Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High Throughput Determination of Plant Height, Ground Cover, and Above-Ground Biomass in Wheat with LiDAR

Crop improvement efforts are targeting increased above-ground biomass and radiation-use efficiency as drivers for greater yield. Early ground cover and canopy height contribute to biomass production, but manual measurements of these traits, and in particular above-ground biomass, are slow and labor-intensive, more so when made at multiple developmental stages. These constraints limit the ability to capture these data in a temporal fashion, hampering insights that could be gained from multi-dimensional data. Here we demonstrate the capacity of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), mounted on a lightweight, mobile, ground-based platform, for rapid multi-temporal and non-destructive estimation of canopy height, ground cover and above-ground biomass. Field validation of LiDAR measurements is presented. For canopy height, strong relationships with LiDAR (r2 of 0.99 and root mean square error of 0.017 m) were obtained. Ground cover was estimated from LiDAR using two methodologies: red reflectance image and canopy height. In contrast to NDVI, LiDAR was not affected by saturation at high ground cover, and the comparison of both LiDAR methodologies showed strong association (r2 = 0.92 and slope = 1.02) at ground cover above 0.8. For above-ground biomass, a dedicated field experiment was performed with destructive biomass sampled eight times across different developmental stages. Two methodologies are presented for the estimation of biomass from LiDAR: 3D voxel index (3DVI) and 3D profile index (3DPI). The parameters involved in the calculation of 3DVI and 3DPI were optimized for each sample event from tillering to maturity, as well as generalized for any developmental stage. Individual sample point predictions were strong while predictions across all eight sample events, provided the strongest association with biomass (r2 = 0.93 and r2 = 0.92) for 3DPI and 3DVI, respectively. Given these results, we believe that application of this system will provide new opportunities to deliver improved genotypes and agronomic interventions via more efficient and reliable phenotyping of these important traits in large experiments.
Mutations in the Arabidopsis Homolog of LST8/GβL, a Partner of the Target of Rapamycin Kinase, Impair Plant Growth, Flowering, and Metabolic Adaptation to Long Days[C][W]

LST8 is a member of the widely conserved TOR kinase complex. This work shows that LST8 is important for plant growth as well as metabolic and developmental processes linked to changes in light conditions, probably by influencing the activity of the TOR complex. The conserved Target of Rapamycin (TOR) kinase forms high molecular mass complexes and is a major regulator of cellular adaptations to environmental cues. The Lethal with Sec Thirteen 8/G protein β subunit-like (LST8/GβL) protein is a member of the TOR complexes, and two putative LST8 genes are present in Arabidopsis thaliana, of which only one (LST8-1) is significantly expressed. The Arabidopsis LST8-1 protein is able to complement yeast lst8 mutations and interacts with the TOR kinase. Mutations in the LST8-1 gene resulted in reduced vegetative growth and apical dominance with abnormal development of flowers. Mutant plants were also highly sensitive to long days and accumulated, like TOR RNA interference lines, higher amounts of starch and amino acids, including proline and glutamine, while showing reduced concentrations of inositol and raffinose. Accordingly, transcriptomic and enzymatic analyses revealed a higher expression of genes involved in nitrate assimilation when lst8-1 mutants were shifted to long days. The transcriptome of lst8-1 mutants in long days was found to share similarities with that of a myo-inositol 1 phosphate synthase mutant that is also sensitive to the extension of the light period. It thus appears that the LST8-1 protein has an important role in regulating amino acid accumulation and the synthesis of myo-inositol and raffinose during plant adaptation to long days.
Nonaxisymmetric instabilities of neutron star with toroidal magnetic fields

Context. Neutron stars with strong toroidal magnetic fields are often produced in nature. We show that isentropic neutron stars with purely toroidal magnetic fields are unstable against the int erchange, Parker and/or Taylor instabilities irrespective of the toroidal magnetic field configurations. Aims. The aim of this paper is to clarify the stabilities of neutron stars with strong toroidal magnetic fields against non-axis ymmetric perturbation. The motivation comes from the fact that super magnetized neutron stars of∼ 10 15 G, magnetars, and magnetized protoneutron stars born after the magnetically-driven supernovae are likely to have such strong toroidal magnetic fields. Methods. Long-term, three-dimensional general relativistic magneto-hydrodynamic simulations are performed, preparing isentropic neutron stars with toroidal magnetic fields in equilibrium a s initial conditions. To explore the effects of rotations on the stability, simulations are done for both non-rotating and rigidly rotating models. Results. We find the emergence of the Parker and/or Tayler instabilities in both the non-rotating and rotati ng models. For both nonrotating and rotating models, the Parker instability is the primary instability as predicted by the local linear pertur bation analysis. The interchange instability also appears in the rotating models. It is found that rapid rotation is not enough to suppres s the Parker instability, and this finding does not agree with the perturb ation analysis. The reason for this is that rigidly and rapid ly rotating stars are marginally stable, and hence, in the presence of stellar pulsations by which the rotational profile is deformed, unst able regions with negative gradient of angular momentum profile is develo ped. After the onset of the instabilities, a turbulence is ex cited. Contrary to the axisymmetric case, the magnetic fields never reach an e quilibrium state after the development of the turbulence. Conclusions. Isentropic neutron stars with strong toroidal magnetic fiel ds are likely to be always unstable against the Parker instability. A turbulence motion is induced and maintained for a long time. This conclusion is different from that in axisymmetric simulations and suggests that three-dimensional simulation is indispensable for exploring the formation of magnetars or prominence activities of magnetars such as giant flares.
Exposing an “Intangible” Cognitive Skill among Collegiate Football Players: Enhanced Interference Control

American football is played in a chaotic visual environment filled with relevant and distracting information. We investigated the hypothesis that collegiate football players show exceptional skill at shielding their response execution from the interfering effects of distraction (interference control). The performances of 280 football players from National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I football programs were compared to age-matched controls in a variant of the Eriksen flanker task (Eriksen and Eriksen, 1974). This task quantifies the magnitude of interference produced by visual distraction on split-second response execution. Overall, football athletes and age controls showed similar mean reaction times (RTs) and accuracy rates. However, football athletes were more proficient at shielding their response execution speed from the interfering effects of distraction (i.e., smaller flanker effect costs on RT). Offensive and defensive players showed smaller interference costs compared to controls, but defensive players showed the smallest costs. All defensive positions and one offensive position showed statistically smaller interference effects when compared directly to age controls. These data reveal a clear cognitive advantage among football athletes at executing motor responses in the face of distraction, the existence and magnitude of which vary by position. Individual differences in cognitive control may have important implications for both player selection and development to improve interference control capabilities during play.
Effectiveness of Chinese Hand Massage on Anxiety Among Patients Awaiting Coronary Angiography: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Background: Anxiety is the most common negative emotion among the patients awaiting coronary angiography. The increased anxiety may exacerbate coronary heart disease symptoms and possibly contribute to complications during the procedure. Chinese hand massage is a nonpharmaceutical intervention that has been used in several clinical situations in China and might have beneficial effects on reducing anxiety before coronary angiography. Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of Chinese hand massage care on anxiety among patients awaiting coronary angiography. Methods: One hundred eighty-five subjects awaiting coronary angiography in a single hospital in Fuzhou, China, between May 2012 and September 2012 were screened. One hundred eligible participants were recruited and randomly assigned into the control or Chinese hand massage group. The control group received the conventional therapies and care according to the guidelines, and those in the Chinese hand massage group received additional Chinese hand massage care in conjunction with the same conventional therapies and care as the control group. The anxiety scores (evaluated by using the Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale), heart rate, blood pressure, quality of life (Short-Form Health Survey), and the adverse events were recorded at the baseline and after coronary angiography, respectively. Results: The scores of Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale in the Chinese hand massage group (11.78 [SD, 2.9]) had a statistically significant decrease compared with those in the control group (15.96 [SD, 3.4]) at post-procedure (P < .01). There was no statistically significant difference on blood pressure, heart rate, and Short-Form Health Survey at postangiography between the Chinese hand massage group and the control group. No adverse event was reported during the intervention period. Conclusions Chinese hand massage effectively alleviated anxiety without any adverse effects among patients awaiting coronary angiography. Therefore, it might be recommended as a nonpharmacological nursing intervention. However, future study with a larger sample size is needed to further confirm the efficacy of Chinese hand massage intervention.
Chitin Amendment Increases Soil Suppressiveness toward Plant Pathogens and Modulates the Actinobacterial and Oxalobacteraceal Communities in an Experimental Agricultural Field

ABSTRACT A long-term experiment on the effect of chitin addition to soil on the suppression of soilborne pathogens was set up and monitored for 8 years in an experimental field, Vredepeel, The Netherlands. Chitinous matter obtained from shrimps was added to soil top layers on two different occasions, and the suppressiveness of soil toward Verticillium dahliae, as well as plant-pathogenic nematodes, was assessed, in addition to analyses of the abundances and community structures of members of the soil microbiota. The data revealed that chitin amendment had raised the suppressiveness of soil, in particular toward Verticillium dahliae, 9 months after the (second) treatment, extending to 2 years following treatment. Moreover, major effects of the added chitin on the soil microbial communities were detected. First, shifts in both the abundances and structures of the chitin-treated soil microbial communities, both of total soil bacteria and fungi, were found. In addition, the abundances and structures of soil actinobacteria and the Oxalobacteraceae were affected by chitin. At the functional gene level, the abundance of specific (family-18 glycoside hydrolase) chitinase genes carried by the soil bacteria also revealed upshifts as a result of the added chitin. The effects of chitin noted for the Oxalobacteraceae were specifically related to significant upshifts in the abundances of the species Duganella violaceinigra and Massilia plicata. These effects of chitin persisted over the time of the experiment.
The Edinburgh Feeding Evaluation in Dementia Scale: A Longitudinal Study in Nursing Home Residents

Aims/Background: The Edinburgh Feeding Evaluation in Dementia (EdFED) scale has been shown to have good psychometric properties using a range of methods including Mokken scaling. We aimed to study the Italian version of the EdFED using Mokken scaling. Methods: Data were gathered at 7 time points from 401 nursing home residents affected by dementia in the course of a 6-month intervention study using analysis of variance, Mokken scaling, and person-item fit statistics. Results: The properties of the EdFED-I scale were stable over the course of the study with 4 items showing invariant item ordering at all time points. Some items behaved differently at different levels of difficulty in the scale and also depending on the mean level of feeding difficulty. The test information function showed a dip in the mid-range of difficulty scores.
Improving Website Hyperlink Structure Using Server Logs

Good websites should be easy to navigate via hyperlinks, yet maintaining a high-quality link structure is difficult. Identifying pairs of pages that should be linked may be hard for human editors, especially if the site is large and changes frequently. Further, given a set of useful link candidates, the task of incorporating them into the site can be expensive, since it typically involves humans editing pages. In the light of these challenges, it is desirable to develop data-driven methods for automating the link placement task. Here we develop an approach for automatically finding useful hyperlinks to add to a website. We show that passively collected server logs, beyond telling us which existing links are useful, also contain implicit signals indicating which nonexistent links would be useful if they were to be introduced. We leverage these signals to model the future usefulness of yet nonexistent links. Based on our model, we define the problem of link placement under budget constraints and propose an efficient algorithm for solving it. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating it on Wikipedia, a large website for which we have access to both server logs (used for finding useful new links) and the complete revision history (containing a ground truth of new links). As our method is based exclusively on standard server logs, it may also be applied to any other website, as we show with the example of the biomedical research site Simtk.
Global Health Estimate of Invasive Mycobacterium chimaera Infections Associated with Heater–Cooler Devices in Cardiac Surgery

Investigations of a worldwide epidemic of invasive Mycobacterium chimaera associated with heater–cooler devices in cardiac surgery have been hampered by low clinical awareness and challenging diagnoses. Using data from Switzerland, we estimated the burden of invasive M. chimaera to be 156–282 cases/year in 10 major cardiac valve replacement market countries.
Shared and unshared exposure measurement error in occupational cohort studies and their effects on statistical inference in proportional hazards models

Exposure measurement error represents one of the most important sources of uncertainty in epidemiology. When exposure uncertainty is not or only poorly accounted for, it can lead to biased risk estimates and a distortion of the shape of the exposure-response relationship. In occupational cohort studies, the time-dependent nature of exposure and changes in the method of exposure assessment may create complex error structures. When a method of group-level exposure assessment is used, individual worker practices and the imprecision of the instrument used to measure the average exposure for a group of workers may give rise to errors that are shared between workers, within workers or both. In contrast to unshared measurement error, the effects of shared errors remain largely unknown. Moreover, exposure uncertainty and magnitude of exposure are typically highest for the earliest years of exposure. We conduct a simulation study based on exposure data of the French cohort of uranium miners to compare the effects of shared and unshared exposure uncertainty on risk estimation and on the shape of the exposure-response curve in proportional hazards models. Our results indicate that uncertainty components shared within workers cause more bias in risk estimation and a more severe attenuation of the exposure-response relationship than unshared exposure uncertainty or exposure uncertainty shared between individuals. These findings underline the importance of careful characterisation and modeling of exposure uncertainty in observational studies.
Role of Glutathione S-Transferase M 1 and T 1 Gene Polymorphisms in Adult Acute Myeloid Leukemia Susceptibility

Objectives: Authors aimed to investigate the association between GSTT1 and GSTM1 genetic polymorphism and susceptibility to acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Materials and methods: Genotyping polymorphisms were studied in a total adult 178 individuals (88 newly diagnosed AML patients and 90 healthy controls) using multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Results: Significant difference was reported between genotype polymorphism in AML as compared to control individuals. High risk incidence was detected when dual null of the candidate genotypes were combined (p < 0.0001). Conclusion: Dual combination of the null GSTT1 and GSTM1 were superior to the susceptibility to leukemogenesis.
Knowledge, competencies and attitudes regarding external post-mortem physical examination: A survey among German post-graduate trainees in general practice

Abstract Background: The external post-mortem examination (EPME) is an important medical, legal and socio-economic task with far-reaching relevance; however, due to discrepancies between findings from EPMEs and actual cause of death, improvements in accuracy and quality are needed. Objectives: To investigate knowledge, competencies and attitudes regarding EPME in general practitioner (GP) post-graduate trainees. Methods: Before four post-graduate training courses on the EPME for general practitioner trainees, organized in 2014 in the German federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, a questionnaire on the EPME was distributed by the lecturer, completed by the GP post-graduate trainees and returned to the lecturer. The questionnaire consisted of 19 items related to three main categories: knowledge, competencies and attitudes. Results: Out of 380 GP post-graduate trainees, 128 completed and returned the questionnaire (response rate 33.7%). Less than 18% felt adequately confident in identifying a natural cause of death and less than 5% felt adequately confident in identifying an unnatural cause of death. Only 33% consistently fully uncover the corpse for the EPME. Conclusion: We found an important uncertainty in GP post-graduate trainees regarding their EPME knowledge and competencies.
Mitochondrial myopathies.

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An optimized, broadly applicable piggyBac transposon induction system

Abstract The piggyBac (PB) transposon has been used in a number of biological applications. The insertion of PB transposons into the genome can disrupt genes or regulatory regions, impacting cellular function, so for many experiments it is important that PB transposition is tightly controlled. Here, we systematically characterize three methods for the post-translational control of the PB transposon in four cell lines. We investigated fusions of the PB transposase with ERT2 and two degradation domains (FKBP-DD, DHFR-DD), in multiple orientations, and determined (i) the fold-induction achieved, (ii) the absolute transposition efficiency of the activated construct and (iii) the effects of two inducer molecules on cellular transcription and function. We found that the FKBP-DD confers the PB transposase with a higher transposition activity and better dynamic range than can be achieved with the other systems. In addition, we found that the FKBP-DD regulates transposon activity in a reversible and dose-dependent manner. Finally, we showed that Shld1, the chemical inducer of FKBP-DD, does not interfere with stem cell differentiation, whereas tamoxifen has significant effects. We believe the FKBP-based PB transposon induction will be useful for transposon-mediated genome engineering, insertional mutagenesis and the genome-wide mapping of transcription factor binding.
Consensus of multi-agent systems based on leader-following control

In this paper, a more general multi-agent system based on leader control model is established, in which the coupling topology of the attraction action among the agents is different from the coupling topology of the repulsion action. It is proved that the swarm agents will converge and form a cohesive cluster following the leader under certain conditions in finite time. Two different cases of the system are considered. Moreover, some numerical simulations are given to illustrate the theoretical results.