Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Forest Dependent Indigenous Communities’ Perception and Adaptation to Climate Change through Local Knowledge in the Protected Area—A Bangladesh Case Study

Forest-dependent indigenous communities rely on natural resources for their livelihoods, but those are currently under threat due to many factors, including the adverse impact of climate change. The present study looks into climate change-related perception and adaptation strategies of three forest-dependent indigenous communities, namely, Khasia, Tripura and Garo in the Lawachara National Park of Northeastern Bangladesh. Household surveys, focus group discussions, key informant interviews, and observation methods were used to unveil the climatic events, impacts and related adaptations. The events include the change in temperature and rainfall patterns, landslide, soil erosion and flash flood, heavy cold and fog, and natural calamities. Moreover, livelihood problems emanating from these events are the drying up of streams and wells, irregular rainfall, increased dieback and mortality of seedlings, pests, diseases, and the attack of crops by wild animals. Likewise, the reduction of soil moisture content, growing season and crop productivity, landslides, damage of roads and culverts, and increased human diseases are common. This study recognized 29 adaptation strategies and divided them into six management categories, drawing on their local knowledge of the natural resources and other technologies. The study reveals that, although adaptation strategies through land use and land cover changes are not enough to sustain their livelihoods, the tactics help them to reduce the risk of, and increase food security and community resilience against, climate change.
Integrative Genomic, Transcriptional, and Proteomic Diversity in Natural Isolates of the Human Pathogen Burkholderia pseudomallei

ABSTRACT Natural isolates of pathogenic bacteria can exhibit a broad range of phenotypic traits. To investigate the molecular mechanisms contributing to such phenotypic variability, we compared the genomes, transcriptomes, and proteomes of two natural isolates of the gram-negative bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei, the causative agent of the human disease melioidosis. Significant intrinsic genomic, transcriptional, and proteomic variations were observed between the two strains involving genes of diverse functions. We identified 16 strain-specific regions in the B. pseudomallei K96243 reference genome, and for eight regions their differential presence could be ascribed to either DNA acquisition or loss. A remarkable 43% of the transcriptional differences between the strains could be attributed to genes that were differentially present between K96243 and Bp15682, demonstrating the importance of lateral gene transfer or gene loss events in contributing to pathogen diversity at the gene expression level. Proteins expressed in a strain-specific manner were similarly correlated at the gene expression level, but up to 38% of the global proteomic variation between strains comprised proteins expressed in both strains but associated with strain-specific protein isoforms. Collectively, >65 hypothetical genes were transcriptionally or proteomically expressed, supporting their bona fide biological presence. Our results provide, for the first time, an integrated framework for classifying the repertoire of natural variations existing at distinct molecular levels for an important human pathogen.
Localization and quantification of beta‐adrenergic receptors in human brain

Little information is currently available on the localization of noradrenergic systems in the human CNS. We used quantitative autoradiography with [125I] iodopindolol to examine beta-adrenergic receptors in postmortem human brain. The concentration of beta-receptors was highest in all subfields of the hippocampus, followed by cerebellum, and then thalamic nuclei, basal ganglia, midbrain, and cerebral cortex. Low levels were found in white matter and hypothalamus. This distribution differed from the distribution of beta-receptors reported in membrane homogenates of human brain and also from the distribution of beta-receptors in rat brain determined by autoradiography. The similarities and differences between the distribution of beta-receptors in the human and rat brains may have implications regarding the role of norepinephrine in the CNS of these two species.
We should be measuring genomic bacterial load and virulence factors

Objective:To describe relevant pathogen-related characteristics and their impact on sepsis pathogenesis and prognosis. Data Source:Current literature regarding genomic bacterial load and virulence factors, with an emphasis on the impact of these factors on pathophysiology and prognosis of sepsis. Data Extraction and Synthesis:The current paradigm on sepsis pathophysiology and management overlooks aspects concerning the nature and characteristics of the infecting pathogen. Our findings suggest that evaluation of genomic bacterial load might be useful to assess severity and predict prognosis in septic patients; its use during treatment for monitoring clinical response is another interesting potential application. Virulence factors identification might help to develop pathogen-specific therapeutic strategies for higher-risk septic patients. Conclusions:The recognition of the importance of quantifying the pathogen has major clinical implications and will open up a new field of exploration of therapies targeted at anticipating development and appropriate treatment in severe sepsis. The improved detection and understanding of bacterial virulence factors may lead to specific therapies.
Geometric modeling based on triangle meshes

Course Summary This course is designed to cover the entire geometry processing pipeline based on triangle meshes. We will present the latest concepts for mesh generation and mesh repair, for geometry and topology optimizations like mesh smoothing, decimation, and remeshing, for parametrization, segmentation, and shape editing. In addition to describing and discussing the related algorithms, we will also give valuable implementation hints and provide source code for most of the covered topics. The course assumes only very basic knowledge on geometric concepts in general, but does not require specific knowledge on polygonal meshes and how to discretize the respective problems for those. It is intended for computer graphics researchers, software developers and engineers from CAGD, computer games, or the movie industry, who are interested in geometry processing algorithms based on triangle meshes. Stephan Bischoff graduated in 1999 with a master's in computer science from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. He then worked at the graphics group of the Max-Planck-Institute for Computer Science in Saarbrücken, Germany. In 2001 he joined the Computer Graphics Group at the Aachen University of Technology, Germany, where he is working as a research associate with Prof. Dr. Leif Kobbelt and is currently pursuing his PhD. He is an experienced speaker and presented courses at Eurographics and Shape Modeling International. His research interests focus on freeform shape representations for efficient geometry processing, topology control techniques for level-set surfaces, reconstruction of medical data sets and the restoration and healing of CAD models. of which he is paper co-chair this year. He is an experienced speaker and presented courses at Eurographics and Shape Modeling International. His research interests include geometry processing in general, and mesh generation, mesh optimization, and multiresolution shape editing in particular. His research interests include all areas of Computer Graphics and Geometry Processing with a focus on multiresolution and freeform modeling, 3D model optimization, as well as the efficient handling of polygonal mesh data. during the last years resulted in numerous publications in top scientific journals and international conferences. He is invited regularly to give keynote presentations and tutorial lectures. For his contributions he received several scientific awards. He has ongoing collaborations with colleagues in Europe, North America, and Asia, and frequently serves on international program committees. He organized and co-chaired several workshops and conferences. he was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University , where he also held a position as visiting assistant professor during the …
American Journal of Epidemiology Original Contribution Evaluation of Moderate Alcohol Use and Cognitive Function among Men Using a Mendelian Randomization Design in the Guangzhou Biobank Cohort Study

Observational studies usually show that moderate alcohol use is associated with better cognitive function. Such studies are vulnerable to residual confounding arising from systematic differences between moderate alcohol users and others. A Mendelian randomization study carried out in a suitable population, such as southern Chinese men, in which alcohol use is low to moderate and is influenced by genotype, offers an alternative and superior approach for clarifying the causal effect of moderate alcohol use on cognitive function. The authors used aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH2) genotype (AA, GA, or GG) as an instrumental variable in 2-stage least squares analysis to obtain unbiased estimates of the relation of alcohol consumption (measured in alcohol units (10 g ethanol) per day) with cognitive function, assessed from delayed 10-word recall score (n ¼ 4,707) and Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) score (n ¼ 2,284), among men from the Guangzhou Biobank Cohort Study (2003–2008). ALHD2 genotype was strongly associated with alcohol consumption, with an F statistic of 71.0 in 2-stage least squares analysis. Alcohol consumption was not associated with delayed 10-word recall score (À0.03 words per alcohol unit, 95% confidence interval: À0.18, 0.13) or MMSE score (0.06 points per alcohol unit, 95% confidence interval: À0.22, 0.34). Moderate alcohol use is unlikely to be cognitively protective. Several prospective Western observational studies have shown that alcohol use generally has a U-shaped association with cognitive function, such that moderate alcohol users usually have better cognitive function than never users (1–3), although there have been exceptions—for example, where the association was nonsignificant in a relatively small sample (4). However, observational study designs are susceptible to residual confounding (5, 6) and cannot disentangle the true effects of alcohol from apparent effects generated by the clustering of several unmeasured healthier attributes in moderate alcohol users (7). Replication of observational results in populations with a different confounding structure may strengthen the likelihood of a causal association between exposure and outcomes (6, 8). There are few studies of moderate alcohol use and cognition from non-Western settings. In 2 large cross-sectional studies from southern China, which has a different social pattern of moderate alcohol use than Western settings, we found occasional rather than moderate alcohol use (compared with never use) to be associated with better cognitive function (9, 10), suggesting that observed effects are not biologically driven by alcohol. Another study from China found that moderate alcohol use impaired cognitive function (11). It is not ethical …
Motor and sensory recovery following incomplete tetraplegia.

Fifty individuals with incomplete tetraplegia due to trauma underwent serial prospective examinations to quantify motor and sensory recovery. None of 5 patients who were motor complete with the presence of sacral (S4-S5) sharp/dull touch sensation unilaterally recovered any lower extremity motor function. However, in 8 motor complete subjects having bilateral sacral sharp/dull sensation present, the mean lower extremity motor score increased to 12.1 +/- 7.8 at 1 year. In 3 of the 8 cases, functional (> or = 3/5) recovery was seen in some muscles at 1 year. Though mean upper and lower extremity ASIA Motor Scores increased significantly (p < .001) between 1 month and 1 year for the entire sample, the annualized rate of motor recovery rapidly declined in the first 6 months and then subsequently approached plateau. Eighty-seven percent (20 of 23) of patients having a lower extremity motor score > or = 10 at 1 month were community ambulators using crutches and orthoses at 1 year follow-up.
Whole-system persistence

Today's databases and key-value stores commonly keep all their data in main memory. A single server can have over 100 GB of memory, and a cluster of such servers can have 10s to 100s of TB. However, a storage back end is still required for recovery from failures. Recovery can last for minutes for a single server or hours for a whole cluster, causing heavy load on the back end. Non-volatile main memory (NVRAM) technologies can help by allowing near-instantaneous recovery of in-memory state. However, today's software does not support this well. Block-based approaches such as persistent buffer caches suffer from data duplication and block transfer overheads. Recently, user-level persistent heaps have been shown to have much better performance than these. However they require substantial application modification and still have significant runtime overheads. This paper proposes whole-system persistence (WSP) as an alternative. WSP is aimed at systems where all memory is non-volatile. It transparently recovers an application's entire state, making a failure appear as a suspend/resume event. Runtime overheads are eliminated by using "flush on fail": transient state in processor registers and caches is flushed to NVRAM only on failure, using the residual energy from the system power supply. Our evaluation shows that this approach has 1.6--13 times better runtime performance than a persistent heap, and that flush-on-fail can complete safely within 2--35\% of the residual energy window provided by standard power supplies.
Topiramate-induced angle closure with acute myopia, macular striae

Topiramate is a sulfamate-substituted monosaccharide used in the treatment of seizures, and prophylaxis of migraine. A number of ocular side-effects have been described with use of topiramate, like bilateral angle closure, acute myopia and macular striae. Ultrasound biomicroscopy (UBM) clinches the diagnosis after ruling out other causes of shallow anterior chamber. Previous studies have not demonstrated internal limiting membrane folds presenting as macular striae. We report a case of topiramate-induced acute myopia with angle closure and macular striae in a young adult. This is the first report wherein striae formation after low doses of topiramate and their resolution have been documented by Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT).
Marine Origin Polysaccharides in Drug Delivery Systems

Oceans are a vast source of natural substances. In them, we find various compounds with wide biotechnological and biomedical applicabilities. The exploitation of the sea as a renewable source of biocompounds can have a positive impact on the development of new systems and devices for biomedical applications. Marine polysaccharides are among the most abundant materials in the seas, which contributes to a decrease of the extraction costs, besides their solubility behavior in aqueous solvents and extraction media, and their interaction with other biocompounds. Polysaccharides such as alginate, carrageenan and fucoidan can be extracted from algae, whereas chitosan and hyaluronan can be obtained from animal sources. Most marine polysaccharides have important biological properties such as biocompatibility, biodegradability, and anti-inflammatory activity, as well as adhesive and antimicrobial actions. Moreover, they can be modified in order to allow processing them into various shapes and sizes and may exhibit response dependence to external stimuli, such as pH and temperature. Due to these properties, these biomaterials have been studied as raw material for the construction of carrier devices for drugs, including particles, capsules and hydrogels. The devices are designed to achieve a controlled release of therapeutic agents in an attempt to fight against serious diseases, and to be used in advanced therapies, such as gene delivery or regenerative medicine.
To Reserve or Not to Reserve: Optimal Online Multi-Instance Acquisition in IaaS Clouds

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds offer diverse instance purchasing options. A user can either run instances on demand and pay only for what it uses, or it can prepay to reserve instances for a long period, during which a usage discount is entitled. An important problem facing a user is how these two instance options can be dynamically combined to serve time-varying demands at minimum cost. Existing strategies in the literature, however, require either exact knowledge or the distribution of demands in the long-term future, which significantly limits their use in practice. Unlike existing works, we propose two practical online algorithms, one deterministic and another randomized, that dynamically combine the two instance options online without any knowledge of the future. We show that the proposed deterministic (resp., randomized) algorithm incurs no more than 2 ↵ (resp., e/(e 1 + ↵)) times the minimum cost obtained by an optimal offline algorithm that knows the exact future a priori, where ↵ is the entitled discount after reservation. Our online algorithms achieve the best possible competitive ratios in both the deterministic and randomized cases, and can be easily extended to cases when short-term predictions are reliable. Simulations driven by a large volume of real-world traces show that significant cost savings can be achieved with prevalent IaaS prices.
Assessment of Reinforced Concrete Surface Breaking Crack Using Rayleigh Wave Measurement

An improved single sided Rayleigh wave (R-wave) measurement was suggested to characterize surface breaking crack in steel reinforced concrete structures. Numerical simulations were performed to clarify the behavior of R-waves interacting with surface breaking crack with different depths and degrees of inclinations. Through analysis of simulation results, correlations between R-wave parameters of interest and crack characteristics (depth and degree of inclination) were obtained, which were then validated by experimental measurement of concrete specimens instigated with vertical and inclined artificial cracks of different depths. Wave parameters including velocity and amplitude attenuation for each case were studied. The correlations allowed us to estimate the depth and inclination of cracks measured experimentally with acceptable discrepancies, particularly for cracks which are relatively shallow and when the crack depth is smaller than the wavelength.
ABC/2 for rapid clinical estimate of infarct, perfusion, and mismatch volumes

Background: Rapid and easy clinical assessments for volumes of infarction and perfusion mismatch are needed. We tested whether simple geometric models generated accurate estimates of these volumes. Methods: Acute diffusion-weighted image (DWI) and perfusion (mean transit time [MTT]) in 63 strokes and established infarct volumes in 50 subacute strokes were measured by computerized planimetry. Mismatch was defined as MTT/DWI ≥ 1.2. Observers, blinded to planimetric values, measured lesions in three perpendicular axes A, B, and C. Geometric estimates of sphere, ellipsoid, bicone, and cylinder were compared to planimetric volume by least-squares linear regression. Results: The ABC/2 formula (ellipsoid) was superior to other geometries for estimating volume of DWI (slope 1.16, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.94 to 1.38; R2 = 0.91, p = 0.001) and MTT (slope 1.11, 95% CI 0.99 to 1.23; R2 = 0.89, p = 0.001). The intrarater and interrater reliability for ABC/2 was high for both DWI (0.992 and 0.965) and MTT (0.881 and 0.712). For subacute infarct, the ABC/2 formula also best estimated planimetric volume (slope 1.00, 95% CI 0.98 to 1.19; R2 = 0.74, p = 0.001). In general, sphere and cylinder geometries overestimated all volumes and bicone underestimated all volumes. The positive predictive value for mismatch was 92% and negative predictive value was 33%. Conclusions: Of the models tested, ABC/2 is reproducible, is accurate, and provides the best simple geometric estimate of infarction and mean transit time volumes. ABC/2 has a high positive predictive value for identifying mismatch greater than 20% and might be a useful tool for rapid determination of acute stroke treatment.
Calcium Sets the Physiological Value of the Dominant Time Constant of Saturated Mouse Rod Photoresponse Recovery

Background The rate-limiting step that determines the dominant time constant (τD) of mammalian rod photoresponse recovery is the deactivation of the active phosphodiesterase (PDE6). Physiologically relevant Ca2+-dependent mechanisms that would affect the PDE inactivation have not been identified. However, recently it has been shown that τD is modulated by background light in mouse rods. Methodology/Principal Findings We used ex vivo ERG technique to record pharmacologically isolated photoreceptor responses (fast PIII component). We show a novel static effect of calcium on mouse rod phototransduction: Ca2+ shortens the dominant time constant (τD) of saturated photoresponse recovery, i.e., when extracellular free Ca2+ is decreased from 1 mM to ∼25 nM, the τD is reversibly increased ∼1.5–2-fold. Conclusions We conclude that the increase in τD during low Ca2+ treatment is not due to increased [cGMP], increased [Na+] or decreased [ATP] in rod outer segment (ROS). Also it cannot be due to protein translocation mechanisms. We suggest that a Ca2+-dependent mechanism controls the life time of active PDE.
Updates on improvement of human athletic performance: focus on world records in athletics.

INTRODUCTION Progression of world records (WRs) in athletics is a reliable mean to assess the potentiality of the human body, which also reflects how society has evolved over time and will continue to evolve. We conducted a quantitative analysis of WRs in measurable Olympic events from nine representative disciplines (100, 400, 1500, 10,000 m, marathon, long jump, high jump, shot put and javelin throw) in order to identify progression and trends. SOURCES OF DATA Data were gathered for the years 1900-2007 from the database of the International Olympic Committee. AREAS OF AGREEMENT Overall, the relative improvement of athletic performance was higher in women than in men, being nearly doubled across the different specialities. The biggest increases were observed for javelin throw and shot put, in both men and women, respectively. Conversely, the improvement in race time was directly related to the race distance. We also observed a consistent significant linear model of WRs progression in time, although the improvement has substantially stopped or reached a plateau in several specialities. GROWING POINTS The observed trend might be explained by a variety of factors, including social and environmental changes, natural selection, advances in training and sport physiology, ergogenic aids and, possibly, doping. EMERGING AREAS FOR DEVELOPING RESEARCH These results are discussed in a multifaceted approach, taking into account several biological, environmental and technological issues that might explain the trends observed.