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We examine the effect of modeling a researcher's past works in recommending scholarly papers to the researcher. Our hypothesis is that an author's published works constitute a clean signal of the latent interests of a researcher. A key part of our model is to enhance the profile derived directly from past works with information coming from the past works' referenced papers as well as papers that cite the work. In our experiments, we differentiate between junior researchers that have only published one paper and senior researchers that have multiple publications. We show that filtering these sources of information is advantageous -when we additionally prune noisy citations, referenced papers and publication history, we achieve statistically significant higher levels of recommendation accuracy.

Lactoferrin (LF), a multifunctional glycoprotein in mammalian milk, is reported to exert a modulatory effect on lipid metabolism. The aim of the present study was to elucidate whether enteric-coated LF (eLF) might improve visceral fat-type obesity, an underlying cause of the metabolic syndrome. Using a double-blind, placebo-controlled design, Japanese men and women (n 26; aged 22 -60 years) with abdominal obesity (BMI . 25 kg/m 2 , and visceral fat area (VFA) . 100 cm 2 ) consumed eLF (300 mg/d as bovine LF) or placebo tablets for 8 weeks. Measurement of the total fat area, VFA and subcutaneous fat area from computed tomography images revealed a significant reduction in VFA (214·6 cm 2 ) in the eLF group, as compared with the placebo controls (2 1·8 cm 2 ; P¼0·009 by ANCOVA). Decreases in body weight, BMI and hip circumference in the eLF group (2 1·5 kg, 20·6 kg/m 2 , 2 2·6 cm) were also found to be significantly greater than with the placebo (þ 1·0 kg, þ0·3 kg/m 2 , 2 0·2 cm; P¼ 0·032, 0·013, 0·041, respectively). There was also a tendency for a reduction in waist circumference in the eLF group (24·4 cm) as compared with the placebo group (20·9 cm; P¼ 0·073). No adverse effects of the eLF treatment were found with regard to blood lipid or biochemical parameters. From these results, eLF appears to be a promising agent for the control of visceral fat accumulation.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that is characterized by senile plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, synaptic disruption, and neuronal loss. Several studies have demonstrated decreases of docosahexaenoic acid-containing phosphatidylcholines (DHA-PCs) in the AD brain. In this study, we used matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization imaging mass spectrometry in postmortem AD brain to show that PC molecular species containing stearate and DHA, namely PC(18:0/22:6), was selectively depleted in the gray matter of patients with AD. Moreover, in the brain regions with marked amyloid β (Aβ) deposition, the magnitude of the PC(18:0/22:6) reduction significantly correlated with disease duration. Furthermore, at the molecular level, this depletion was associated with reduced levels of the postsynaptic protein PSD-95 but not the presynaptic protein synaptophysin. Interestingly, this reduction in PC(18:0/22:6) levels did not correlate with the degrees of Aβ deposition and neuronal loss in AD. The analysis of the correlations of key factors and disease duration showed that their effects on the disease time course were arranged in order as Aβ deposition, presynaptic disruption, postsynaptic disruption coupled with PC(18:0/22:6) reduction, and neuronal loss.

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In the current Web 2.0 era, the popularity of Web resources fluctuates ephemerally, based on trends and social interest. As a result, content-based relevance signals are insufficient to meet users' constantly evolving information needs in searching for Web 2.0 items. Incorporating future popularity into ranking is one way to counter this. However, predicting popularity as a third party (as in the case of general search engines) is difficult in practice, due to their limited access to item view histories.To enable popularity prediction externally without excessive crawling, we propose an alternative solution by leveraging user comments, which are more accessible than view counts. Due to the sparsity of comments, traditional solutions that are solely based on view histories do not perform well. To deal with this sparsity, we mine comments to recover additional signal, such as social influence. By modeling comments as a time-aware bipartite graph, we propose a regularization-based ranking algorithm that accounts for temporal, social influence and current popularity factors to predict the future popularity of items. Experimental results on three realworld datasets -crawled from YouTube, Flickr and Last.fmshow that our method consistently outperforms competitive baselines in several evaluation tasks.

Lactoferrin (LF) is a multifunctional glycoprotein in mammalian milk. In a previous report, we showed that enteric-coated bovine LF tablets can decrease visceral fat accumulation, hypothesising that the enteric coating is critical to the functional peptides reaching the visceral fat tissue and exerting their anti-adipogenic activity. The aim of the present study was to assess whether ingested LF can retain its antiadipogenic activity. We therefore investigated the effects of LF and LF treated with digestive enzymes (the stomach enzyme pepsin and the small intestine enzyme trypsin) on lipid accumulation in pre-adipocytes derived from the mesenteric fat tissue of male SpragueDawley rats. Lipid accumulation in pre-adipocytes was significantly reduced by LF in a dose-dependent manner and was associated with reduction in gene expression of CCAAT/enhancer binding protein delta, CCAAT/enhancer binding protein alpha and PPARg as revealed by DNA microarray analysis. Trypsin-treated LF continued to show anti-adipogenic action, whereas pepsin-treated LF abrogated the activity. When an LF solution (1000 mg bovine LF) was administered by gastric intubation to Sprague -Dawley rats, immunoreactive LF determined by ELISA could be detected in mesenteric fat tissue at a concentration of 14·4 mg/g fat after 15 min. The overall results point to the importance of enteric coating for action of LF as a visceral fat-reducing agent when administered in oral form.

The results of a near-infrared (2.9–4.1 μm) spectroscopic observation of NGC 1068 is presented. We detected an absorption feature near to 3.4 μm caused by an obscuring torus as well as a broad (FWHM ∼ 300 km s−1) Pfγ emission line near to 3.75 μm. The column density estimated from the 3.4 μm feature corresponds to AV = 18–30 mag, which is far smaller than that inferred from hard X-ray observations. We conclude that the obscuring torus is highly concentrated to a thin disk, the thickness of which is less than 10−1 pc, and that we view the obscuring torus from the exact edge-on direction. We have not detected the 3.3 μm UIR (Unidentified InfraRed emission) feature in the central 3.″8 × 3.″8 region. This result implies that starburst activity just outside of the obscuring torus is absent.