jimnoneill/paper-to-field-training huggingface dataset:
Caspase-3 Has Apoptotic and Non-Apoptotic Functions in Regulating the Fate of Hematopoietic Stem Cells.

Field: Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology (Life Sciences)

Abstract The processes of cell cycle control, differentiation and apoptosis are closely intertwined in controlling cell fate during development and in adult homeostasis. Much emphasis has been placed on differentiation and proliferation in hematopoiesis, but little is known about control of the stem cell pool by mediators of apoptosis. We are particularly interested in the cysteine-aspartic acid protease, Caspase-3, an ‘executioner’ caspase also implicated in the regulation of the cyclin dependent kinase inhibitor, p21Cip1. p21 is known to regulate hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) cycling and we demonstrated high levels of Caspase-3 mRNA and protein in immunophenotypically defined mouse HSC. Using mice engineered to be deficient in Caspase-3, we observed no difference from wild-type in blood counts. However, knock-out animals had reduced bone marrow cellularity and an increase in the stem cell enriched lin-kit+Sca-1+ CD34 low (LKS-CD34lo) cell fraction. The apoptotic rates of LKS cells under homeostatic conditions were minimally different from controls. However, under conditions of stress (gamma irradiation, heat shock or cytokine withdrawal), Caspase-3 deficient LKS cells demonstrated reduced sensitivity to apoptotic cell death as measured by TUNEL or Annexin-V assay. Primitive hematopoietic cells from these animals in vivo also had reduced BrdU incorporation reflecting decreased proliferation and, upon transplantation, demonstrated marked differentiation abnormalities. Caspase-3−/− marrow cells had significantly reduced ability to differentiate into lymphoid and myeloid lineages 12 weeks after transplantation. Similarly, WT bone marrow cells treated prior to transplantation with a selective Caspase-3 inhibitor, z-DEVD.fmk, displayed a significant disadvantage in peripheral blood reconstitution, compared with a mock control. These data indicate that Caspase-3 is involved in the regulation of apoptosis, differentiation and proliferation of HSC. The molecular bases for these effects remain to be determined, but the multi-faceted nature of the changes seen suggest that Caspase-3 is central to multiple regulatory pathways in the stem cell compartment.
P4-02-04 - Assessment of selected parameters of body composition in idiopathic epilepsy

Field: Medicine (Health Sciences)

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder characterized by seizures resulting from abnormal or excessive neuronal activity in the brain. The most common type of epilepsy, which affects 6 out of 10 people with this disease, is idiopathic epilepsy, which has no identifiable cause. People with epilepsy tend to be overweight, obese and abdominally obese. Body Mass Index (BMI) is the most commonly used parameter in nutrition studies, but it does not reflect the ratio between fat and muscle tissue. Therefore, the analysis of body composition would be more appropriate.The study involved 40 adult people (29 women and 11 men), aged 36 and 32 years, respectively, with idiopathic epilepsy and 40 healthy people matched by age and sex. Epileptics completed a questionnaire on clinical course and treatment. Body composition analysis was carried out using a bioelectric impedance analyzer (BIA), model InBody 270. Statistical analysis was carried out using Statistica software.BMI in the study group was 25.4u00b14.59 (normal range 18.5-24.9). The mean percentage of adipose tissue in the study group was 36u00b113.8 in women (optimal range 20-30%) and 29.7u00b19 in men (optimal range 12-20 %). The mean waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) was 0.924u00b10.06 in women (standard <0.8) and 0.892u00b10.08 in men (standard <1). These results did not differfrom those obtained in the control group. However, in women the segmental fat-free mass (FFM) was significantly lower in comparison to the control group of females.In the examined men a significantly lower segmental FFM, total body water (TBW), proteins, minerals and skeletal muscle mass (SMM) were found. In this study epileptic patients tend to be overweight with an excess body fat. Despite similar BMI, they have an unfavorable body composition compared to control. These results suggest that patients with idiopathic epilepsy may be at greater risk of metabolic disorders than their healthy peers.Conflict of interest:There is no conflict of interest.
Measles outbreak under the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy

Field: Medicine (Health Sciences)

Abstract Background Measles cases in Italy (58,9 mln population) were 8 in 2021, 15 in 2022 and 43 in 2023. Between January and April 2024 there were 213 cases in Italy, with higher incidence in children. Pisa Local Public Health Department (201073 population) experienced a measles outbreak in the same period. Methods Cases were classified according to Decision (EU) 2018/945. A bidirectional tracing (backward and forward) was conducted to identify transmission chain and contacts of cases. Immunization status was checked on Regional Vaccination Registry. Results 33 suspected measles cases were notified in Pisa between 21st January and 17th April 2024: 16 by General Practitioners and 17 by Hospital Emergency Room. Additionally, 1 undiagnosed case was found during the epidemiological investigation. 2 notifications were withdrawn by General Practitioner because of lack of the diagnostic criteria. Laboratory analysis confirmed 24 cases. Last confirmed case occurred on 23rd February, while not confirmed cases occurred mostly in the last part of the period (6 in a row from 3rd March to 17th April), suggesting an infodemic effect. Women were more affected than men (17 vs. 7). Except for 2 babies (9 months and 1 year old age), the outbreak affected young adults with a mean age of 40 yo. Hospitalization rate was 37,5%. The first 5 unrelated cases occurred between 19th and 21st January. A second wave involved 13 people, 12 of them were related to a single case. Transmission occurred in Emergency Room (7), in a mall (1) and in the neighborhood (4). A third wave involved 4 cases (family contacts). 2 cases were imported from Sicily and Spain. All cases were unvaccinated, 2 were migrants. Around 950 contacts were traced. Conclusions In Pisa, high vaccination coverage of children &lt; 2years of age (≥95%) protected school population and cases to spread, but there are pockets of unvaccinated adults which could allow measles circulation. Key messages • An effective public health response is required to contrast increasing measles cases in EU/EE countries. • As recommended by ECDC, public health services need to close immunity gaps, addressing catch-up actions towards adults and vulnerable groups as migrants.
Friction measurements on inclined dry, wet, and glycerol-contaminated floors using four footwear samples

Field: Engineering (Physical Sciences)

Slips and falls are very common not only in industry but also in our daily activities. The coefficient of friction (COF) is coomonly adopted as a measure to quantify floor slipperiness and as an index to represent the risk of slipping and falling. A friction measurement study was conducted in the laboratory under four footwear, three surface, and three inclination conditions. The Brungraber Mark II slipmeter was used for the measurement. The results showed that all the main and interaction effects of the three factors were statistically significant. Dry floors had the highest COF, next with the wet floor, and finally the glycerol contaminated floors. The flat floor had the highest COF, next with the 5° floors, and finally the 10° ones. Treaded Neolite had better slip-resistance than flat Neolite. Treaded rubber, however, did not provided batter slip-resistance than that of the flat rubber sample.
[Effects and mechanism ofitraconazole on prostate cancer PC-3 cell apoptosis].

Field: Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics (Life Sciences)

Objective: To investigate the effects and mechanisms of itraconazole on prostate cancer PC-3 cells proliferation. Methods: The PC-3 cells were divided into four group: control group, itraconazole group, itraconazole+ CerS-1-shRNA group and itraconazole+ PDMP group.3-(4, 5-dimethyl-2-thiazolyl)-2, 5-diphenyl-2-H-tetrazolium bromide(MTT)assay was used to detect the growth of PC-3 cells.Apoptosis was detected by Annexin V-FITC /PI.The intracellular ceramide production was assayed by high performance liquid chromatography(HPLC). The expression of Bax, Bcl-2, cleaved-caspase3 and the expression and phosphorylation of Akt, mTORC1 were detected by Western blot. Results: After treatment with 0, 5, 10, 20 μmol/L itraconazole, apoptosis rate was 3.23%±1.32%, 5.87%±2.45%, 23.22%±5.29%, 48.57%±8.37%.The percentage content of ceramide was 100%, 109%±18%, 156%±12%, 197%±22%.Compared with the control group, there were statistically differences when the concentration of itraconazole were 10 and 20 μmol/L(all P<0.05). Western blot analysis showed that the Bax, cleaved-caspase 3 expression of itraconazole group and itraconazole+ PDMP group was significantly higher than control group, while Bcl-2 expression was significantly lower than the control; the Bax, cleaved-caspase 3 expression ofitraconazole+ CerS1-shRNA group was significantly lower than itraconazole group, while Bcl-2 expression was significantly higher than the itraconazole group.After 5, 10, 20 μmol/L itraconazole treatment, the expression of p-Akt and p-mTORC1 were significantly lower than the control group; the expression of p-Akt and p-mTORC1 in itraconazole+ CerS-1-shRNA group were significantly higher than itraconazole group. Conclusion: Itraconazole induces apoptosis of PC-3 cell through increasing the intracellular ceramide content, which might relate to upregulation of cleavage-caspase 3 and Bax, downregulation of Bcl-2 and inactivation of Akt-mTORC signal pathway.
Interlanguage Analysis: How morpheme order studies do not necessarily apply to every situation

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Much research on language acquisition, from nativist to interactionist, describes Morpheme Order Studies as a major development in second language acquisition. This paper intended to discuss how spoken data from a Japanese student could be used to indicate the level of acquisition of English morphemes attained via the processability theory but actually determined that an order of acquisition does not necessarily apply. Results showed that the informant varied in success in supplying correct morphemes in obligatory contexts, that her first language did not interfere with her second language acquisition and the accuracy of using morpheme order sequence to determine the level of acquisition breaks down because learner’s developmental sequence is unpredictable.
Morton Feldman, Speaking of Music at the Exploratorium in 1986

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Morton Feldman interviewed by Charles Amirkhanian at the Exploratorium's Speaking of Music Series in San Francisco, January 30, 1986. Charles Amirkhanian interviews Morton Feldman and asks right at the top: Is your music Hermetic? The answers take us on a whirlwind tour of this composers opinions, philosophy, criticisms, recollections and observations. There are excerpts from his Piano and String Quartet as well as his Violin Concerto. Feldman indicates that his compositions, which are usually lengthy, can be compared to the novels of Proust or drinking a fine wine: one to be sipped rather than gulped. Dont give up listening until you find out why Fred Astaire danced so well, or why Beethoven wrote his C-sharp minor String Quartet; Feldman provides the answers! Thanks to the Estate of Morton Feldman for permission to share this historic interview. All Rights Reserved.
Supplementary Tables from Bioavailability of Sulforaphane from Two Broccoli Sprout Beverages: Results of a Short-term, Cross-over Clinical Trial in Qidong, China

Field: Medicine (Health Sciences)

Supplementary Tables from Bioavailability of Sulforaphane from Two Broccoli Sprout Beverages: Results of a Short-term, Cross-over Clinical Trial in Qidong, China
A collection of Book Reviews for Volume 19, Issue 1

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Literator publishes research articles and essays on linguistics and literature in general, but focuses in particular on the (comparative) study of South African languages and literatures and other cultural phenomena across language, media and cultural boundaries (examples of topics would be: different manifestations of Post-Modernism, the interaction between visual arts and literature, the representation of the South African War in literature, language attitudes and language policy).
On the properties and implications of collapse-driven MHD turbulence

Field: Physics and Astronomy (Physical Sciences)

ABSTRACT We investigate the driving of MHD turbulence by gravitational contraction using simulations of an initially spherical, isothermal, magnetically supercritical molecular cloud core with transonic and trans-Alfvénic turbulence. We perform a Helmholtz decomposition of the velocity field, and investigate the evolution of its solenoidal and compressible parts, as well as of the velocity component along the gravitational acceleration vector, a proxy for the infall component of the velocity field. We find that (1) In spite of being supercritical, the core first contracts to a sheet perpendicular to the mean magnetic field, and the sheet itself collapses. (2) The solenoidal component of the turbulence remains at roughly its initial level throughout the simulation, while the compressible component increases continuously, implying that turbulence does not dissipate towards the centre of the core. (3) The distribution of simulation cells in the B–ρ plane occupies a wide triangular region at low densities, bounded below by the expected trend for fast MHD waves (B ∝ ρ, applicable for high-local Alfvénic Mach number MA) and above by the trend expected for slow waves (B ∼ constant, applicable for low local MA). At high densities, the distribution follows a single trend $B \propto \rho ^{\gamma _{\rm eff}}$, with 1/2 &lt; γeff &lt; 2/3, as expected for gravitational compression. (4) The mass-to-magnetic flux ratio λ increases with radius r due to the different scalings of the mass and magnetic flux with r. At a fixed radius, λ increases with time due to the accretion of material along field lines. (5) The solenoidal energy fraction is much smaller than the total turbulent component, indicating that the collapse drives the turbulence mainly compressibly, even in directions orthogonal to that of the collapse.
Exploring the role of online EFL learners’ perceived social support in their learning engagement: a structural equation model

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

During the COVID-19 pandemic period, a growing number of learning activities are taking place in online contexts. Along with the adversity in the online course of target language learning, student engagement has been considered important to improve learners' academic achievements of the target language. Although there has been a growing interest in the relationship between students' perceived social support and their online learning engagement, the literature lacks an in-depth investigation of the intricate relations between these two constructs in an online English as a foreign language (EFL) learning setting during the pandemic. To address this gap, this study attempts to develop a model which depicts the relationships between students' perceived social support and their online English learning engagement. A total of 615 university students in China were invited to take part in the study. By conducting structural equation modeling, the results confirmed the mediational model in which behavioral engagement completely mediated the relationships between social support (teacher support and peer support) and three other types of student engagement (cognitive, emotional and social engagement). These findings suggest designing effective instruction and developing support strategies in online teaching to enhance EFL learners' engagement during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Fast Unsupervised Cross-Modal Hashing with Robust Factorization and Dual Projection

Field: Computer Science (Physical Sciences)

Unsupervised hashing has attracted extensive attention in effectively and efficiently tackling large-scale cross-modal retrieval task. Existing methods typically try to mine the latent common subspace across multimodal data without any category annotation. Despite the exciting progress, there are still three challenges that need to be further addressed: (1) efficiently improving the robustness during latent common subspace learning; (2) harmoniously embedding the intra-modal inherence and inter-modal relevance of multimodal data into Hamming space; and (3) effectively reducing the training time complexity and making the model scalable for large-scale datasets. To well address the above challenges, this study proposes a method named Fast Unsupervised Cross-Modal Hashing (FUCH). Specifically, FUCH proposes a semantic-aware collective matrix factorization to learn robust representation via exploiting latent category-specific attributes, and introduces Cauchy loss to measure the factorization process. Accordingly, the above process can effectively embed potential discriminative information into common space, while making the model insensitive for outliers. Moreover, FUCH designs a dual projection learning scheme, which not only learns modality-unique hash functions to excavate individual properties but also learns modality-mutual hash functions to multimodal correlational properties. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of FUCH under various scenarios.
The Role of Macrophages in the Host’s Defense against Sporothrix schenckii

Field: Immunology and Microbiology (Life Sciences)

The role of immune cells associated with sporotrichosis caused by Sporothrix schenckii is not yet fully clarified. Macrophages through pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) can recognize pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) of Sporothrix, engulf it, activate respiratory burst, and secrete pro-inflammatory or anti-inflammatory biological mediators to control infection. It is important to consider that the characteristics associated with S. schenckii and/or the host may influence macrophage polarization (M1/M2), cell recruitment, and the type of immune response (1, 2, and 17). Currently, with the use of new monocyte-macrophage cell lines, it is possible to evaluate different host–pathogen interaction processes, which allows for the proposal of new mechanisms in human sporotrichosis. Therefore, in order to contribute to the understanding of these host–pathogen interactions, the aim of this review is to summarize and discuss the immune responses induced by macrophage-S. schenckii interactions, as well as the PRRs and PAMPs involved during the recognition of S. schenckii that favor the immune evasion by the fungus.
Measurement of Effects of Antibiotics in Bioluminescent Staphylococcus aureus RN4220

Field: Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology (Life Sciences)

ABSTRACT The spread of antibiotic resistance among pathogenic bacteria is a serious threat to humans and animals. Therefore, unnecessary use should be minimized, and new antimicrobial agents with novel mechanisms of action are needed. We have developed an efficient method for measuring the action of antibiotics which is applied to a gram-positive strain, Staphylococcus aureus RN4220. The method utilizes the firefly luciferase reporter gene coupled to the metal-inducible cadA promoter in a plasmid, pTOO24. Correctly timed induction by micromolar concentrations of antimonite rapidly triggers the luciferase gene transcription and translation. This sensitizes the detection system to the action of antibiotics, and especially for transcriptional and translational inhibitors. We show the results for 11 model antibiotics with the present approach and compare them to an analytical setup with a strain where luciferase expression is under the regulation of a constitutive promoter giving only a report of metabolic inhibition. The measurement of light emission from intact living cells is shown to correlate extremely well ( r = 0.99) with the conventional overnight growth inhibition measurement. Four of the antibiotics were within a 20% concentration range and four were within a 60% concentration range of the drugs tested. This approach shortens the assay time needed, and it can be performed in 1 to 4 h, depending on the sensitivity needed. Furthermore, the assay can be automatized for high-throughput screening by the pharmaceutical industry.
Corynebacterium Jeikeium Endocarditis: A Review of the Literature

Field: Medicine (Health Sciences)

Corynebacterium jeikeium is a gram-positive, aerobic, pleomorphic, nonspore forming bacillus, commonly present on the skin surface. Infective endocarditis secondary to C. jeikeium most commonly affects left-sided heart valves and has a higher likelihood to require valve replacement compared to other Corynebacterium endocarditis. C. jeikeium endocarditis is extremely difficult to treat as it is characteristically resistant to penicillin, cephalosporins and aminoglycosides, and sensitivity to quinolones, macrolides, tetracyclines and rifampin is variable. Despite treatment, mortality rates as high as 33% have been reported. We hereby review the literature regarding the epidemiology, diagnosis and treatment of this deadly microorganism.
BLUES: A Self-organizing BLE Mesh-network Paradigm for IoT Environments

Field: Computer Science (Physical Sciences)

The introduction of new key features into the core specification of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) increased its potentialities, thus paving the way to the development of new networking paradigms. The ability for a single node to participate in more than a piconet and to assume both the role of master and slave makes it possible the formation of multi-hop networks that can be used in several emerging application scenarios. Additionally, the inherent low power consumption at the cost of contained throughput makes this technology appealing for Internet of Things (IoT), where power memory and capacity constrained devices exchange messages at relatively low data rates. In this paper, we devise a two layers BLE mesh-based networking paradigm obtained by generalizing Android BE-MESH for hardware-independent sensor networks. Each node enforces a plug-and-play architecture which makes it able to autonomously switch between client and server role, discover and connect to existing scatternets and relay messages through them, making the network able to extend and self re-organize in a distributed fashion. To have our implementation ready for IoT systems we based it on the ESP32 off-the-shelf board. We describe both the implemented functions as well as some practical results proving the effectiveness of the framework in some tested configurations.
Pressure-driven microfluidics

Field: Engineering (Physical Sciences)

Microfluidics is a new field of fluid flow generation and control at small scales, making possible fundamental changes in some engineering and biomedical fields. Particular advantages bring devices operating without moving parts – but at the usually small Reynolds number it is difficult to use jet inertia,upon which no-moving-part fluidics is based. The paper presents, on an example, a solution: flow assisted - or downright driven - by applied pressure difference.