nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
RNA-Binding Proteins in the Control of LPS-Induced Macrophage Response

Innate immune response is triggered by pathogen components, like lipopolysaccharides (LPS) of gram-negative bacteria. LPS initiates Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) signaling, which involves mitogen activated protein kinases (MAPK) and nuclear factor kappa B (NFκB) in different pathway branches and ultimately induces inflammatory cytokine and chemokine expression, macrophage migration and phagocytosis. Timely gene transcription and post-transcriptional control of gene expression confer the adequate synthesis of signaling molecules. As trans-acting factors RNA binding proteins (RBPs) contribute significantly to the surveillance of gene expression. RBPs are involved in the regulation of mRNA processing, localization, stability and translation. Thereby they enable rapid cellular responses to inflammatory mediators and facilitate a coordinated systemic immune response. Specific RBP binding to conserved sequence motifs in their target mRNAs is mediated by RNA binding domains, like Zink-finger domains, RNA recognition motifs (RRM), and hnRNP K homology domains (KH), often arranged in modular arrays. In this review, we focus on RBPs Tristetraprolin (TTP), human antigen R (HUR), T-cell intracellular antigen 1 related protein (TIAR), and heterogeneous ribonuclear protein K (hnRNP K) in LPS induced macrophages as primary responding immune cells. We discuss recent experiments employing RNA immunoprecipitation and microarray analysis (RIP-Chip) and newly developed individual-nucleotide resolution crosslinking and immunoprecipitation (iCLIP), photoactivatable ribonucleoside-enhanced crosslinking (PAR-iCLIP) and RNA sequencing techniques (RNA-Seq). The global mRNA interaction profile analysis of TTP, HUR, TIAR, and hnRNP K exhibited valuable information about the post-transcriptional control of inflammation related gene expression with a broad impact on intracellular signaling and temporal cytokine expression.

Field of study: Biology
Metals in protein structures: a review of their principal features

Metals are present in more than one-third of all proteins as they occur in nature, and are usually important in biological function or maintenance of the structure. Some are present as cations, directly associated with amino acid functional groups of the protein, others within small molecule cofactors associated with the protein. For the 10 metals commonly found as cations, Na, Mg, K, Ca, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu and Zn, a survey is given of occurrence, relative frequencies of both metal and donor atom or group type, and geometry of coordination. The survey is based on crystal structure information deposited in the Protein Data Bank (PDB) [Berman, H.; Henrick, K.; Nakamura, H.; Markley, J.L. The Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB): Ensuring a Single, Uniform Archive of PDB Data.  2007, 35, D301–D303]. The precision and reliability of this information is assessed in detail. Illustrative examples are given for each metal, including, usually, details of the structure of the metal site in relation to the whole protein and to its function; there are comparisons between metals and descriptions of features such as binding to carboxylate and multiple metal sites close to each other. Metals found within cofactors which associate with the protein, most notably Mo, are included within these examples. Also included briefly are the prediction of metal sites in proteins resulting from genomic synthesis, information which can be derived from methods other than X-ray diffraction of crystals, and metal–protein systems which do not occur naturally.

Field of study: Materials science
Meeting Democracy's Challenge to Higher Education

. . .Now in the great rush of students which is almost at our doors the great state universities will be almost helpless to protect themselves, and many of them which have won distinction as communities of scholars and studentscommunities, each with a personality and a character of its own-will be in grave danger of being distorted and battered out of shape, of being overrun and harried until they lose all sense of direction and quality. It will be squarely up to the independently endowed and privately supported institutions . . . to continue to do their national duty, as I see it, to protect the standards and strive for the ideal community of scholars and students.

Field of study: Education
Differential spectral responsivity measurement of photovoltaic detectors with a light-emitting-diode-based integrating sphere source.

We present an experimental realization of differential spectral responsivity measurement by using a light-emitting diode (LED)-based integrating sphere source. The spectral irradiance responsivity is measured by a Lambertian-like radiation field with a diameter of 40 mm at the peak wavelengths of the 35 selectable LEDs covering a range from 280 to 1550 nm. The systematic errors and uncertainties due to lock-in detection, spatial irradiance distribution, and reflection from the test detector are experimentally corrected or considered. In addition, we implemented a numerical procedure to correct the error due to the broad spectral bandwidth of the LEDs. The overall uncertainty of the DSR measurement is evaluated to be 2.2% (k = 2) for Si detectors. To demonstrate its application, we present the measurement results of two Si photovoltaic detectors at different bias irradiance levels up to 120 mW/cm(2).

Field of study: Physics
Research Themes of Broad Transport Applicability

This paper describes two current examples of research being undertaken at the Claremont Research Institute of Applied Mathematical Sciences. The first concerns the development of geometrically convergent Monte Carlo algorithms to estimate global solutions of transport problems. The second initiative is aimed at the solution of certain inverse problems arising in biomedical applications. Only the main ideas for both techniques are sketched here; algorithmic details and numerical examples are presented elsewhere.

Field of study: Mathematics
The Internationalization of Islamic Banking and Finance: The Co-Evolution of Institutional Changes and Financial Services Integration

The basis for Islamic finance lies in the Shariah. In this paper we point out the co-evolution of institutionalchange and the banking expansion in Islamic countries; there are certain parallelism between the quantitative andqualitative developments of the Islamic financing industry and the emergence of supportive institutions. Thereare certain convergences of Islamic banking products and institutions towards traditional banking functioning butkeeping their principles. The Islamic financial institutions are effective instruments towards financial andeconomic integration at regional and global level. The Islamic economy has also showed a lesser impact of theglobal crisis than the western economy.

Field of study: Business
A late Eocene palynological record of climate change and Tibetan Plateau uplift (Xining Basin, China)

Climate models suggest that Asian paleoenvironments, monsoons and continental aridification were primarily governed by tectonic uplift and sea retreat since the Eocene with potential contribution of global climate changes. However, the cause and timing of these paleoenvironmental changes remain poorly constrained. The recently well-dated continental mudflat to ephemeral saline lake sedimentary succession, situated in the Xining Basin at the northeastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau (NW China), provides a unique opportunity to develop additional proxy successions in this area that are placed accurately in time. Here, a palynological record from this succession is reported. High abundances of desert and steppe-desert taxa such as Ephedripites and Nitrariadites/Nitraripollis are found, which can be differentiated by the presence of broad leaved deciduous forest taxa in the lower part of the section (particularly up to 36.4 Ma; magnetochron C16r), and a sudden increase of Pinaceae (Pinuspollenites, Piceaepollenites and Abiespollenites) which is dated at 36.1 Ma (C16n.2n). Coexistence Approach (CoA) indicates that from 39.9 to 36.4 Ma (C17n.1n) regional climate was warm and wet, while from 36.4 to 33.5 Ma (C16n.2n-C13r) climate tends to be cooler and drier. The data indicate that paleoenvironmental and palynological changes on the NE part of the Tibetan Plateau resulted from a combination of long-term tectonic uplift forcing and long- and short-term climate changes. The increase of taxa such as Piceaepollenites and Abiespollenites indicates not only a cooling and drying trend prior to the Eocene/Oligocene (E/O) boundary, but also the existence of high altitude mountain habitats in the periphery of the Xining Basin. The sudden Pinaceae event correlates closely in time with a marked aridification step as viewed from the lithology of the Xining Basin that was linked to the sea retreat out of the Tarim Basin.

Field of study: Environmental science, Geography
Stereotypes as Historical Accidents: Images of Social Class in Postcommunist Versus Capitalist Societies

Stereotypes are ideological and justify the existing social structure. Although stereotypes persist, they can change when the context changes. Communism’s rise in Eastern Europe and Asia in the 20th century provides a natural experiment examining social-structural effects on social class stereotypes. Nine samples from postcommunist countries (N = 2,241), compared with 38 capitalist countries (N = 4,344), support the historical, sociocultural rootedness of stereotypes. More positive stereotypes of the working class appear in postcommunist countries, both compared with other social groups in the country and compared with working-class stereotypes in capitalist countries; postcommunist countries also show more negative stereotypes of the upper class. We further explore whether communism’s ideological legacy reflects how societies infer groups’ stereotypic competence and warmth from structural status and competition. Postcommunist societies show weaker status–competence relations and stronger (negative) competition–warmth relations; respectively, the lower meritocratic beliefs and higher priority of embeddedness as ideological legacies may shape these relationships.

Field of study: Psychology
Generative Image Modeling Using Spatial LSTMs

Modeling the distribution of natural images is challenging, partly because of strong statistical dependencies which can extend over hundreds of pixels. Recurrent neural networks have been successful in capturing long-range dependencies in a number of problems but only recently have found their way into generative image models. We here introduce a recurrent image model based on multidimensional long short-term memory units which are particularly suited for image modeling due to their spatial structure. Our model scales to images of arbitrary size and its likelihood is computationally tractable. We find that it outperforms the state of the art in quantitative comparisons on several image datasets and produces promising results when used for texture synthesis and inpainting.

Field of study: Computer science
[Clinical features of anxiety disorders in pregnant women].

To study the frequency and clinical features of anxiety disorders during pregnancy.



One thousand women who were 8-40 weeks pregnant were examined. Anxiety disorders were noted in 98 cases, 90 of them were included in the study. A special form used in the study included medical and social/demographic data. Psychopathological examination and psychometric testing were performed.



Psychopathological heterogeneity of anxiety disorders was shown. The following syndromes were singled out: anxiety (20%), anxious-sub-depressive (10%), anxious-phobic (13.3%), anxious-depressive (10%) and a subsyndromal variant (37%).

Field of study: Medicine, Psychology
Photographs in lectures: Gestures as meaning-making resources

Photographs are the most frequent inscriptions in high school biology textbooks. However, little is known about how students make sense of and learn from photographs; even less is known about the different resources available for making sense of photographs when they appear in lectures. In this study, the use of photographs during lectures and lecture-type situations was analyzed with respect to the semiotic resources that speakers standing next to the projected photographs provided for understanding and learning from them. Our analysis identified eight types of gesture as semiotic resources that decreased the ambiguity inherent in photographs, and that have the potential to enhance the understanding of photographs and the scientific concepts embodied in them. We surmise that teachers can help their students learn to read and interpret photographs from lectures when they project them in such a way that it allows the use of gestures as additional meaning-making resources.

Field of study: Education, Linguistics
Effects of Composite Warm Mix Additive (CAR) on the Physical and Rheological Performance of Bitumen and the Pavement Performance of Its Concrete

Warm mix asphalt received increasing attention in recent years, and this technology aims to increase the fluidity of bitumen in the process of mixing and construction. To characterize the physical and rheological properties of bitumen and the pavement performance of bituminous mixtures, it was modified by a composite additive Rediset. Rediset consists of both the cationic surfactants and organic additive-based rheology modifiers. Commonly used materials such as Pen 60/80 bitumen and bituminous concrete (AC-20) were selected. The results show that Rediset can improve the penetration and softening point of the bitumen, making the bitumen stiffer and harder. All Rediset-modified bituminous concretes are in the same low-temperature performance grade (PG) as the bitumen without Rediset. Although Rediset can decrease the rutting and crack resistance of Rediset-modified bituminous concrete, all the Rediset-modified bituminous concrete with less than 2% Rediset still satisfied the requirement of the maximum bending strain being higher than 2000 με, and the dynamic stability of Rediset-modified bituminous concrete with 3% Rediset was still higher than 1000 cycles/mm. The cationic surfactants in the Rediset can play the role of an anti-stripping agent and improve the adhesion between the interfaces of the aggregate and bituminous binder, which enhances the moisture resistance of Rediset-modified bituminous concrete.

Field of study: Materials science
The purification and some properties of the Mg(2+)-activated cytosolic aldehyde dehydrogenase of Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

A purification procedure has been developed for the cytosolic aldehyde dehydrogenase of Saccharomyces cerevisiae that yields homogeneous enzyme. The enzyme seems to be a tetramer of identical 58 kDa subunits. The enzyme reaction is strongly stimulated by Mg2+ at low NADP+ concentrations but there is no absolute requirement for bivalent cations. The kinetics of the reaction have been studied in the presence and absence of MgCl2. NADP+ binding studies of the quenching of protein fluorescence in the presence and absence of MgCl2 show that the effect of Mg2+ is to increase the affinity of the enzyme for NADP+ by approx. 100-fold. NADP+ binding causes a slow conformational change in the enzyme and converts the enzyme from the inactive or low-activity form in which it is isolated into the fully active form. This conformational change seems to explain the marked lag-phases seen in enzyme assays. The enzyme is strongly inhibited by disulfiram and pyridoxal 5-phosphate.

Field of study: Biology, Computer science
[Speech disorders and anxiety: interaction mechanisms and therapy potential].

Anxiety and speech disorders frequently co-exist, provoking and intensifying each other's manifestations, which is important to consider when choosing optimal therapeutic strategy. Linguistic anxiety is a separate anxiety disorder in which the speech itself, the fear of making a mistake may act as principal fear and start up the negative affect. Linguistic anxiety may develop due to disturbance of functional interactions between various systems in any healthy individual, but the risk of it developing increases significantly by the presence of initial speech defect such as post-stroke aphasia. Comorbidity of speech disorders and affective specter disorders is also noted in patients with neurodegenerative diseases. Strategies aimed at stopping anxiety may be effective for decreasing speech disorders severity.

Field of study: Medicine, Psychology
Ellipsoidal Flows in Relativistic Hydrodynamics of Finite Systems

A new class of 3D anisotropic analytic solutions of relativistic hydrodynamics with constant pressure is found. We analyze, in particular, solutions corresponding to ellipsoidally symmetric expansion of finite systems into vacuum. They can be utilized for relativistic description of the system evolution in thermodynamic region near the softest point and at the final stage of the hydrodynamic expansion in A+A collisions. The solutions can be used also for testing of numerical hydrodynamic codes solving relativistic hydrodynamic equations for anisotropic expansion of finite systems.

Field of study: Physics
Factors Influencing Foreign Direct Investment Inflow in Tanzania

This research explores the relationship between various variables that my influence the foreign direct investment inflow in Tanzania such as government terms and regulations, technology and infrastructure, and abundant of natural resources. The study also highlighted the significance and factor that lead to foreign direct investment. One of the main aims of this research is to find the predictors of the inflow of foreign direct investment in Tanzania and identify these factors. This study has been conducted based on Tanzania and it will focus on foreign direct investment inflow. Several previous findings were provided in literature review to link with study, which provide different studies from different researchers. However the variable was developed using the variables from Tanzania investment centre (TIC) website. A total of 300 respondents were collected using simple randomly sampling. The results showed that two objectives were achieved whereas one showed there is no significant relationship with dependent variable by conducting the regression coefficient results. ANOVA test were also provided to test the degree to which two or more groups vary or differ in their mean.

Field of study: Business
Abnormal antioxidant vitamin and carotenoid status in chronic renal failure.

Oxidative modification of plasma lipoproteins increases their atherogenicity. Nutritive antioxidants, including carotenoids, can prevent such lipoperoxidation and may protect against atherosclerosis. Plasma retinol, ascorbate, alpha-tocopherol and four carotenoids (lutein, lycopene, alpha-carotene and beta-carotene) were measured using HPLC in 45 patients with chronic renal failure (CRF) and in 21 controls. Plasma retinol was significantly increased in patients with CRF (conservative therapy mean of 3.7 mumol/l vs. 1.9 mumol/l; p < 0.001). Plasma lycopene was significantly lower in patients with CRF (healthy mean 0.44 mumol/l vs. conservative therapy mean 0.27 mumol/l and haemodialysis mean of 0.17 mumol/l; p < 0.001), a finding that persisted even after adjusting for plasma cholesterol. Low circulating antioxidant lycopene levels may contribute to an already impaired antioxidant defence system in patients with CRF. The process of haemodialysis further compromises antioxidant defences, principally by removing water-soluble ascorbate and urate, but does not appear to affect circulating carotenoid concentrations.

Field of study: Medicine
Examination of the Cerebro-spinal Fluid as an Aid to Diagnosis in Certain Cases of Insanity, with Special Reference to the Protein Reaction described by Ross and Jones

The main points of practical interest in the examination of the cerebro-spinal fluid are the protein reactions and the cell-count. Both are of great value for the early diagnosis of general paralysis, tabes, or cerebral syphilis.

The simplicity of the Ross and Jones test brings it within the reach of any qualified man, and it would appear to be the most delicate of all the protein reactions.

So far as I know this series is the largest in which the reaction has been tested. Ross and Jones only tested 27, and Amsden 36 cases.

At the present time the other characters noted, the acidity or alkalinity and the presence of copper-reducing substance, are mainly of academic interest. It is probable, however, that the degree of acidity to phenolphthaleine may coincide with the development of lactic acid in the fluid during life, and this with the disappearance or lessening of the copper reducing substance; so that inasmuch as lactic acid is rapidly formed in dying nervous tissue, we may have here the means of establishing a test as to the extent of the organic nervous changes in any given case.

Writings on the subject of the spinal fluid are now so numerous that some apology is almost needed for adding to their number, especially when, as in my case, nothing new is recorded. Still, I felt it was worth while further testing the trustworthiness of such a simple reaction as that described by Ross and Jones, by its application to a larger number of cases than has hitherto been done, and from my results it appears to come successfully out of the ordeal.

Field of study: Medicine, Psychology
Different arguments, same conclusions: how is action against invasive alien species justified in the context of European policy?

The prevention and management of invasive alien species (IAS) has become a high priority in European environmental policy. At the same time, ways of evaluating IAS continue to be a topic of lively debate. In particular, it is far from clear how directly policy makers’ value judgements are linked to the European (EU) policy against IAS. We examine the arguments used to support value judgements of both alien species and invasive alien species as well as the relation between these value judgements and the policy against IAS being developed at European level. Our study is based on 17 semi-structured interviews with experts from EU policy making and from the EU member states Austria, Belgium, Germany and Hungary. We found that our interviewees conceived of IAS in very different ways, expressed a variety of visions of biodiversity and ecosystem services, and adhered to widely different values expressed in their perceptions of IAS and the impacts of IAS. However, only some of these conceptualizations and value judgements are actually addressed in the rationale given in the preamble to the European IAS Regulation. Although value judgements about IAS differed, there was considerable agreement regarding the kind of action to be taken against them.

Field of study: Environmental science
Correlation Coefficients and Other Constants for Combined and Separated Distributions

There are numerous occasions when one wishes to obtain correlation coefficients and other series constants from several populations combined into one, or from a breakdown of a general population into two or more sub populations. It is somewhat arduous to make new tabulations of the combined or separated populations. There are methods by which any number of tabulated distributions may be combined without additional tabulation or un due labor of calculation, and by which any tabulated distribution may be separated out from a compound table without further tabu lation. The methods are equally applicable to calculations based on paired series which have not been tabulated, but for convenience of expression series will be spoken of as though tabulated.

Field of study: Education