Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Young people with cognitive disabilities and overrepresentation in the criminal justice system: service provider perspectives on policing

Abstract Young people with cognitive disabilities (YPWCD) are overrepresented as offenders in the criminal justice system. However, most existing research on this topic examines overrepresentation in courts and corrections rather than at the police gatekeeping stage of the criminal justice process. Furthermore, while the views of other groups have been documented, the perspectives of service providers – who often bear witness to YPWCD’s interactions with police – have yet to be examined. This research addresses this gap by analysing qualitative interviews with service providers from Queensland, Australia, using the three most common theoretical explanations for the overrepresentation of PWCD (the susceptibility, differential treatment and psychosocial disadvantage theses) as an analytic framework. A number of implications emerged from the study. There is a need to take a critical and intersectional lens to YPWCD’s experiences, as well as to equip police to work with YPWCD to de-escalate interactions with this group.
Evolution of radical mastectomy for breast cancer

Surgical treatment of breast cancer has been marked by a constant evolution since the Halsted radical mastectomy described in the late 19th century has become the current standard Madden radical mastectomy, a breast surgery that involves the ablation of tissue with the axillary lymphatic preserving both pectoral muscles. The purpose of this paper was to present the stages that have marked the evolution of this intervention and to provide an overview of the way breast cancer has been understood and treated in the last century.
Single‐word semantic judgements in semantic dementia: Do phonology and grammatical class count?

Background: Listeners make active use of phonological regularities such as word length to facilitate higher‐level syntactic and semantic processing. For example, nouns are longer than verbs, and abstract words are longer than concrete words. Patients with semantic dementia (SD) experience conceptual loss with preserved syntax and phonology. The extent to which patients with SD exploit phonological regularities to support language processing remains unclear. Aims: We examined the ability of patients with SD (1) to perceive subtle acoustic–phonetic distinctions in English, and (2) to bootstrap their accuracy of lexical‐semantic and syntactic judgements from regularities in the phonological forms of English nouns and verbs. Methods and Procedures: Four patients with SD made minimal pair judgements (same/different) for auditorily presented stimuli selectively varied by voice, place, or manner of the initial consonant (e.g., pa –ba). In Experiment 2 patients made forced‐choice semantic judgements (abstract or concrete) for single words varied by (1) concreteness (abstract or concrete); (2) grammatical class (noun or verb); and (3) word length (one‐ or three‐syllable words). Outcomes and Results: The most semantically impaired patients paradoxically showed the highest accuracy of minimal pair phonologic discrimination. Judgements of word concreteness were less accurate for verbs than nouns. Among verbs, accuracy was worse for concrete than abstract items (e.g., eat was worse than think). Patients were more likely to misclassify longer concrete words (e.g., professor) as abstract, demonstrating sensitivity to an underlying phonologically mediated semantic property in English. Conclusions: Single‐word semantic judgements were sensitive to both grammatical class and phonological properties of the words being evaluated. Theoretical and clinical implications are addressed in the context of an anatomically constrained model of SD that assumes increasing reliance on phonology as lexical‐semantic knowledge degrades.
Categorizing and Individuating Others: The Neural Substrates of Person Perception

People are remarkably adroit at understanding other social agents. Quite how these information-processing abilities are realized, however, remains open to debate and empirical scrutiny. In particular, little is known about basic aspects of person perception, such as the operations that support people's ability to categorize (i.e., assign persons to groups) and individuate (i.e., discriminate among group members) others. In an attempt to rectify this situation, the current research focused on the initial perceptual stages of person construal and considered: (i) hemispheric differences in the efficiency of categorization and individuation; and (ii) the neural activity that supports these social-cognitive operations. Noting the greater role played by configural processing in individuation than categorization, it was expected that performance on the former task would be enhanced when stimuli (i.e., faces) were presented to the right rather than to the left cerebral hemisphere. The results of two experiments (Experiment 1healthy individuals; Experiment 2split-brain patient) confirmed this prediction. Extending these findings, a final neuroimaging investigation revealed that individuation is accompanied by neural activity in regions of the temporal and prefrontal cortices, especially in the right hemisphere. We consider the implications of these findings for contemporary treatments of person perception.
Inhibition of Firefly Luciferase by General Anesthetics: Effect on In Vitro and In Vivo Bioluminescence Imaging

UNLABELLED Bioluminescence imaging is routinely performed in anesthetized mice. Often isoflurane anesthesia is used because of its ease of use and fast induction/recovery. However, general anesthetics have been described as important inhibitors of the luciferase enzyme reaction. AIM To investigate frequently used mouse anesthetics for their direct effect on the luciferase reaction, both in vitro and in vivo. MATERIALS AND METHODS isoflurane, sevoflurane, desflurane, ketamine, xylazine, medetomidine, pentobarbital and avertin were tested in vitro on luciferase-expressing intact cells, and for non-volatile anesthetics on intact cells and cell lysates. In vivo, isoflurane was compared to unanesthetized animals and different anesthetics. Differences in maximal photon emission and time-to-peak photon emission were analyzed. RESULTS All volatile anesthetics showed a clear inhibitory effect on the luciferase activity of 50% at physiological concentrations. Avertin had a stronger inhibitory effect of 80%. For ketamine and xylazine, increased photon emission was observed in intact cells, but this was not present in cell lysate assays, and was most likely due to cell toxicity and increased cell membrane permeability. In vivo, the highest signal intensities were measured in unanesthetized mice and pentobarbital anesthetized mice, followed by avertin. Isoflurane and ketamine/medetomidine anesthetized mice showed the lowest photon emission (40% of unanesthetized), with significantly longer time-to-peak than unanesthetized, pentobarbital or avertin-anesthetized mice. We conclude that, although strong inhibitory effects of anesthetics are present in vitro, their effect on in vivo BLI quantification is mainly due to their hemodynamic effects on mice and only to a lesser extent due to the direct inhibitory effect.
Hue Selectivity in Human Visual Cortex Revealed by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

The variability of color-selective neurons in human visual cortex is considered more diverse than cone-opponent mechanisms. We addressed this issue by deriving histograms of hue-selective voxels measured using fMRI with a novel stimulation paradigm, where the stimulus hue changed continuously. Despite the large between-subject difference in hue-selective histograms, individual voxels exhibited selectivity for intermediate hues, such as purple, cyan, and orange, in addition to those along cone-opponent axes. In order to rule the possibility out that the selectivity for intermediate hues emerged through spatial summation of activities of neurons selectively responding to cone-opponent signals, we further tested hue-selective adaptations in intermediate directions of cone-opponent axes, by measuring responses to 4 diagonal hues during concurrent adaptation to 1 of the 4 hues. The selective and unidirectional reduction in response to the adapted hue lends supports to our argument that cortical neurons respond selectively to intermediate hues.
Trophoblast L-Selectin-Mediated Adhesion at the Maternal-Fetal Interface

Trophoblast adhesion to the uterine wall is the requisite first step of implantation and, subsequently, placentation. At the maternal-fetal interface, we investigated the expression of selectin adhesion systems that enable leukocyte capture from the bloodstream. On the maternal side, human uterine epithelial cells up-regulated selectin oligosaccharide-based ligands during the window of receptivity. On the fetal side, human trophoblasts expressed L-selectin. This ligand-receptor system was functional, because beads coated with the selectin ligand 6-sulfo sLex bound to trophoblasts, and trophoblasts bound to ligand-expressing uterine luminal epithelium in tissue sections. These results suggest that trophoblast L-selectin mediates interactions with the uterus and that this adhesion mechanism may be critical to establishing human pregnancy.
Face Liveness Detection Using Dynamic Local Ternary Pattern (DLTP)

Face spoofing is considered to be one of the prominent threats to face recognition systems. However, in order to improve the security measures of such biometric systems against deliberate spoof attacks, liveness detection has received significant recent attention from researchers. For this purpose, analysis of facial skin texture properties becomes more popular because of its limited resource requirement and lower processing cost. The traditional method of skin analysis for liveness detection was to use Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and its variants. LBP descriptors are effective, but they may exhibit certain limitations in near uniform patterns. Thus, in this paper, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Local Ternary Pattern (LTP) as an alternative to LBP. In addition, we adopted Dynamic Local Ternary Pattern (DLTP), which eliminates the manual threshold setting in LTP by using Weber’s law. The proposed method was tested rigorously on four facial spoof databases: three are public domain databases and the other is the Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) face spoof database, which was compiled through this study. The results obtained from the proposed DLTP texture descriptor attained optimum accuracy and clearly outperformed the reported LBP and LTP texture descriptors.
Restoring Eelgrass (Zostera marina) from Seed: A Comparison of Planting Methods for Large-Scale Projects

Abstract : Eelgrass (Zostera marina) seeds are being used in a variety of both small- and large-scale restoration activities and have been successfully used to initiate recovery of eelgrass in the Virginia seaside coastal lagoons, which lost eelgrass in the 1930s wasting disease pandemic (Orth et al. 2006a). However, a major bottleneck with the use of seeds has been the relatively low rate of seedling establishment, generally 10 percent or less of seeds placed in the field (Orth et al. 2003). A recently developed underwater seed planter (Traber et al. 2003) represents an alternative method that could improve seedling success compared to techniques used in previous Chesapeake Bay studies and elsewhere. The objective of this study was to compare the effectiveness of different techniques of seeding for use in large-scale projects: injecting seeds into submerged sediments with a mechanical seed planter and hand-broadcasting seeds on the sediment surface using divers.
Functional Connectivity during Resting-State Functional MR Imaging: Study of the Correspondence between Independent Component Analysis and Region-of-Interest−Based Methods

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: The connectivity across brain regions can be evaluated through fMRI either by using ICA or by means of correlation analysis of time courses measured in predefined ROIs. The purpose of this study was to investigate quantitatively the correspondence between the connectivity information provided by the 2 techniques. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In this study, resting-state fMRI data from 40 healthy participants were independently analyzed by using spatial ICA and ROI−based analysis. To assess the correspondence between the results provided by the 2 methods, for all combinations of ROIs, we compared the time course correlation coefficient with the corresponding “ICA coactivation index. ” RESULTS: A strongly significant correspondence of moderate intensity was found for 20 ICA components (r = 0.44, P < .001). Repeating the analysis with 10, 15, 25, 30, 35, and 40 components, we found that the correlation remained but was weaker (r = 0.35–0.41). CONCLUSIONS: There is a significant but not complete correspondence between the results provided by ICA and ROI−based analysis of resting-state data.
Carbon stock changes and carbon sequestration potential of Flemish cropland soils

Evaluations of soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks are often based on assigning a carbon density to each one of a number of ecosystems or soil classes considered, using data from soil profiles within these categories. A better approach, in which the use of classification methods by which extrapolation of SOC data to larger areas is avoided, can only be used if enough data are available at a sufficiently small scale. Over 190 000 SOCmeasurements (0–24 cm) have been made in the Flemish cropland (the Northern part of Belgium) in the 1989–2000 period. These SOC data were grouped into 3-year periods and as means plus standard deviation per (part of) community (polygons). This large dataset was used to calculate SOC stocks and their evolution with time, without data extrapolation. Using a detailed soil map, larger spatial groups of polygons were created based on soil texture and spatial location. Linear regression analysis showed that in the entire study area, SOC stocks had decreased or at best had remained stable. In total, a yearly decrease of 354kton OCyr 1 was calculated, which corresponds with a net CO2 emission of 1238 kton CO2 yr . Specific regions with a high carbon sequestration potential were identified, based on SOC losses during the 1989–2000 period and the mean 1999 SOC content, compared to the average SOC content of soils in Flanders with a similar soil texture. When restoring the SOC stocks to their 1990 level, we estimated the carbon sequestration potential of the Flemish cropland soils to be some 300kton CO2 yr 1 at best, which corresponds to a 40-year restoration period. In conclusion, we can say that in regions where agricultural production is very intense, carbon sequestration in the cropland may make only a very modest contribution to a country’s effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Assembly of an Oxalate Decarboxylase Produced under σK Control into the Bacillus subtilis Spore Coat

ABSTRACT Over 30 polypeptides are synthesized at various times during sporulation in Bacillus subtilis, and they are assembled at the surface of the developing spore to form a multilayer protein structure called the coat. The coat consists of three main layers, an amorphous undercoat close to the underlying spore cortex peptidoglycan, a lamellar inner layer, and an electron-dense striated outer layer. The product of the B. subtilis oxdD gene was previously shown to have oxalate decarboxylase activity when it was produced in Escherichia coli and to be a spore constituent. In this study, we found that OxdD specifically associates with the spore coat structure, and in this paper we describe regulation of its synthesis and assembly. We found that transcription of oxdD is induced during sporulation as a monocistronic unit under the control of σK and is negatively regulated by GerE. We also found that localization of a functional OxdD-green fluorescent protein (GFP) at the surface of the developing spore depends on the SafA morphogenetic protein, which localizes at the interface between the spore cortex and coat layers. OxdD-GFP localizes around the developing spore in a cotE mutant, which does not assemble the spore outer coat layer, but it does not persist in spores produced by the mutant. Together, the data suggest that OxdD-GFP is targeted to the interior layers of the coat. Additionally, we found that expression of a multicopy allele of oxdD resulted in production of spores with increased levels of OxdD that were able to degrade oxalate but were sensitive to lysozyme.
The utility of simple mathematical models in understanding gene regulatory dynamics

Abstract In this review, we survey work that has been carried out in the attempts of biomathematicians to understand the dynamic behaviour of simple bacterial operons starting with the initial work of the 1960’s. We concentrate on the simplest of situations, discussing both repressible and inducible systems and then turning to concrete examples related to the biology of the lactose and tryptophan operons. We conclude with a brief discussion of the role of both extrinsic noise and so-called intrinsic noise in the form of translational and/or transcriptional bursting.
Climate sensitivity across marine domains of life: limits to evolutionary adaptation shape species interactions

Organisms in all domains, Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya will respond to climate change with differential vulnerabilities resulting in shifts in species distribution, coexistence, and interactions. The identification of unifying principles of organism functioning across all domains would facilitate a cause and effect understanding of such changes and their implications for ecosystem shifts. For example, the functional specialization of all organisms in limited temperature ranges leads us to ask for unifying functional reasons. Organisms also specialize in either anoxic or various oxygen ranges, with animals and plants depending on high oxygen levels. Here, we identify thermal ranges, heat limits of growth, and critically low (hypoxic) oxygen concentrations as proxies of tolerance in a meta‐analysis of data available for marine organisms, with special reference to domain‐specific limits. For an explanation of the patterns and differences observed, we define and quantify a proxy for organismic complexity across species from all domains. Rising complexity causes heat (and hypoxia) tolerances to decrease from Archaea to Bacteria to uni‐ and then multicellular Eukarya. Within and across domains, taxon‐specific tolerance limits likely reflect ultimate evolutionary limits of its species to acclimatization and adaptation. We hypothesize that rising taxon‐specific complexities in structure and function constrain organisms to narrower environmental ranges. Low complexity as in Archaea and some Bacteria provide life options in extreme environments. In the warmest oceans, temperature maxima reach and will surpass the permanent limits to the existence of multicellular animals, plants and unicellular phytoplankter. Smaller, less complex unicellular Eukarya, Bacteria, and Archaea will thus benefit and predominate even more in a future, warmer, and hypoxic ocean.
Mode regularization of the supersymmetric sphaleron and kink: Zero modes and discrete gauge symmetry

To obtain the one-loop corrections to the mass of a kink by mode regularization, one may take one-half the result for the mass of a widely separated kink-antikink (or sphaleron) system, where the two bosonic zero modes count as two degrees of freedom, but the two fermionic zero modes as only one degree of freedom in the sums over modes. For a single kink, there is one bosonic zero mode degree of freedom, but it is necessary to average over four sets of fermionic boundary conditions in order (i) to preserve the fermionic Z{sub 2} gauge invariance {psi}{yields}-{psi}, (ii) to satisfy the basic principle of mode regularization that the boundary conditions in the trivial and the kink sector should be the same, (iii) that the energy stored at the boundaries cancels and (iv) to avoid obtaining a finite, uniformly distributed energy which would violate cluster decomposition. The average number of fermionic zero-energy degrees of freedom in the presence of the kink is then indeed 1/2. For boundary conditions leading to only one fermionic zero-energy solution, the Z{sub 2} gauge invariance identifies two seemingly distinct 'vacua' as the same physical ground state, and the single fermionic zero-energy solution does not correspondmore » to a degree of freedom. Other boundary conditions lead to two spatially separated {omega}{approx}0 solutions, corresponding to one (spatially delocalized) degree of freedom. This nonlocality is consistent with the principle of cluster decomposition for correlators of observables. « less
Real-Time Elicitation of Moral Emotions Using a Prejudice Paradigm

Moral emotions are critically important in guiding appropriate social conduct. Empirical investigation of these emotions remains a challenge, however, because of the difficulty in eliciting them reliably in controlled settings. Here we describe a novel prejudice paradigm that aimed to elicit both negatively and positively valenced moral emotions in real-time. Low-prejudice females (N = 46) who met highly specific demographic and personality-based screening criteria completed a series of Implicit Association Tests (IATs). Feedback following these IATs was pre-programmed to either endorse participants’ non-prejudiced self-standards (positive condition), or to contradict their self-standards (negative condition), in response to sensitive social topics. Neutral condition IATs reflected participants’ attitudes toward non-sensitive social topics. Results demonstrated that the IATs were successful in eliciting moral-positive emotions (satisfaction and pride) and moral-negative emotions (primarily guilt). In addition, participants high in self-reported punishment sensitivity, as assessed by the Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS) scale, reported greater guilt.
Can Gas prevent the Destruction of Thin Stellar Discs by Minor Mergers

We study the effect of dissipational gas physics on the vertical heating and thickening of disc galaxies during minor mergers. We produce a suite of minor merger simulations for Milky-Way-like galaxies. This suite consists of collisionless simulations as well as hydrodynamical runs including a gaseous component in the galactic disc. We find that in dissipationless simulations minor mergers cause the scaleheight of the disc to increase by up to a factor of ∼2. When the presence of gas in the disc is taken into account, this thickening is reduced by 25 per cent (50 per cent) for an initial disc gas fraction of 20 per cent (40 per cent), leading to a final scaleheight z0 between 0.6 and 0.7 kpc (for a sech2 profile), regardless of the initial scaleheight. We argue that the presence of gas reduces disc heating via two mechanisms: absorption of kinetic impact energy by the gas and/or formation of a new thin stellar disc that can cause heated stars to recontract towards the disc plane. We show that in our simulations most of the gas is consumed during the merger and thus the regrowth of a new thin disc has a negligible impact on the z0 of the post-merger galaxy. Final disc scaleheights found in our simulations are in good agreement with studies of the vertical structure of spiral galaxies where the majority of the systems are found to have scaleheights of 0.4 ≲z0≲0.8 kpc. We also found no tension between recent measurements of the scaleheight of the Milky Way thin disc and results coming from our hydrodynamical simulations. Even if the Milky Way did experience a recent 1:10 merger it is possible to reproduce the observed thin disc scaleheight, assuming that the disc contained at least 20 per cent gas (similar to the gas fraction today) at the time of the merger. We conclude that the existence of a thin disc in the Milky Way and in external galaxies is not in obvious conflict with the predictions of the cold dark matter model.