cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
L-arginine/nitric oxide amplifies the magnitude and duration of the luteinizing hormone surge induced by estrogen: involvement of neuropeptide Y.

Although estrogen can induce LH hypersecretion in ovariectomized (ovx) rats, the magnitude and duration of the LH surge are invariably far less than those of the preovulatory LH surge in cycling rats. Recently, the crucial roles of hypothalamic nitric oxide (NO) and neuropeptide Y (NPY) in the induction of LHRH and the LH surge have been recognized. In this study, we have tested the hypothesis that low grade stimulatory feedback effects of 17 beta-estradiol (E2) on LH secretion in ovx rats is due to a deficit in NO signaling. As the NO substrate, L-arginine (L-Arg), can enhance NO-dependent physiological responses, the effects of L-Arg on the LH surge in E2-primed ovx rats was studied. Ovx rats bearing permanent cannulas in the lateral cerebroventricle received 15-mm long SILASTIC capsules filled with E2 (300 micrograms/ml oil, s.c.) at 1000 h. Two days later, saline (SAL) or L-Arg (0.1 or 1 nmol in 5 microliters SAL) or D-Arg (1.0 nmol) was injected intracerebroventricularly every hour from 1100-1400. Bl...
Quantitative proteomic analysis of sphere-forming stem-like oral cancer cells

The purpose of this study is to identify target proteins that may play important functional roles in oral cancer stem-like cells (CSCs) using mass spectrometry-based quantitative proteomics. Sphere-formation assays were performed on highly invasive UM1 and lowly invasive UM2 oral cancer cell lines, which were derived from the same tongue squamous cell carcinoma, to enrich CSCs. Quantitative proteomic analysis of CSC-like and non-CSC UM1 cells was carried out using tandem mass tagging and two-dimensional liquid chromatography with Orbitrap mass spectrometry. CSC-like cancer cells were found to be present in the highly invasive UM1 cell line but absent in the lowly invasive UM2 cell line. Stem cell markers SOX2, OCT4, SOX9 and CD44 were up-regulated, whereas HIF-1 alpha and PGK-1 were down-regulated in CSC-like UM1 cells versus non-CSC UM1 cells. Quantitative proteomic analysis indicated that many proteins in cell cycle, metabolism, G protein signal transduction, translational elongation, development, and RNA splicing pathways were differentially expressed between the two cell phenotypes. Both CREB-1-binding protein (CBP) and phosphorylated CREB-1 were found to be significantly over-expressed in CSC-like UM1 cells. CSC-like cells can be enriched from the highly invasive UM1 oral cancer cell line but not from the lowly invasive UM2 oral cancer cell line. There are significant proteomic alterations between CSC-like and non-CSC UM1 cells. In particular, CBP and phosphorylated CREB-1 were significantly up-regulated in CSC-like UM1 cells versus non-CSC UM1 cells, suggesting that the CREB pathway is activated in the CSC-like cells.
Abstract 4263: Identifying somatic mutation hotspots across protein family alignments

Proceedings: AACR Annual Meeting 2014; April 5-9, 2014; San Diego, CA In cancer, somatic driver mutations often target “hotspots” of paralogous residues across evolutionarily related members of a single protein family. These hotspots usually confer a dominant oncogenic function, such as constitutive catalytic activity or binding. These hotspots generally represent the most “druggable” genetic alterations. Examples of protein families targeted in such a manner include the Ras and receptor Tyrosine Kinase family. Protein family hotspots are not directly assessed by standard computational approaches for statistically nominating genes under positive somatic selection, such as MutSig, InVex, or MuSic. These methods only assess single genes for statistical enrichment of total mutation burden or the presence of mutation hotspots. As a result, such approaches are only powered to detect protein family hotspots in cases where each (or at least one) protein family member is very frequently mutated (e.g. KRAS, NRAS, HRAS). They are not powered to detect hotspots in highly functionally redundant families, of which each member may be only mutated in <<1% of a tumor type. To directly identify such protein-family hotspots, we have developed a computational framework, MutPfam. This framework superimposes mutation data onto Pfam (http://pfam.sanger.ac.uk/) (protein family and subfamily multiple sequence alignments and identifies statistically significant hotspots. We demonstate our method on protein families involved in the catalysis of small-molecular catabolism using the TCGA Pan-Cancer dataset (https://tcga-data.nci.nih.gov/) comprising somatic mutation calls for 4608 whole-exome sequenced patients and 21 tumor types. As we demonstrate, our framework enables the de novo discovery of mutation hotspots across protein families. Though developed for somatic mutation analysis, this framework could also be applied to the analysis of inherited mutations. Computational issues meriting future investigation include (1) alternate definitions of protein alignments and sub-families (e.g. involving three dimensional structure, biophysical constraints) (2) improved statistical modeling of the local background mutation rate (incorporating local genomic covariates that mediate heterogeneity) (3) incorporation of variant functional impact scores for missense variants. Citation Format: Marcin Imielinski, Charles Du, Matthew Meyerson. Identifying somatic mutation hotspots across protein family alignments. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2014 Apr 5-9; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2014;74(19 Suppl):Abstract nr 4263. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2014-4263
The Brigham Scalp Nail Inverse Palmoplantar Psoriasis Composite Index (B-SNIPI): A Novel Index to Measure All Non-plaque Psoriasis Subsets

Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory disease that encompasses a large spectrum of clinically distinct subtypes. Although chronic plaque psoriasis is reported as the most common form of psoriatic skin disease, there is growing evidence that other variants including scalp, nail, inverse, and palmoplantar psoriasis are prevalent, undertreated, and associated with significant impairment in quality of life. Currently, the Psoriasis Area and Severity Index (PASI) is the standard to assess psoriasis severity as well as response to treatment; however, the PASI has several limitations. In response to this need and as a complementary objective measure to the PASI, we created the Brigham Scalp Nail Inverse Palmoplantar Psoriasis Composite Index (B-SNIPI), based on patient-surveyed, patient-reported outcomes equally weighted with physician assessment of disease activity. Herein we summarize the B-SNIPI as presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Group for Research and Assessment of Psoriasis and Psoriatic Arthritis (GRAPPA).
Pliometric contraction-induced injury of mouse skeletal muscle: effect of initial length.

Hunter, Kam D., and John A. Faulkner. Pliometric contraction-induced injury of mouse skeletal muscle: effect of initial length. J. Appl. Physiol. 82(1): 278–283, 1997.—For single pliometric (length...
Electromagnetic topology analysis: small apertures and lightning interactions

An electromagnetic topology based simulation code has been used to characterize interactions through a small aperture of a semi-shielded electrical system to external lightning. A transfer function for the external-internal interactions for the topological model was first determined and then applied to a cable network for electrical lightning effect studies. The results are comparable to experimental measurements. It is shown that, for a cable inside an aircraft, the effects of the external fields on the cable current depends on the cable length, location, driving voltage and the impedances at the terminals.
Plasmodium vivax malaria in the UK.

New insights into an old enemy Plasmodium falciparum malaria is so lethal and ubiquitous that one could easily forget that other species of malaria are globally important too. In particular, Plasmodium vivax , the main cause of relapsing malaria, affects up to 300 million people annually, and occurs in far wider and ecologically diverse settings than P falciparum . Yet P vivax remains seriously understudied. Today, querying “ Plasmodium falciparum ” on PubMed generated 31 493 citations compared with only 6520 for “ Plasmodium vivax .” Recent data suggest that the epidemiology of P vivax may be shifting1 2 and that the parasite could be growing more virulent.3 4 But the evidence supporting these rests largely on small, cross sectional studies with limited geographical scope. Without large, systematically collected, geographically diverse, longitudinal datasets, we cannot be certain that these trends are for real, let alone try to explain them based on external forces, such as global warming or urbanisation. In this context, the linked paper by Broderick and colleagues (doi:10.1136/bmj.h1703) is well timed.5 These authors analysed 27 years of data and over 50 000 clinical samples collected by the Public Health England Malaria Reference Laboratory. To enter the …
Assessment of Outputs from Smith‐Root Model‐5.0 GPP and Model‐7.5 GPP Electrofishers

Abstract We evaluated the outputs from eight Smith-Root electrofishers (two factory-rigged model-5.0 GPP boats, four biologist-rigged model-5.0 GPP boats, and two biologist-rigged model-7.5 GPP boats), using an oscilloscope to determine the actual waveforms (voltage as a function of time), current, and power produced for various settings. Differences were found in average power outputs among the six model-5.0 GPP electrofishing boats. In terms of average power output, biologist-rigged electrofishing boats using generators and control boxes purchased from Smith-Root were as or more effective than those rigged by Smith-Root. However, factory-rigged boats generally contained additional safety features that should be considered when purchasing electrofishing equipment. Outputs were similar between the two model-7.5 GPP boats. We were unable, with information obtained solely from the control boxes, to calculate power output produced by the Smith-Root electrofishers. Thus, additional meters (e.g., a voltage met...
Molecular Aspects of Head and Neck Cancer Therapy

In spite of a rapidly expanding understanding of head and neck tumor biology and optimization of radiation, chemotherapy, and surgical treatment modalities, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) remains a major cause of cancer-related morbidity and mortality. Although our biologic understanding of these tumors had largely been limited to pathways driving proliferation, survival, and differentiation, the identification of HPV as a major driver of HNSCC and genomic sequencing analyses has dramatically influenced our understanding of tumor biology and approach to therapy. Here, we summarize molecular aspects of HNSCC biology and identify promising areas for potential diagnostic and therapeutic agents.
DISTINCT PATTERNS OF MOTOR UNIT BEHAVIOR DURING MUSCLE SPASMS IN SPINAL CORD INJURED SUBJECTS

Thomas, C. K. and B. H. Ross. Distinct patterns of motor unit behavior during muscle spasms in spinal cord injured subjects. J. Neurophysiol. 77: 2847–2850, 1997. Surface electromyograms (EMG) and ...
Toward precise user-topic alignment in online social media

Mining users'= topics of interest is one of the most important tasks for social media services. Given known topic associations for some fraction of the users in an online microblogging platform, our goal is to infer the topics of interest for the remaining users in the same site. Specifically, we proposed a novel bi-relational graph model to capture the interactions among users and their shared topics of interests. The proposed graph model contains two sub-graphs: one corresponds to users and the other corresponds to topics. Such a representation allows for effective exploitation of both user homophily relation and topic correlation simultaneously. This is in contrast with previous work where these two factors are considered in isolation. Subsequently, the user interest discovery problem is formulated as a multi-label learning problem on the bi-relational graph, with the goal to estimate the optimized associations between user nodes and topic nodes across the two sub-graphs. Our experiment is carried out with a complete month-long data collected from Twitter and Tumblr via GNIP Decahose1 and Firehose2 respectively. The large-scale studies shed light on the effectiveness of inferring user interests based on the underlying social connections.
Distinct differences in the responses of the human pancreatic β-cell line EndoC-βH1 and human islets to proinflammatory cytokines

While insulinoma cells have been developed and proven to be extremely useful in studies focused on mechanisms controlling β-cell function and viability, translating findings to human β-cells has proven difficult because of the limited access to human islets and the absence of suitable insulinoma cell lines of human origin. Recently, a human β-cell line, EndoC-βH1, has been derived from human fetal pancreatic buds. The purpose of this study was to determine whether human EndoC-βH1 cells respond to cytokines in a fashion comparable to human islets. Unlike most rodent-derived insulinoma cell lines that respond to cytokines in a manner consistent with rodent islets, EndoC-βH1 cells fail to respond to a combination of cytokines (IL-1, IFN-γ, and TNF) in a manner consistent with human islets. Nitric oxide, produced following inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) expression, is a major mediator of cytokine-induced human islet cell damage. We show that EndoC-βH1 cells fail to express iNOS or produce nitric oxide in response to this combination of cytokines. Inhibitors of iNOS prevent cytokine-induced loss of human islet cell viability; however, they do not prevent cytokine-induced EndoC-βH1 cell death. Stressed human islets or human islets expressing heat shock protein 70 (HSP70) are resistant to cytokines, and, much like stressed human islets, EndoC-βH1 cells express HSP70 under basal conditions. Elevated basal expression of HSP70 in EndoC-βH1 cells is consistent with the lack of iNOS expression in response to cytokine treatment. While expressing HSP70, EndoC-βH1 cells fail to respond to endoplasmic reticulum stress activators, such as thapsigargin. These findings indicate that EndoC-βH1 cells do not faithfully recapitulate the response of human islets to cytokines. Therefore, caution should be exercised when making conclusions regarding the actions of cytokines on human islets when using this human-derived insulinoma cell line.
Lateralized goal framing: How health messages are influenced by valence and contextual/analytic processing

The effectiveness of health messages has been shown to vary due to the positive or negative framing of information, often known as goal framing. In two experiments we altered, the strength of the goal framing manipulation by selectively activating the processing style of the left or right hemisphere (RH). In Experiment 1, we found support for the contextual/analytic perspective; a significant goal framing effect was observed when the contextual processing style of the RH - but not the analytic processing style of the left hemisphere (LH) - was initially activated. In Experiment 2, support for the valence hypothesis was found when a message that had a higher level of personal involvement was used than that in Experiment 1. When the LH was initially activated, there was an advantage for the gain- vs. loss-framed message; however, an opposite pattern - an advantage for the loss-framed message - was obtained when the RH was activated. These are the first framing results that support the valence hypothesis. We discuss the theoretical and applied implications of these experiments.
The importance of margins in head and neck cancer

An estimated 200,000 deaths each year worldwide are due to cancer of the head and neck, mostly mucosal squamous cell carcinoma and nonmelanoma skin cancer. The status of surgical margins is important for prognosis and need for adjuvant therapy. We will discuss how margin status impacts outcomes and therapy, and the conundrum of determining margin status.
Electrical Properties of p-Type Indium Antimonide at Low Temperatures

The electrical resistivity $\ensuremath{\rho}$, Hall coefficient $R$, and transverse magnetoresistive ratio $\frac{\ensuremath{\Delta}\ensuremath{\rho}}{\ensuremath{\rho}}$ of $p$-type single crystals of indium antimonide have been measured between 370\ifmmode^\circ\else\textdegree\fi{}K and 1.5\ifmmode^\circ\else\textdegree\fi{}K. Low-temperature anomalies similar to those observed by Hung on germanium have been found, a steep maximum in the $logR$ versus $\frac{1}{T}$ curve and a change of slope of the $log\ensuremath{\rho}$ versus $\frac{1}{T}$ curve. Contrary to the case with germanium, the magnetoresistive ratio of InSb does not vanish in the lowest temperature range, but it changes its sign from positive to negative as the sample is cooled to a temperature somewhat lower than that at which the Hall coefficient reaches its maximum value. Negative values of the magnetoresistive ratio cannot be explained by the usual theory of semiconductors. At the present time it also is not clear how Hung's model of impurity band conduction can account for negative values of the magnetoresistive ratio.
Studies of Potato Turer Defects in Western New York

The characteristic feeding scars produced by the various forms is discussed together with the results of the first year–s survey of the distribution and prevalence of these injuries in 8 Western New York Counties.
Self-assembly of protein-based biomaterials initiated by titania nanotubes

Protein-based biomaterials are a promising strategy for creating robust highly selective biocatalysts. The assembled biomaterials must sufficiently retain the near-native structure of proteins and provide molecular access to catalytically active sites. These requirements often exclude the use of conventional assembly techniques, which rely on covalent cross-linking of proteins or entrapment within a scaffold. Here we demonstrate that titania nanotubes can initiate and template the self-assembly of enzymes, such as ribonuclease A, while maintaining their catalytic activity. Initially, the enzymes form multilayer thick ellipsoidal aggregates centered on the nanotube surface; subsequently, these nanosized entities assemble into a micrometer-sized enzyme material that has enhanced enzymatic activity and contains as little as 0.1 wt % TiO2 nanotubes. This phenomenon is uniquely associated with the active anatase (001)-like surface of titania nanotubes and does not occur on other anatase nanomaterials, which contain significantly fewer undercoordinated Ti surface sites. These findings present a nanotechnology-enabled mechanism of biomaterial growth and open a new route for creating stable protein-based biomaterials and biocatalysts without the need for chemical modification.
232 ASSESSMENT OF IN VITRO PARAOXONASE 2 ENZYMATIC ACTIVITY: APPLICATIONS TO CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE.

Oxidation of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) plays an integral role in the initiation and progression of atherosclerosis, an underlying cause for cardiovascular diseases. High-density lipoprotein (HDL) is antiatherogenic; HDL-associated proteins, including the paraoxonases (PON), contribute to the protective effects of HDL. The PON gene family consists of three members—PON 1, PON 2 and PON3—located on human chromosome 7q21.3-22.1. Biochemical studies have shown that all three PON proteins possess antioxidant properties against LDL in vitro. Although the physiological function and enzymatic substrates for the PON gene products remain unknown, the proteins possess a common enzyme activity: lactonase activity. In contrast to PON1 and PON3, PON2 is not associated with HDL in the circulation but instead remains intracellular. PON2 is ideal to study the mechanism of action of paraoxonases in vitro because it is associated with the plasma membrane fraction of cells. In the present study, we utilized cell culture models to determine whether the enzymatic activities of PON2 and two of its polymorphisms, A148M and C311S, correspond to their predicted roles in cardiovascular disease. Wild-type PON2, PON2 (A148M), and PON2 (C311S) were overexpressed in COS-7 cells using an adenoviral system. The activity of each enzyme was measured in a lactonase assay using 5-HETE lactone as the substrate. The results showed no significant difference in lactonase activity between the wild-type and variant enzymes. Based on these preliminary studies, we conclude that PON2 lactonase activity may not be associated with the predicted epidemiological link between PON2 polymorphisms and cardiovascular disease.
Measuring disease modification in Alzheimer's disease.

We appear to be on the brink of a new epoch of treatment for Alzheimer's disease. Compelling evidence suggests that Aβ42 secretion is the triggering event in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease, and that tau aggregation may be an important secondary event linked to neurodegeneration. Prophylactic administration of anti-amyloid agents designed to prevent Aβ accumulation in persons with subclinical disease is likely to be more effective than therapeutic interventions in established Alzheimer's disease. Drug development programs in Alzheimer's disease focus primarily on agents with anti-amyloid disease-modifying properties, and many different pharmacologic approaches to reducing amyloid pathology and tauopathy are being studied. Classes of therapeutic modalities currently in advanced-stage clinical trial testing include forms of immunotherapy (active β -amyloid immunoconjugate and human intravenous immunoglobulin), a γ-secretase inhibitor, the selective Aβ42-lowering agent R-flurbiprofen, and the anti-aggregation agent tramiprosate. Non-traditional dementia therapies such as the HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors (statins), valproate, and lithium are now being assessed for clinical benefit as anti-amyloid disease-modifying treatments. Positive findings of efficacy and safety from clinical studies are necessary but not sufficient to demonstrate that a drug has disease-modifying properties. Definitive proof of disease-modification requires evidence from validated animal models of Alzheimer's disease; rigorously controlled clinical trials showing a significantly improved, stabilized, or slowed rate of decline in cognitive and global function compared to placebo; and prospectively obtained evidence from surrogate biomarkers that the treatment resulted in measurable biological changes associated with the underlying disease process.
Infants and Children

When compared to adults, children have more sensitive thermostats, thinner skin, narrower airways, more sensitive gastrointestinal tracts, and a limited repertoire of ways to communicate their symptoms. Add to this the panoply of congenital diseases—both hereditary and environmentally caused—and we can appreciate the special diagnostic challenges often presented when disease occurs in the infant or child.
Clinical Pharmacology of Cannabis in Relation to its Social Use

One of the peculiarities of the problem of determining the potential for social use for drugs with properties like cannabis is that the issue has usually been settled empirically by users before the problem is anticipated by the rest of us. As most of the agents in this class, which might also include the hallucinogens, are not used therapeutically, except in an experimental way, and none seem to be destined for the usual marketplace, no systematic efforts have been taken to determine ways to anticipate the problem of their potential for social use, as in the case of narcotic analgesics.
Evaluating performance of critical chain project management to mitigate delays based on different schedule network complexities

The Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) method uses both project and feeder buffers in network schedules to act as cushions that absorb delays. These buffers are periods that are placed at the ends of critical or non-critical paths within the schedule. But how CCPM performs for probabilistic schedules has barely been studied systematically. It is hypothesized that the complexity of the networks influences how efficiently allocated buffers can fulfill their protective role. This paper therefore explores the relationship between complexity indices and the delay-mitigating performance of CCPM. Its contribution to the body of knowledge is twofold: First, schedule network complexity indices are reviewed and a schedule network graphing module is developed, which identifies the critical chain and buffer locations. Second, CCPM is applied to networks of different complexity with probabilistic durations. Their performance is measured in Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate the efficacy of buffer allocation under various different scenarios.
General Relationship Between Water Quality and Aquaculture Performance in Ponds

Abstract There is a close relationship between water-quality conditions in grow-out systems and the health of aquaculture animals. Impaired water quality can cause direct mortality, but more often, it stresses aquatic animals making them more susceptible to infectious diseases. The effort required for maintaining homeostasis by aquatic animals exposed to suboptimal water quality also diverts energy from growth. Survival and growth of aquatic animals in culture systems decline as the quality of water deteriorates. Most of the problems with water quality in aquaculture result from less than optimal quality of the water supply and fertilizer- and feed-waste effects on water quality. The major water-quality stressors are suboptimal levels or concentrations of the following: water temperature, salinity, and cation imbalance (usually site- or source water–related); pH, gas supersaturation, and toxic algae (both site- or aquaculture input-related and management-related); dissolved oxygen, ammonia nitrogen, nitrite, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide (usually aquaculture input- and management-related). Methods for controlling water quality are discussed briefly.
The baroreflex effectiveness index as an early marker of autonomic dysfunction in heart failure

Heart failure (HF) is a major public health problem worldwide, associated with significant morbidity, mortality, and healthcare expenditure. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
Near-Zero-Power Temperature Sensing via Tunneling Currents Through Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Transistors.

Temperature sensors are routinely found in devices used to monitor the environment, the human body, industrial equipment, and beyond. In many such applications, the energy available from batteries or the power available from energy harvesters is extremely limited due to limited available volume, and thus the power consumption of sensing should be minimized in order to maximize operational lifetime. Here we present a new method to transduce and digitize temperature at very low power levels. Specifically, two pA current references are generated via small tunneling-current metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs) that are independent and proportional to temperature, respectively, which are then used to charge digitally-controllable banks of metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitors that, via a discrete-time feedback loop that equalizes charging time, digitize temperature directly. The proposed temperature sensor was integrated into a silicon microchip and occupied 0.15 mm2 of area. Four tested microchips were measured to consume only 113 pW with a resolution of 0.21 °C and an inaccuracy of ±1.65 °C, which represents a 628× reduction in power compared to prior-art without a significant reduction in performance.
Using Viterbi and Kalman to detect topological changes in dynamic networks

This paper addresses the issue of determining the causal link structure of a network of dynamical systems from time series. Such problem is relevant in contexts where time series data is abundant but causal relationships are unknown. Complex systems, where interaction can rarely be derived from first principles constitute a main target of this effort. Applications abound in biology, environmental sciences and interconnected infrastructures, to name a few. Current methods are promising in their ability to determine link structure, and even provide guarantees under qualified assumptions; however, they are limited in their ability to track changes in causal structure over time. Such changes may result from external or unmodeled disruptions, such as cyber attacks or the formation or dissolution of business relationships. In this paper we formulate a model for changing networks and show that it is a generalization of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). We then provide an algorithm capable of detecting topological changes in dynamical networks, and we compute the probability distributions of transition times.
A structural mechano-chemical model for dynamic instability of microtubule

Microtubules are a major component of the cytoskeleton and vital to numerous cellular processes. The central dogma of microtubules is that all their functions are driven by dynamic instability; understanding its key phenomena (i.e. catastrophe, rescue, pause, differential behaviors at the plus and minus ends) distilled from a myriad of experiments under a consistent and unified scheme, however, has been unattainable. Here, we present a novel statistical-physics- based model uniquely constructed from conformational states deduced from existing tubulin structures, with transitions between them controlled by steric constraints and mechanical energy of the microtubule lattice. This mechano-chemical model allows, for the first time, all the key phenomena of dynamic instability to be coherently reproduced by the corresponding kinetic simulations. Long-puzzling phenomena, such as aging, small GTP-cap size, fast catastrophe upon dilution and temperature-induced ribbon-to-tube transition of GMPCPP-tubulins, robustly emerge and thus can be understood with confidence.
Decomposition of hydroxylammonium nitrate in a low pressure flowing thermal capillary system

Abstract Hydroxylammonium nitrate (HAN) is a potential monopropellant for plasma-based electric propulsion thrusters. However, little is known about the thermal decomposition of HAN at pressures typically encountered in aerospace applications. In this study, using residual gas analysis (RGA) we examine the production of nitrous oxide (N2O), nitrosamide (H2N2O), and nitroxyl (HNO) by thermally decomposing HAN exposed to pressures between 2 and 50 mTorr. Initial expectation was that NO and NO2 would be the primary species producing signal at 30 and 46 m/z respectively. Kinetic modeling studies of HAN solution, however, attributed these signals to HNO and H2N2O, respectively. Thermal decomposition was achieved by passively injecting an aqueous HAN solution into a flowing thermal capillary and detecting the gas products with mass spectrometry. N2O and H2N2O produced relatively small signal with a minor pressure dependence at low temperatures and no pressure dependence above ~460 K. HNO produced a much larger signal relative to N2O and H2N2O and exhibited a high level of pressure dependence as temperature increased above the onset of thermal decomposition, ~393 K. These results indicate that the formation of N2O, H2N2O, and HNO is occurring not only in the bulk solution but possibly on the surface of the aqueous HAN solution and in the vapor phase immediately above the solution surface. The kinetics and mechanism of possible decomposition pathways to form these species are discussed.
Declaratively Producing Data Mash-ups.

Mash-ups extract data fragments from disparate sources, and combine and transform the extracted fragments for display. Currently, mash-up developers tend to employ ad hoc representations for mash-up data, view mash-ups as applications, and use imperative scripts to extract and transform data fragments. These approaches can make mash-up development hard, and the mash-ups’ run-time performance poor. We address these concerns with our infrastructure to declaratively produce data mash-ups. In this paper, we introduce three parts of this infrastructure: Sixml, an XML language to uniformly represent a condensed mash-up; Sixml DOM, a means to manipulate and reconstitute mash-up parts on demand; and Sixml Navigator, an alternative path navigator to reconstitute and format a mash-up using queries in existing languages. We also present the highlights of an experimental evaluation.
CTP: Phosphocholine cytidyltransferase alpha (CCTalpha) siRNA induce cell death in p53 negative and positive lung cancer cells

CCT is a rate limiting enzyme required for the synthesis of phosphatidylcholine through the CDP-choline pathway, which is critical for cell proliferation. Anti-cancer drugs have therefore been desi...
CURING | Physiology of Nitric Oxide

The process of ‘curing’ food is a long-established practice that dates back thousands of years long before refrigeration or food safety regulations. At present food safety and mass manufacturing is dependent on safe and effective means to cure and preserve foods including meats. The science of curing is now very well understood and is dependent on a simple molecule: nitric oxide or NO. Interestingly, this simple molecule is now recognized as an important signaling molecule produced in the body. Foods or diets enriched with NO activity can have profound health benefits.
Spectral Shifts in the Fluorescence of Anthracene and Lifetime Changes in Crystal Violet Under Laser Driven Shock Compression: Probes of Pressure and Viscosity

Compressional shock waves produce rapid simultaneous jumps in temperature and pressure in materials that may lead to unusual chemical and physical behavior1. Optical techniques such as absorption spectroscopy2 and stimulated raman spectroscopy3 have been used to obtain information, at a molecular level, on changes in the material behind the shock front. Traditional techniques used to generate shock waves and optically probe the shocked regions involve the use of gas guns or explosive charges and mechanical synchronization of the interrogating light pulse. These techniques are well developed and have provided a vast amount of high-quality data on the physics and chemistry of shock loaded materials. These techniques do have certain drawbacks: they destroy the sample, the data rates are very low and the time resolution is limited.
Evaluation of sample holding time extension for Escherichia coli and Enterococci measurements

Abstract Escherichia coli and enterococci enumerations were made after 6 and 24 hours of preservation on ice. No significant difference was found between the 6 and 24 hour counts for Escherichia coli . Enterococci counts, however, were significantly different after 24 hours.
With Roots In California, Managed Competition Still Aims To Reform Health Care

Managed competition is a concept that was born in California and has achieved a measure of acceptance there. As California and the United States as a whole continue to struggle with the challenge o...
Beyond debits and credits: Using integrated projects to improve students’ understanding of financial accounting

Abstract This paper discusses a method for developing integrated, multi-step projects that will help students better understand the accounting cycle and develop the problem-solving and technology skills that they need to become successful accounting professionals. More specifically, this method allows instructors to develop projects designed to review specific topics, introduce basic tax consequences, demonstrate how transactions affect the financial statements and encourage students to think about investor reactions and possible ethical dilemmas without sacrificing substantial amounts of class time. After discussing how to develop this type of project, the paper provides suggestions on how to incorporate the project into an intermediate accounting course.
The Reproduction of Social Disadvantage Through Educational Demobilization: A Critical Analysis of Parental Incarceration

The focus of this study concerns the intergenerational consequences of the era of mass incarceration and its role in promoting an educational demobilization of primarily marginalized groups. Using the Howard B. Kaplan Multigenerational and Longitudinal data set, this article links incarceration in the first generation to educational experiences of the second generation at two stages in the life course: adolescence (N = 1303) and emerging adulthood (N = 1621). Intergenerational theories of strain and stigma are argued to be mechanisms in the transmission of reduced educational success and attainment among the second generation. The findings reveal that children of once incarcerated parents are significantly more likely to report that they are experiencing unhappiness in school and have significantly lower levels of educational success than their counterparts not experiencing parental incarceration. Due to these outcomes, I argue that the reproduction of disadvantage produced by the intergenerational effects of parental incarceration will linger in society even with a reduction of incarcerated populations. The need for understanding the intergenerational implications of mass incarceration among disadvantaged populations is discussed.
Nab-paclitaxel and atezolizumab for the treatment of PD-L1-positive, metastatic triple-negative breast cancer: review and future directions

Introduction: Breast cancer is the most common malignancy in women in the United States and triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) accounts for 15–20%. The standard of care for metastatic TNBC has be...
Equi-isoclinic subspaces from difference sets

Equi-chordal tight fusion frames (ECTFFs) and equi-isoclinic tight fusion frames (EITFFs) are types of optimal packings in Grassmannian spaces. In particular, an ECTFF is an arrangement of equi-dimensional subspaces of a Euclidean space with the property that the smallest chordal distance between any pair of these subspaces is as large as possible. An EITFF is a special type of ECTFF that also happens to be an optimal packing with respect to the spectral distance. In the special case where the subspaces are one-dimensional, both ECTFFs and EITFFs reduce to optimal packings of lines known as equiangular tight frames (ETFs); these lines have minimal coherence, achieving equality in the Welch bound. ETFs are tricky to construct, but several infinite families of them are known. Harmonic ETFs in particular arise by restricting the characters of a finite abelian group to a difference set for that group. Moreover, there is a simple tensor-based method for combining ETFs with orthonormal bases to form EITFFs. It is an open question as to whether every EITFF essentially arises in this way.In this short paper, we preview a new result relating difference sets, harmonic ETFs, ECTFFs and EITFFs. This work expands on other recent results showing that certain harmonic ETFs are comprised of a number of simpler ETFs known as regular simplices; such ETFs arise, for example, from McFarland difference sets as well as the complements of certain Singer difference sets. It is already known that in this situation the subspaces spanned by these regular simplices necessarily form an ECTFF. We recently discovered that these same subspaces form an EITFF in some, but not all, cases. In an upcoming journal article, we shall characterize the properties of the underlying difference sets that lead to EITFFs in this fashion.
Re-Shape: A Method to Teach Data Ethics for Data Science Education

Data has become central to the technologies and services that human-computer interaction (HCI) designers make, and the ethical use of data in and through these technologies should be given critical attention throughout the design process. However, there is little research on ethics education in computer science that explicitly addresses data ethics. We present and analyze Re-Shape, a method to teach students about the ethical implications of data collection and use. Re-Shape, as part of an educational environment, builds upon the idea of cultivating care and allows students to collect, process, and visualize their physical movement data in ways that support critical reflection and coordinated classroom activities about data, data privacy, and human-centered systems for data science. We also use a case study of Re-Shape in an undergraduate computer science course to explore prospects and limitations of instructional designs and educational technology such as Re-Shape that leverage personal data to teach data ethics.
Association of Delirium With Long-term Cognitive Decline: A Meta-analysis

Importance Delirium is associated with increased hospital costs, health care complications, and increased mortality. Long-term consequences of delirium on cognition have not been synthesized and quantified via meta-analysis. Objective To determine if an episode of delirium was an independent risk factor for long-term cognitive decline, and if it was, whether it was causative or an epiphenomenon in already compromised individuals. Data Sources A systematic search in PubMed, Cochrane, and Embase was conducted from January 1, 1965, to December 31, 2018. A systematic review guided by Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses was conducted. Search terms included delirium AND postoperative cognitive dysfunction; delirium and cognitive decline; delirium AND dementia; and delirium AND memory. Study Selection Inclusion criteria for studies included contrast between groups with delirium and without delirium; an objective continuous or binary measure of cognitive outcome; a final time point of 3 or more months after the delirium episode. The electronic search was conducted according to established methodologies and was executed on October 17, 2018. Data Extraction and Synthesis Three authors extracted data on individual characteristics, study design, and outcome, followed by a second independent check on outcome measures. Effect sizes were calculated as Hedgesg. If necessary, binary outcomes were also converted tog. Only a single effect size was calculated for each study. Main Outcomes and Measures The planned main outcome was magnitude of cognitive decline in Hedgesgeffect size in delirium groups when contrasted with groups that did not experience delirium. Results Of 1583 articles, data subjected from the 24 studies (including 3562 patients who experienced delirium and 6987 controls who did not) were included in a random-effects meta-analysis for pooled effect estimates and random-effects meta-regressions to identify sources of study variance. One study was excluded as an outlier. There was a significant association between delirium and long-term cognitive decline, as the estimated effect size (Hedgesg) for 23 studies was 0.45 (95% CI, 0.34-0.57;P Conclusions and Relevance In this meta-analysis, delirium was significantly associated with long-term cognitive decline in both surgical and nonsurgical patients.
Lagrangian Inference for Ranking Problems

We propose a novel combinatorial inference framework to conduct general uncertainty quantification in ranking problems. We consider the widely adopted Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model, where each item is assigned a positive preference score that determines the Bernoulli distributions of pairwise comparisons' outcomes. Our proposed method aims to infer general ranking properties of the BTL model. The general ranking properties include the "local" properties such as if an item is preferred over another and the "global" properties such as if an item is among the top $K$-ranked items. We further generalize our inferential framework to multiple testing problems where we control the false discovery rate (FDR), and apply the method to infer the top-$K$ ranked items. We also derive the information-theoretic lower bound to justify the minimax optimality of the proposed method. We conduct extensive numerical studies using both synthetic and real datasets to back up our theory.
Reactivity Contributions of Various Materials in Topsy, Godiva, and Jezebel

An accumulation of reactivity contribution data is brought together for the various critical assemblies at Pajarito. Corresponding values of effective absorption and transport cross sections are derived, and relations between critical mass and volume fraction of diluents are obtained in terms of these cross sections. In some favorable cases, inelastic scattering contributions to the effective absorption cross sections are estimated. (auth)
Who Needs Help? Automating Student Assessment Within Exploratory Learning Environments

This article describes efforts to offer automated assessment of students within an exploratory learning environment. We present a regression model that estimates student assessments in an ill-defined medical diagnosis tutor called Rashi. We were pleased to find that basic features of a student’s solution predicted expert assessment well, particularly when detecting low-achieving students. We also discuss how expert knowledge bases might be leveraged to improve this process. We suggest that developers of exploratory learning environments can leverage this technique with relatively few extensions to a mature system. Finally, we describe the potential to utilize this information to direct teachers’ attention towards students in need of help.
Title generation for machine-translated documents

In this paper, we present and compare automatically generated titles for machine-translated documents using several different statistics-based methods. A Naive Bayesian, a K-Nearest Neighbour, a TF-IDF and an iterative Expectation-Maximization method for title generation were applied to 1000 original English news documents and again to the same documents translated from English into Portuguese, French or German and back to English using SYSTRAN. The AutoSummarization function of Microsoft Word was used as a base line. Results on several metrics show that the statistics-based methods of title generation for machine-translated documents are fairly language independent and title generation is possible at a level approaching the accuracy of titles generated for the original English documents.
Characterization and comparison of the red blood cell membrane damage in severe human alpha- and beta-thalassemia

The aim of the present work was to understand the pathophysiology of the severe human thalassemias as represented by beta-thalassemia intermedia and hemoglobin (Hb) H (alpha-thalassemia) disease. We have previously shown that the material properties of the red blood cell (RBC) and its membrane differ in severe alpha- and beta-thalassemia, and we now show that this difference is probably caused by accumulation of alpha-globin chains at the cytoskeleton in beta-thalassemia, whereas beta-globin chains are associated with the cytoskeleton in alpha-thalassemia. In both alpha- and beta-thalassemia, some of these globin chains have become oxidized as evidenced by loss of the free thiols. Furthermore, there is similar evidence of oxidation of protein 4.1 in beta-thalassemia, whereas beta-spectrin appears to be subject to oxidation in alpha-thalassemia. These observations support the idea that the association of partly oxidized globin chains with the cytoskeleton results in oxidation of adjacent skeletal proteins. The abnormality of protein 4.1 in beta-thalassemia is consistent with a prior observation, and is also in accord with the known importance of protein 4.1 in maintenance of membrane stability, a property that is abnormal in beta-thalassemic membranes.