cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Inhibition of complement activation by human IgA antibodies and their Fab fragments

The anti-inflammatory properties of human IgA antibodies have been investigated using IgA1 and IgG1 monoclonal antibodies and normal polyclonal IgG and IgA having antibody activity against staphylococcal α-toxin. IgA antibodies inhibited the classical pathway initiated either by polyclonal antibodies, or by monoclonal antibodies acting synergistically, and inhibition was independent of the ability of IgA antibodies to displace IgG. Furthermore, Fabα fragments of IgA1 antibodies, obtained by cleavage with bacterial IgAl protease, possessed the same ability to inhibit complement activation as intact IgA1 antibodies. The results support the hypothesis that IgA1 proteases facilitate invasive infections by generating functionally defective Fabα fragments that protect the organisms against other immune defense mechanisms.
A framework for ex-ante analysis of public investment in forest-based development: An application to the Brazilian Amazon

This paper develops a framework for evaluating the ex-ante economic impacts of public investments in forest-based development. Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models provide a powerful approach for evaluating public investments in sectors with strong inter-sectoral linkages and for capturing dynamic economy-wide effects. Results of CGE analysis may be analyzed in a social cost-benefit framework typically used by the public sector and multilateral development banks to assess investment viability and trade-offs between alternatives. In this paper, a dynamic CGE is developed to evaluate the impact of a development loan to promote natural forests, forest plantations and agroforestry development in the Amazonian state of Acre, Brazil. Results of the analysis demonstrate the positive impact the expansion forest-based development activities generates and the potential the approach has for comprehensive analysis of the direct, indirect and induced benefits of public forest sector investment.
Recent advances in the design of efficient-yet-linear watt-class mmWave CMOS PAs

Technology scaling, which has enabled operation at mmWave frequencies in CMOS, has also brought with it a steady decrease in the breakdown voltages of the transistors. The resulting fall in output power of power amplifiers (PAs) combined with the low efficiency due to poor device gain and lossy passive components has led to research efforts towards efficient yet linear high output PAs at mmWave. This paper discusses key advances toward this goal, namely device stacking, mmWave switch-mode operation, large-scale power combining and linearization techniques capable of supporting multi-Gbps complex modulations efficiently.
Statistics on employment of exploration geophysicists

At the request of Dr. Milton B. Dobrin, President of the Canadian Society of Exploration Geophysicists, an employment survey of the members of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists was made in December, 1960. It was authorized by the SEG Executive Committee, who instructed me to report.
Process Optimization using Intelligent Workstations in Distributed Control

Abstract This paper describes the use of the IBM personal computer family for implementing online process optimization in a distributed control environment. The optimization can be implemented when the personal computers are used both as workstation terminals for monitoring and control of processes and as stand-alone computers performing background tasks such as dynamic simulation and process optimization calculations. A simple scheme allows simultaneous use of the personal computer in both modes thus enabling operator involvement in online implementation of the optimization results.
The Social Production of Desire

This chapter draws inspiration from Freud, Lacan, Žižek, Bateson, Marx, and Piaget (among others), arguing that contemporary academic discourse revolving around topics like “the subject” and “agency” is best approached through consideration of desire. A Marxian emphasis on production is equally important to approaching patriliny as a mode of production of Chinese cultural subjects. Although the theoretical topics addressed here are widely discussed in contemporary academe, this chapter proposes a distinctive synthesis of Marxian and psychoanalytic approaches and establishes the general significance of my study.
A theoretical foundation for location secrecy

Sharing users' positional information is often required for high accuracy localization, which is a cornerstone for numerous wireless applications in commercial, military, and social sectors. This raises a concern of leaking positional information to adversaries during the localization process. This paper establishes a mathematical foundation for location secrecy. In particular, we determine the location secrecy metric (LSM) for a localization network in which an eavesdropper has a generic measurement capability. We obtain a simple and closed-form expression of the LSM for the case where the eavesdropper's measurement of a user's position is corrupted by a Gaussian noise. We further extend this result to a more general measurement model, and design location secrecy protection strategies based on the insights gained from our analysis. The performance of the proposed algorithms is verified through numerical simulation.
Evidentiary Policies Through Other Means: Error-Distribution As Procedural Due Process

This Article develops an analytical framework to investigate novel ways in which legal reforms disguised as “substantive” can affect procedural due process safeguards. Scholars have long recognized the impact evidence rules have on substantive policies, such as modifying primary incentives or affecting the distribution of legal entitlements in society. However, legal scholars have not paid enough attention to the reverse effect: how changes in “substantive law” influence policy objectives traditionally associated with evidence law – “evidentiary policies.” To fill this gap, this Article discusses three related evidentiary policies. The first is accuracy, which courts and scholars consider a central objective of evidence law. Improving the accuracy of legal fact-finding is not an exclusive goal of evidence law. Different substantive rules and doctrines also influence the accuracy of legal decisions. Albeit valuable, accuracy is neither free nor cheap. A second important consideration in evidence law is the cost of litigation – and the cost of fact-finding, in particular. Substantive law also plays a role in determining the expense of adjudication. The prohibitive costs of perfect accuracy mean that we should expect to make mistakes. Since we cannot eliminate errors from an adjudicative system with limited resources, we must decide which errors we are willing to accept and are worthy of spending more resources to avoid. This third example of evidentiary policy affected by substantive law, and the one this Article focuses on, is allocating the risk of mistaken judgments of fact between parties. Standards of proof stand out as a particularly important evidentiary mechanism to distribute the risk of errors. The final error distribution, however, is also a function of other factors, such as the accuracy of the legal fact-finding and how rules are designed and applied. Substantive rules can alter the error distribution in a myriad of ways. Through graphs and other analytical tools, this Article develops a framework to identify and assess these impacts on various situations. The effects of substantive law on allocating error risk between parties raises important concerns for different doctrines, particularly with procedural due process. Courts have consistently held that procedural due process requires an error-distribution strongly biased in favor of criminal defendants. This requirement is primarily enforced through standards of proof and other evidentiary rules. However, this Article argues that substantive law changes can move us away from an error-distribution strongly biased in favor of criminal defendants. Scholars and practitioners often fail to consider these effects when discussing changes to existing laws. This omission comes at a potentially high cost for defendants’ procedural due process and other constitutional safeguards, especially for minority groups.
ROCK regulates the intermittent mode of interstitial T cell migration in inflamed lungs.

Effector T cell migration through tissues can enable control of infection or mediate inflammatory damage. Nevertheless, the molecular mechanisms that regulate migration of effector T cells within the interstitial space of inflamed lungs are incompletely understood. Here, we show T cell migration in a mouse model of acute lung injury with two-photon imaging of intact lung tissue. Computational analysis indicates that T cells migrate with an intermittent mode, switching between confined and almost straight migration, guided by lung-associated vasculature. Rho-associated protein kinase (ROCK) is required for both high-speed migration and straight motion. By contrast, inhibition of Gαi signaling with pertussis toxin affects speed but not the intermittent migration of lung-infiltrating T cells. Computational modeling shows that an intermittent migration pattern balances both search area and the duration of contacts between T cells and target cells. These data identify that ROCK-dependent intermittent T cell migration regulates tissue-sampling during acute lung injury. ROCK is associated with T cell movement in lymph nodes. Here the authors use an LPS lung damage model and two-photon imaging to show that CD8+ T cells in lung tissue engage in ROCK-dependent fast linear migration alternating with bursts of slower confined migration that together optimize contact with target cells.
TCT-467 Association of Chronic Total Occlusion with In-Hospital Outcomes after Percutaneous Coronary Intervention for Acute Myocardial Infarction: Insights from the National Inpatient Sample Database

Coronary chronic total occlusion (CTO) has been associated with worse long-term outcomes among patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). Data regarding the association of CTO with in-hospital outcomes in patients with AMI undergoing PCI is
Time-zero-variability and BTI impact on advanced FinFET device and circuit reliability

Abstract In this study a careful analysis of the device and the circuit level variability and reliability are presented. Planar 20 nm System on Chip (SoC), 16 nm FinFET (16FF) and 10 nm FinFET (10FF) devices are studied to understand the time-zero process variability and Bias Temperature Instability (BTI) stress induced (time dependent) threshold voltage (VT) variations to evaluate the device degradation. Moreover, to understand the circuit level variability, the 6-Transistor (6T) SRAM performance is assessed in terms of the static noise margin (SNM) degradation under the influence of BTI stress. Finally, the product level SRAM performance is studied in terms of the minimum SRAM operating voltage (Vmin) degradation.
Abstract SY19-01: Cell to cell variability in the responses of tumor cells to death ligands

Cell to cell variability in phenotype and fate is important for tissue homeostasis, the emergence of drug resistance and the evolution of tumors. I will discuss cell to cell variability in the responses of clonal populations of human cells to TRAIL, a prototypical inducer of receptor-mediated (extrinsic) apoptosis and an investigational therapeutic. Some TRAIL-treated human cells die within ~40 min, others only after 12 hr and some live indefinitely. During this variable delay initiator caspases (ICs) are active in processing substrates such as Bid and downstream effector caspases (ECs) but mitochondrial membrane permeablization (MOMP) does not occur and ECs are catalytically inactive. We have explored three explanations for cell to cell differences among members of a clonal and notionally uniform population: (i) genetic or epigenetic variation; (ii) the involvement of one or more biochemical processes subject to stochastic fluctuation; (iii) difference in cell state such as position in the cell cycle or protein concentrations. To distinguish among these three possibilities we compared the fates of sister cells exposed to TRAIL using live-cell microscopy. Genetic and epigenetic factors are transmitted with near-perfect fidelity; reaction rates dominated by stochastic fluctuations are no more similar in sisters than in any two cells chosen at random and variability arising from differences in mRNA or protein levels should be transiently heritable (because division is a binomial process in which sister cells inherit roughly equal numbers of abundant cytosolic and nuclear factors but drift towards the population average over time). The later explanation is correct; natural fluctuations in protein levels dominate phenotypic heterogeneity in extrinsic apoptosis and cause transient phenotypic heritablility. Variability can be manipulated by protein over-expression and drugs and I will describe analytic methods for modeling these perturbations. Finally, I will show that natural variation is sufficient to cause some cells to follow one biochemical pathway to death (a MOMP-dependent Type II pathway) and another set of genetically identical cells to follow a fundamentally different pathway (a MOMP-independent Type I pathway). Citation Format: Peter K. Sorger, Sabrina Spencer, Deborah Flusberg, Suzanne Gaudet. Cell to cell variability in the responses of tumor cells to death ligands [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR 101st Annual Meeting 2010; 2010 Apr 17-21; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2010;70(8 Suppl):Abstract nr SY19-01
Sandpiper: Scaling probabilistic inferencing to large scale graphical models

We design and implement a scalable version of loopy belief propagation (BP), a widely used algorithm for performing inference on probabilistic graphical models. However, implementations of BP on generic data processing platforms such as Apache Spark do not scale well to very large graphical models containing billions of vertices. To handle such large-scale graphs, we leverage a number of strategies. Our implementation is based on Apache Spark GraphX. We propose a novel graph partitioning strategy to reduce both computation and communication overhead providing a 2x speed-up. We use efficient memory management for storing the graph and shared memory for highspeed communication. To evaluate performance and demonstrate scalability of the approach, we perform a range of experiments including using real-world graphs with billions of vertices, where we achieve an overall 10x speed-up over a vanilla Spark baseline. Further, we apply our BP implementation to infer the probability of a website being malicious by performing inference on a graphical model derived from real, large-scale hyperlinked webcrawl data. We have open sourced our implementation.
Comprehensive Peptide Ion Structure Studies Using Ion Mobility Techniques: Part 3. Relating Solution-Phase to Gas-Phase Structures

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations have been utilized to study peptide ion conformer establishment during the electrospray process. An explicit water model is used for nanodroplets containing a model peptide and hydronium ions. Simulations are conducted at 300 K for two different peptide ion charge configurations and for droplets containing varying numbers of hydronium ions. For all conditions, modeling has been performed until production of the gas-phase ions and the resultant conformers have been compared to proposed gas-phase structures. The latter species were obtained from previous studies in which in silico candidate structures were filtered according to ion mobility and hydrogen-deuterium exchange (HDX) reactivity matches. Results from the present study present three key findings namely (1) the evidence from ion production modeling supports previous structure refinement studies based on mobility and HDX reactivity matching, (2) the modeling of the electrospray process is significantly improved by utilizing initial droplets existing below but close to the calculated Rayleigh limit, and (3) peptide ions in the nanodroplets sample significantly different conformers than those in the bulk solution due to altered physicochemical properties of the solvent.
Influence function algorithms for predicting three-dimensional power distributions and control reactivity worths in LMFBR plants

An influence function approach for predicting the three-dimensional power distributions and control reactivity worths in LMFBR plants has been formulated. Testing of the influence function approach has indicated that it is a simple, rapid and effective technique for carrying out three-dimensional calculations of the effects of control rod movements in a specified LMFBR system.
Physical activity in older subjects is associated with increased coronary vasodilation: the ADVANCE study.

Objectives We investigated the association between physical activity and coronary vasodilation to nitroglycerin (NTG) in the ADVANCE (Atherosclerotic Disease, Vascular Function, and Genetic Epidemiology) cohort of older healthy subjects. Background Physical activity may exert its beneficial effects by augmenting coronary responsiveness to nitric oxide. The relationship between physical activity and coronary vasodilatory response to NTG, an exogenous nitric oxide donor, has not been studied in a community-based population with typical activity levels. Methods In 212 older adults (ages 60 to 72 years) without cardiovascular disease, we measured the coronary vasodilatory response to NTG using magnetic resonance angiography and physical activity using the Stanford Seven-Day Physical Activity Recall Questionnaire. The primary predictor measure was total physical activity (kcal/kg/day). The primary outcome measure was coronary vasodilatory response (percent increase of cross-sectional area post-NTG). Results Coronary vasodilation was 27.6% in more active subjects (>35 kcal/kg/day, e.g., 1 h of walking per day) compared to 18.9% in less active subjects (p = 0.03). Regression analysis showed a significant positive correlation between coronary vasodilation and physical activity (p = 0.003), with a slope (beta) of 1.2% per kcal/kg/day. This finding remained significant after adjustment for cardiac risk factors, coronary calcium, the use of vasoactive or statin medications, and analysis of physical activity by quintiles (p Conclusions In an asymptomatic, community-based cohort of older adults, increased coronary vasodilatory response was independently associated with greater physical activity, supporting the benefits of exercise on the order of 1 h of walking per day.
β-Alanine supplementation increased physical performance and improved executive function following endurance exercise in middle aged individuals

Sarcopenia, a reduction in muscle mass and function seen in aging populations, may be countered by improving systemic carnosine stores via beta-Alanine (β-alanine) supplementation. Increasing systemic carnosine levels may result in enhanced anti-oxidant, neuro-protective and pH buffering capabilities. This enhancement should result in improved exercise capacity and executive function. Twelve healthy adults (average age = 60.5 ± 8.6 yrs, weight = 81.5 ± 12.6 kg) were randomized and given either 2.4 g/d of β-alanine (BA) or Placebo (PL) for 28 days. Exercise capacity was tested via bouts on a cycle ergometer at 70% VO2 peak. Executive function was measured by Stroop Tests 5 min before exercise (T1), immediately before exercise (T2), immediately following fatigue (T3), and 5 min after fatigue (T4). Lactate measures were taken pre/post exercise. Heart rate, Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) and VO2 were recorded throughout exercise testing. PRE average time-to-exhaustion (TTE) for the PL and BA group were not significantly different (Mean ± SD; 9.4 ± 1.4mins vs 11.1 ± 2.4mins, respectively, P = 0.7). POST BA supplemented subjects cycled significantly longer than PRE (14.6 ± 3.8mins vs 11.1 ± 2.4mins, respectively, P = 0.04) while those given PL did not (8.7 ± 2.4mins vs 9.4 ± 1.4mins, respectively, P = 0.7). PL subjects were slower in completing the Stroop test POST at T4 compared to T3 (T3 = − 13.3 ± 8.6% vs T4 = 2.1 ± 8.3%, P = 0.04), while the BA group (T3 = − 9.2 ± 6.4% vs T4 = − 2.5 ± 3.5%, P = 0.5) was not. POST lactate production expressed a trend when comparing treatments, as the BA group produced 2.4 ± 2.6 mmol/L more lactate than the PL group (P = 0.06). Within group lactate production for BA (P = 0.4) and PL (P = 0.5), RPE (P = 0.9) and heart rate (P = 0.7) did not differ with supplementation. BA supplementation increased exercise capacity and eliminated endurance exercise induced declines in executive function seen after recovery. Increased POST TTE coupled with similar PRE vs POST lactate production indicates an improvement in the ability of BA to extend exercise durations. Furthermore, by countering endurance exercise’s accompanying deficits in executive function, the aging population can maintain benefits from exercise with improved safety.
The Liquid/Vapor Phase Boundary in a Porous Plug

Porous plugs have been successfully used as phase separators for superfluid helium and its vapor in a number of space flight dewars. A rapid increase in the temperature and pressure drop across the porous plug has been seen above a critical flow rate by numerous experimenters. For this paper careful measurements of pressure and temperature differences as a function of flow rate and hydrostatic head have been made on two types of porous plugs. One porous plug is of sintered stainless steel, with larger pores but otherwise similar to that in the IRAS, IRT and COBE dewars. The other plug has pores of uniform cross-section within a glass matrix. The data were fit to a simple physical model which describes the pressure drop in terms of the thermomechanical pressure and the forces due to the hydrostatic head and surface tension. The results indicate that the liquid/vapor phase boundary exists at the outer surface of the porous plug for low flows or large hydrostatic heads. It retreats into the plug as the flow increases or the hydrostatic head decreases in excellent qualitative and good quantitative agreement with the simple model. The sintered stainless porous plug exhibits some hysteresis in the area near the phase boundary retreat. This hysteresis is probably explained by the difference in pore size near the surface of the plug.
Lévy Systems and Time Changes

The Levy system for a Markov process X provides a convenient description of the distribution of the totally inaccessible jumps of the process. We examine the effect of time change (by the inverse of a not necessarily strictly increasing CAF A) on the Levy system, in a general context. They key to our time-change theorem is a study of the “irregular” exits from the fine support of A that occur at totally inaccessible times. This permits the construction of a partial predictable exit system (a la Maisonneuve).
The Urban Geography of Residential Energy Consumption

This chapter examines the link between urban ecology and residential energy consumption. An analysis of Decatur, Illinois census tract data illustrates that different types of residential areas have different kinds of heating and cooling equipment, and that the correlations are quite close. In particular, homes in areas of “low economic status” tend to have many room and window air conditioners and supplemental room heaters, but few central air conditioning systems. “Rental housing” is associated with fewer than average forced air furnaces and many hot water heating systems. Areas of “low family status” (characterized by elderly and single-person households) have a disproportionate number of room and window air conditioners. An analysis of residential energy consumption is less successful. Components of household energy use are only modestly correlated with socio-economic, demographic, and housing characteristics. These findings suggest that caution should be used when employing neighborhoods as market segments in efforts to implement energy conservation programs.
Clinical and Histopathologic Features of Interstitial Lung Disease in Erdheim–Chester Disease

Limited information is available regarding interstitial lung disease (ILD) in Erdheim–Chester disease (ECD), a rare multisystemic non-Langerhans cell histiocytosis. Sixty-two biopsy-confirmed ECD patients were divided into those with no ILD (19.5%), minimal ILD (32%), mild ILD (29%), and moderate/severe ILD (19.5%), based on computed tomography (CT) findings. Dyspnea affected at least half of the patients with mild or moderate/severe ILD. Diffusion capacity was significantly reduced in ECD patients with minimal ILD. Disease severity was inversely correlated with pulmonary function measurements; no correlation with BRAF V600E mutation status was seen. Reticulations and ground-glass opacities were the predominant findings on CT images. Automated CT scores were significantly higher in patients with moderate/severe ILD, compared to those in other groups. Immunostaining of lung biopsies was consistent with ECD. Histopathology findings included subpleural and septal fibrosis, with areas of interspersed normal lung, diffuse interstitial fibrosis, histiocytes with foamy cytoplasm embedded in fibrosis, lymphoid aggregates, and focal type II alveolar cell hyperplasia. In conclusion, ILD of varying severity may affect a high proportion of ECD patients. Histopathology features of ILD in ECD can mimic interstitial fibrosis patterns observed in idiopathic ILD.
Acute leukemia in pregnancy: A single institution experience.

7040Background: Acute leukemia is rarely diagnosed during pregnancy. Management of acute leukemia during pregnancy presents a considerable challenge due to limited available data on optimal managem...
A regression based phase I clinical trial for late-onset toxicities without clinician elicitation.

Abstract An extension of the isotonic regression based phase I clinical trial design is presented that incorporates partial follow-up times into estimation of the raw toxicity probabilities. This phase I clinical trial design, called the TITE-IR design, drastically decreases average trial duration by allowing patients to be treated immediately after being enrolled in a phase I clinical trial. The TITE-IR design does not require specification of a prior skeleton of toxicity probabilities like the continual reassessment method, has an additional trial parameter for controlling aggressiveness of dose escalation, and has an easily understood formula for estimating toxicity probabilities. An R statistical software package is described in detail in the appendix for simulating and implementing the design. A simulation study shows that the TITE-IR design outperforms the 3 + 3 design in terms of selecting the true maximum tolerated dose and results in shorter trial times, without a large loss in efficiency, compared to the isotonic regression design and Storer's up-and-down design D. These properties make the TITE-IR design a more appealing option to clinicians than the two most commonly used 3 + 3 designs and the isotonic regression design with larger follow-up windows for toxicity.
Gypsum scaling propensity in semi-batch RO (SBRO) and steady-state RO with partial recycle (SSRO-PR)

Abstract Membrane mineral scaling in semi-batch RO (SBRO) and steady-state RO with partial recycle (SSRO-PR) were investigated experimentally in a spiral-wound pilot system with gypsum as a model scalant. Scaling in SSRO-PR operation, at a given level of solution supersaturation, was compared to SBRO operation at the equivalent time-averaged solution supersaturation, and also for operation at equivalent water recovery. Real-time tracking of mineral scaling revealed that SBRO was more prone to mineral scaling, in terms of both crystals formation rate and scaled membrane surface area, relative to SSRO-PR. The growth rates of crystals in both SBRO and SSRO-PR followed diffusional growth and were similar at the same level of solution supersaturation. However, the crystallization induction time was shorter and rate of crystal formation higher in SBRO relative to SSRO-PR. This behavior was consistent with the higher level of gypsum supersaturation reached in the SBRO filtration period when compared to SSRO-PR at either one of the above operational scenarios. For a given recovery, improved scale mitigation in SBRO via extended flushing to reset the “crystallization induction clock” may be feasible, but the tradeoff is an extended filtration period with a higher level of solution supersaturation.
Soil properties and combustion temperature: Controls on the decomposition rate of pyrogenic organic matter

Abstract Pyrogenic carbon (PyC) is the material left behind after incomplete combustion of biomass, including a spectrum of materials ranging from charcoal to lightly charred biomass. We investigated the roles of combustion temperature and properties of soil at two distinct landform positions on carbon dioxide (CO2) flux from soil and decomposition of PyC. Bark from Pinus jeffreyi was charred at three temperatures (200 °C, 350 °C, and 500 °C) for an hour to create PyC before it was incubated with soil collected from eroding and depositional landform positions along the same hillslope. We determined the fraction of PyC in soil C at the beginning and end of the incubation using the Kurth-MacKenzie-Deluca digestion method. We found rates of microbial respiration in soil from the depositional landform position were over three times higher than from soil from the eroding landform position. The soil from the eroding landform position had less optimal decomposition conditions, including water holding capacity and organic matter content, compared with the soil from the depositional landform position. Furthermore, over the length of the incubation experiment, PyC concentrations decreased only in depositional soils that contained lower temperature chars, indicating that low temperature PyC has shorter residence times in soils from depositional landform positions, compared to eroding ones. Using scanning electron microscopy, we also observed physical decay of the low temperature chars. Previous research has shown that PyC is preferentially eroded from hillslopes post-fire. Here we show that erosion of PyC and deposition into depositional landform positions can cause the decay rate of PyC to significantly increase, exerting a significant control on the long-term fate of PyC in the soil system.
Frustrative nonreward: Chemogenetic inactivation of the central amygdala abolishes the effect of reward downshift without affecting alcohol intake.

Abstract The role of the central amygdala (CeA) in the adjustment to a 32-to-2% sucrose downshift in the consummatory successive negative contrast (cSNC) task and in a free-choice 10% alcohol-water preference task (PT) was studied using chemogenetic inactivation. cSNC is a model of frustrative nonreward that enhances alcohol consumption. In Experiment 1, sessions 1–10 involved 5-min access to 32% sucrose and sessions 11–12 involved access to 2% sucrose. Vehicle or clozapine N-oxide (CNO; 1 or 3 mg/kg, ip), used later to activate the inhibitory designer receptor, was administered 30 min before sessions 11–12. There was no evidence that CNO affected consummatory behavior after the sucrose downshift. In Experiment 2, all animals received an infusion of the inhibitory designer receptor hM4D(Gi) into the CeA. After recovery, animals received access to either 32% or 2% sucrose on sessions 1–10, followed by 2% sucrose on sessions 11–12. Immediately after each 5-min sucrose session, animals received a 2-bottle, 1-h PT with 10% alcohol and water. CNO (3 mg/kg, ip) or vehicle was administered 30 min before sessions 11–12. CeA inactivation prior to sucrose downshift eliminated the cSNC effect, which was observed in vehicle controls. However, there was no evidence that CeA inactivation affected preference for 10% alcohol over water. These results support the hypothesis that CeA activity is critical for cSNC effect, an outcome consistent with the view that the amygdala plays a central role in frustrative nonreward.
Tumor immune microenvironment alterations in penile squamous cell carcinoma using multiplex immunofluorescence and image analysis approaches.

4Background: Penile Squamous Cell Carcinoma (PSCC) is a rare but often fatal disease. In this study, we characterize the poorly understood immune microenvironment using multiplex immunofluorescence...
‘No perfect image’: health, fitness and visual affects with youth after-school

Background and purpose: Messages and initiatives around childhood obesity, health and fitness continue to circulate multiple pedagogical sites (physical education, after-school, media), reproducing...
Self-assembled nucleo-tripeptide hydrogels provide local and sustained doxorubicin release.

Self-assembled nucleo-peptide hydrogels have a nanofibril structure composed of noncovalent molecular interactions between peptide groups as well as π–π stacking and Watson–Crick interactions via complementary nucleobases. These hydrogels have specific benefits for biomedical applications due to their DNA-like interactions in addition to the well-known advantages of peptide biomaterials: biocompatibility, extracellular matrix (ECM)-like structure, and bottom-up design. Inspired by the nucleobase stacking structure, we hypothesized that nucleo-peptides would be able to deliver the DNA-intercalating chemotherapeutic, doxorubicin (Dox) in a sustained manner when delivered locally to a solid tumor. Ade-FFF nucleo-peptide hydrogels were able to load a high concentration of Dox (1 mM) and demonstrated continuous release under in vitro degradation conditions. We adopted an in vivo tumor-bearing mouse model to evaluate the delivery of Dox by Ade-FFF hydrogels. We found that Dox-containing hydrogels reduced tumor growth and resulted in greater apoptosis-mediated cell death in the tumor as evidenced by caspase-3 expression. Pharmacokinetics and biodistribution studies also supported the observation that Dox delivery by an Ade-FFF hydrogel improves sustained delivery in the local tumor site. This study demonstrates the potential of self-assembled nucleo-peptides in biomedical applications by using their distinctive DNA-like structure.
The time course of passive stiffness responses following an acute bout of static stretching in healthy, elderly men.

BACKGROUND The time course of passive stiffness responses following an acute bout of static stretching has received little research attention, particularly in older adults. OBJECTIVE To determine the time course of the acute effects of static stretching on passive stiffness of the hamstrings in healthy, elderly men. METHODS Fifteen elderly men (age = 70 ± 7 years) underwent two randomized conditions that included a control treatment and an experimental treatment of four, 15-s straight-leg raise static stretches. Passive stiffness was calculated as the slopes of the initial and final phases of the angle-torque curve at pre-treatment (Pre) and post-treatment time points of zero (Post0), five (Post5), and ten (Post10) minutes. RESULTS Passive stiffness collapsed across phase was lower at Post0 (P= .029, d= 0.64) and Post5 (P= .042, d= 0.54) but not Post10 (P> .999, d= 0.15) compared to Pre for the stretching treatment. There were no significant differences in passive stiffness (collapsed across phase) between any of the time points (P> .999, d≤ 0.14) for the control. CONCLUSIONS An acute bout of static stretching produced significant decreases in the passive stiffness characteristics of elderly men; however, these decreases returned to baseline values within 5 to 10 minutes.
Identifying the Environment and Redshift of Gamma‐Ray Burst Afterglows from the Time Dependence of Their Absorption Spectra

The discovery of gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglows revealed a new class of variable sources at optical and radio wavelengths. At present, the environment and precise redshift of the detected afterglows are still unknown. We show that if a GRB source resides in a compact (100 pc) gas-rich environment, the afterglow spectrum will show time-dependent absorption features due to the gradual ionization of the surrounding medium by the afterglow radiation. Detection of this time dependence can be used to constrain the size and density of the surrounding gaseous system. For example, the Mg II absorption line detected in GRB 970508 should have weakened considerably during the first month if the absorption occurred in a gas cloud of size 100 pc around the source. The time-dependent H I or metal absorption features provide a precise determination of the GRB redshift.
Supersymmetry unification, naturalness, and discovery prospects at HL-LHC and HE-LHC

An overview of recent developments in supersymmetry, supergravity and unification and prospects for supersymmetry discovery at the current and future high energy colliders and elsewhere are discussed. Currently several empirical data point to supersymmetry as an underlying symmetry of particle physics. These include the unification of gauge couplings within supersymmetry, prediction within supergravity unification that the Higgs boson mass lie below 130 GeV supported by the observation of the Higgs boson mass at ~125 GeV, and vacuum stability up to the Planck scale for the observed value of the Higgs boson mass while the standard model does not do that. Additionally, of course, supersymmetry solves the big hierarchy problem arising from the quadratic divergence to the Higgs boson mass square in the Standard Model, and provides a frame work that allows for extrapolation of physics from the electroweak scale to the grand unification scale consistent with experiment. Currently there is no alternative paradigm that does that. However, the large loop corrections needed to lift the mass of the Higgs boson from its tree value to the experimentally observed values imply that the scale of weak scale supersymmetry lies in the TeV region making the observation of sparticles more challenging. The lightest of the sparticles could still lie with in reach of the High Luminosity (HL)-LHC and High Energy (HE)-LHC operating at an optimal luminosity of 2.5 × 1035 cm−2 s−1 at a center of mass energy of 27 TeV. Variety of other experiments related to search for dark matter, improved experiments on the measurement of gμ − 2 and EDMs of elementary particles could lend further support for new physics beyond the standard model and specifically supersymmetry. Supergravity theories may also contain hidden sectors which may interact with the visible sector gravitationally and also via extra-weak or ultra-weak interactions. In this case a variety of new signals might arise in indirect detection and at LHC in the form of long lived charged sparticles which can either decay inside the detector or outside. We note that the discovery of sparticles will establish supersymmetry as a fundamental symmetry of nature, and its confirmation will also lend support for strings.
Concomitant laparoscopic and vaginal excision of duplicated collecting system.

A duplicated collecting system is the most common birth defect related to the urinary tract and is more common in women. Approximately 0.7% of the healthy adult population and 2–4% of patients with urinary tract symptoms have duplicated ureters. This video discusses the presentation, evaluation, and treatment of duplicated urinary collecting systems, and presents a case of duplicated collecting system with ectopic ureteral implantation at the vaginal introitus. We present the case of a 56-year-old presenting with a history of incontinence and recurrent urinary tract infections starting in adolescence and her workup for a duplicated collecting system, as well as subsequent surgical management with narrated footage. The patient was counseled that a distal ectopic ureter remnant could serve as a nidus for infection and the patient elected to undergo complete excision of the distal ectopic ureter. Duplicated urinary collecting systems are the most common birth defect related to the urinary tract and can be frequently encountered by the pelvic surgeon. Knowledge of the presentation and workup of a suspected duplicated collecting system is important in carrying out appropriate treatment.
What Is This Trash?: Closer Reading for an Endangered World

The dead metaphor of “trash fiction” is in need of resuscitation or, better yet, of reincarnation. To recognize most any printed material as a disposable commodity suggests that those who are interested in discovering ways in which literature and environment interact would do well to begin by addressing the discipline’s own contribution to the world’s mass of disposable prose. Though ecocritical scholarship has drawn attention to important new themes for literary analysis, such studies are often conducted in much the same way as the cultural and formalist approaches they aim to supersede—asking the same kinds of questions, using the same methods to answer them, and conducting these debates in the same kinds of venues. In focusing so intently on the text’s ability to cast light upon elements of the environmental unconscious, the book’s role as an unconscious element of our modern environment has often been elided.
Evaluation of ventriculoperitoneal shunt emergencies.

Ventriculoperitoneal shunt (VPS) placement, the placement of a silastic, or flexible plastic, shunt which allows drainage of the cerebrospinal fluid into the peritoneum in order to decrease intracranial pressure, is a neurosurgical procedure that is performed to relieve a number of pathologic entities. The most common indication for Ventriculoperitoneal shunt placement is hydrocephalus, or increased intracranial pressure (ICP) and ventricular size secondary to a mismatch between cerebrospinal fluid production and absorption. Hydrocephalus is a physiologic and anatomic state that may occur from a variety of etiologies both congenital and acquired (see Table 1). The current rate of VPS placement is unknown, but some estimate that there are approximately 18,000 to 50,000 shunt placements per year in the United States, and the incidence is rising each year [4,12]. The increase in shunt placement procedures is in part due to advances in neonatology with the consequent resuscitation of very premature infants who are at increased risk for common causes of hydrocephalus such as intraventricular hemorrhage and central nervous system infection [12]. According to some estimates as many as 40% of VPS’s fail in the first year and 56–80% will have at least one episode of malfunction over 10 years [19]. Advances in the care of patients undergoing this procedure have lead to greater survival and quality of life. Thus, it is important for practitioners to be familiar with the life-threatening
Lightweight video service for multi-media digital libraries

In this paper we present the design, architecture, implementation and performance of a digital library of video data. Our goal is to provide a lightweight video service for multimedia digital libraries built upon an ATM infrastructure, providing nonlinear editing and viewing of video. To accomplish this objective we have used a low overhead, high performance persistent object manager to manage the underlying video data.To test these ideas, we used the lightweight persistent object manager PTool, developed by the Laboratory for Advanced Computing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to create persistent object stores of video data on a cluster of Unix workstations connected with an ATM switch. To improve performance, we striped the video data across the cluster.We verified that we were able to manage gigabytes of video data without performance degradation and that striping improved performance linearly up to the bandwidth of the equipment. We also compared the performance of ATM networked and ethernet networked clusters.Finally, we mention that viewing the video data as a persistent collection of objects (i.e. each frame of video as an object) provides attribute based retrieval of data, and hence allows for very simple editing, querying and retrieval of video data by attribute. It allows for the use of object associations to combine video, audio, text, etc.
Learning state space trajectories in recurrent neural networks : a preliminary report.

Abstract : We describe a procedure for finding learning state space trajectories in recurrent neural networks. Keywords: Connectionism; Learning algorithm; Trajectories following; Minimizing functionals.
The Effect of Hydrocortisone on the Production of Herpes Simplex Virus in Tissue Culture

Cortisone and hydrocortisone have an adverse effect upon some viral infections of man (1-6) and upon a number of experimental viral infections in laboratory animals (7-21). Treatment of laboratory animals with these steroids often results in more severe symptoms and at times in a higher mortality rate and earlier death. In some instances in both animals and man an infection which is ordinarily mild or almost undetectable is transformed into a serious or fatal disorder (1-6, 12, 13, 15, 16, 21).
Using linguistic knowledge in statistical machine translation

In this thesis, we present methods for using linguistically motivated information to enhance the performance of statistical machine translation (SMT). One of the advantages of the statistical approach to machine translation is that it is largely language-agnostic. Machine learning models are used to automatically learn translation patterns from data. SMT can, however, be improved by using linguistic knowledge to address specific areas of the translation process, where translations would be hard to learn fully automatically. We present methods that use linguistic knowledge at various levels to improve statistical machine translation, focusing on Arabic-English translation as a case study. In the first part, morphological information is used to preprocess the Arabic text for Arabic-to-English and English-to-Arabic translation, which reduces the gap in the complexity of the morphology between Arabic and English. The second method addresses the issue of long-distance reordering in translation to account for the difference in the syntax of the two languages. In the third part, we show how additional local context information on the source side is incorporated, which helps reduce lexical ambiguity. Two methods are proposed for using binary decision trees to control the amount of context information introduced. These methods are successfully applied to the use of diacritized Arabic source in Arabic-to-English translation. The final method combines the outputs of an SMT system and a Rule-based MT (RBMT) system, taking advantage of the flexibility of the statistical approach and the rich linguistic knowledge embedded in the rule-based MT system. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)
Calculation of flow in a supersonic compression corner by the Dorodnitsyn Finite Element Method

The calculation of laminar boundary layer flow in two dimensions, using the Dorodnitsyn Method of Integral Relations, was successfully extended to separated regions by Holt and others (Holt, Numerical Methods in Fluid Dynamics, Springer 1984). The extension requires incorporation of a square root term in the representation of the local shearing stress as a function of the streamwise velocity component. This limits the order of approximation that can be conveniently carried out for various flow configurations in plane flow and presents obstacles to the generalisation of M.I.R. for three dimensional flow. The same difficulties arise in developing the orthonormal version of M.I.R. both for laminar and turbulent boundary layers.
A Recessive ENU Screen Identifies Memo as a Novel Gene Driving Palatogenesis and Cranial base Development

Nearly 75% of all birth defects affect the head and orofacial complex, with ~1:750 live births involving a facial cleft. To identify novel genes driving orofacial development we employed a recessiv...