aimed to determine the effect of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) on plant growth under normal and limited water availability in two durum wheat genotypes (Svevo and Etrusco). Furthermore, we investigated how the plant nutritional status responds to drought stress. We found that the response of Svevo and Etrusco to drought stress was differentially affected by AMF. Interestingly, we revealed that AMF positively affected sulfur homeostasis under drought conditions, mainly in the Svevo cultivar. The results provide a valuable indication that the identification of drought tolerant plants cannot ignore their nutrient use efficiency or the impact of other biotic soil components (i.e., AMF).
Heat conduction in thermoelectric materials and micro-devices

Thermoelectric energy conversion technology is a clean-energy technology, which can convert energy directly between heat and electricity using thermoelectric materials. The conversion efficiency is mainly determined by the performance of the material, which includes the electrical and thermal transport properties. A suitable balance between the latter must be found to optimize the thermo-electric properties. This paper describes recent developments in minimizing the heat conduction in ther-moelectric materials and micro-devices, focussing on the effect of wide-spectrum phonon scattering and the damping of phonon transverse waves in semiconductor compounds, and phonon scattering by the in-terfaces and defects in low-dimension structures and thermoelectric composites. Finally, an overview of recent advances in high performance thermoelectric micro-devices improved by the suppression of heat conduction around room temperature will be given.
An Efficient Method for Biomedical Entity Linking Based on Inter- and Intra-Entity Attention

Biomedical entity linking is an important research problem for many downstream tasks, such as biomedical intelligent question answering, information retrieval, and information extraction. Biomedical entity linking is the task of mapping mentions in medical texts to standard entities in a given knowledge base. Recently, BERT-based models have achieved state-of-the-art results on the biomedical entity linking task. Although this type of method is effective, it brings challenges for fine-tuning and online services in practical industries due to a large number of model parameters and long inference time. In addition, due to the numerous surface variants of biomedical mentions, it is difficult for a single matching module to achieve good results. To address the challenge, we propose an efficient biomedical entity linking method that integrates inter- and intra-entity attention to better capture the information between medical entity mentions and candidate entities themselves and each other, and the model in this paper is more lightweight. Experimental results show that our method achieves competitive performance on two biomedical benchmark datasets, NCBI and ADR, with an accuracy rate of 91.28% and 93.13%, respectively. Moreover, it also achieves comparable or even better results compared to the BERT-based entity linking method while having far fewer model parameters and very high inference speed.
DrawnNet: Offline Hand-Drawn Diagram Recognition Based on Keypoint Prediction of Aggregating Geometric Characteristics

Offline hand-drawn diagram recognition is concerned with digitizing diagrams sketched on paper or whiteboard to enable further editing. Some existing models can identify the individual objects like arrows and symbols, but they become involved in the dilemma of being unable to understand a diagram’s structure. Such a shortage may be inconvenient to digitalization or reconstruction of a diagram from its hand-drawn version. Other methods can accomplish this goal, but they live on stroke temporary information and time-consuming post-processing, which somehow hinders the practicability of these methods. Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been proved that they perform the state-of-the-art across many visual tasks. In this paper, we propose DrawnNet, a unified CNN-based keypoint-based detector, for recognizing individual symbols and understanding the structure of offline hand-drawn diagrams. DrawnNet is designed upon CornerNet with extensions of two novel keypoint pooling modules which serve to extract and aggregate geometric characteristics existing in polygonal contours such as rectangle, square, and diamond within hand-drawn diagrams, and an arrow orientation prediction branch which aims to predict which direction an arrow points to through predicting arrow keypoints. We conducted wide experiments on public diagram benchmarks to evaluate our proposed method. Results show that DrawnNet achieves 2.4%, 2.3%, and 1.7% recognition rate improvements compared with the state-of-the-art methods across benchmarks of FC-A, FC-B, and FA, respectively, outperforming existing diagram recognition systems on each metric. Ablation study reveals that our proposed method can effectively enable hand-drawn diagram recognition.