Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analytical and experimental investigation of the delamination during drilling of composite structures with core drill made of diamond grits: X-ray tomography analysis

Among the various forms of material damage, exit-ply delamination has been identified as one of the most deleterious damage processes associated with drilling fibre-reinforced plastics. The thrust force has been cited as the primary cause for drilling-induced exit-ply delamination. Only one analytical model for the prediction of the critical thrust force responsible for delamination using core drills can be found in the literature. In this study, a realistic model to predict critical thrust force responsible for drilling-induced exit-ply delamination in a multi-directional carbon fibre-reinforced plastic laminate with core drill has been proposed. A comparison between the proposed model, literature model as well as the experimental tests conducted during punching tests is presented. The proposed model is found to correlate well with experimental punching tests. In fact, the maximum relative errors recorded between the experimental values of the critical thrust force and the measured values are around 15%. Micro-tomography experiments have also been conducted that capture the drilling-induced damage in multi-directional carbon fibre-reinforced plastics in great detail. The X-ray images highlight the difficulty in controlling the thickness of the uncut plies located under the core drill during punching tests that can be attributed to some deviations in predictions of critical thrust force. Postmortem examination of the blind holes after punching tests also confirms the presence of a net delamination near the vicinity of the nominal diameter of the core drill, which correlates well to the hypothesis of the analytical model.
Studying the Effect of Hard and Soft News Exposure on Mental Well-Being Over Time

Following the news is generally understood to be crucial for democracy as it allows citizens to politically participate in an informed manner; yet, one may wonder about the unintended side effects it has for the mental well-being of citizens. With news focusing on the negative and worrisome events in the world, framing that evokes a sense of powerlessness, and lack of entertainment value, this study hypothesizes that news consumption decreases mental well-being via negative hedonic experiences; thereby, we differentiate between hard and soft news. Using a panel survey in combination with latent growth curve modeling (n = 2,767), we demonstrate that the consumption of hard news television programs has a negative effect on the development of mental well-being over time. Soft news consumption, by contrast, has a marginally positive impact on the trend in well-being. This can be explained by the differential topic focus, framing and style of soft news vis-àvis hard news. Investigating the effects of news consumption on mental well-being provides insight into the impact news exposure has on variables other than the political ones, which definitively are not less societally relevant.
Distinct effects of subcellular glycogen localization on tetanic relaxation time and endurance in mechanically skinned rat skeletal muscle fibres

In vitro experiments indicate a non‐metabolic role of muscle glycogen in contracting skeletal muscles. Since the sequence of events in excitation–contraction (E–C) coupling is known to be located close to glycogen granules, at specific sites on the fibre, we hypothesized that the distinct compartments of glycogen have specific effects on muscle fibre contractility and fatigability. Single skeletal muscle fibres (n= 19) from fed and fasted rats were mechanically skinned and divided into two segments. In one segment glycogen localization and volume fraction were estimated by transmission electron microscopy. The other segment was mechanically skinned and, in the presence of high and constant myoplasmic ATP and PCr, electrically stimulated (10 Hz, 0.8 s every 3 s) eliciting repeated tetanic contractions until the force response was decreased by 50% (mean ±s.e.m., 81 ± 16, range 22–252 contractions). Initially the total myofibrillar glycogen volume percentage was 0.46 ± 0.07%, with 72 ± 3% in the intermyofibrillar space and 28 ± 3% in the intramyofibrillar space. The intramyofibrillar glycogen content was positively correlated with the fatigue resistance capacity (r2= 0.32, P= 0.02). Intermyofibrillar glycogen was inversely correlated with the half‐relaxation time in the unfatigued tetanus (r2= 0.25, P= 0.03). These results demonstrate for the first time that two distinct subcellular populations of glycogen have different roles in contracting single muscle fibres under conditions of high myoplasmic ATP.
Influence of hydrophobic surface treatment toward performance of air filter

This study investigated the performance of hydrophobic surface treatment by using silica aerogel powder via spray coating techniques. Hydrophobic properties were determined by measuring the level of the contact angle. Meanwhile, performance was evaluated in term of the hydrogen gas flow and humidity rejection. The results are shown by contact angle that the microstructure filter, especially in the upper layer and sub-layer has been changed. The results also show an increase of hydrophobicity due to the increased quantity of silica aerogel powder. Results also showed that the absorption and rejection filter performance filter has increased after the addition of silica aerogel powder. The results showed that with the addition of 5 grams of powder of silica aerogel have the highest result of wetting angle 134.11°. The highest humidity rejection found with 5 grams of powder of silica aerogel.
[Adductor pollicis muscle thickness: a fast and reliable method for nutritional assessment in surgical patients].

OBJECTIVE Investigate whether the right adductor pollicis muscle thickness is a reliable method to evaluate the nutritional status of surgical patients and whether it correlates or not correlate to other anthropometric, biochemical, and clinical parameters. METHODS Cross-sectional study evaluating 87 patients candidates to major operations of the gastrointestinal tract. All were submitted to global subjective evaluation, traditional anthropometry (arm circumpherence ; triceps skin fold; and arm muscle circumpherence, serum albumin, lymphocytes and measurement of in both hands. RESULTS The mean right adductor pollicis muscle thickness in dominant hand was 12,64 +/- 3,19 mm and in non-dominant hand (EMAPND) 12,23 +/- 2,9 mm. Sensitivity was 72,37% for left adductor pollicis muscle and 77,33% for left adductor pollicis muscle thickness being the cut-offs given by the ROC curve (13,4 and 13,1mm respectively). Specificity was 100% for both hands. There was a significantly correlation (P<0.01) for right adductor pollicis muscle thickness with all anthropometric parameters. The mean value for normal individuals was significantly greater (P<0.001) than for mild malnourished which was greater (p<0.05) when compared to patients with severe malnutrition. CONCLUSION right adductor pollicis muscle thickness is a low-cost, reliable, and trustworthy method to assess nutritional status that can be easily and safety used in clinical practice for surgical patients.
Risk-sensitive control with HARA utility

A control methodology based on the hyperbolic absolute risk averse (HARA) utility function is presented as an alternative to the exponential-of-an-integral approach to finding robust controllers. The work is inspired by the intuition that HARA controllers, while being robust, may give better performance than exponential controllers in normal situations. The HARA problem is shown to be equivalent to a certain differential game, and the asymptotic properties of the HARA problem and this differential game are studied. As an example, a linear-quadratic HARA problem is studied, where the problem of finding a robust HARA controller is proved to be equivalent to solving a standard linear-quadratic problem for a system with a higher noise intensity. This reveals an interesting relationship between robustness and uncertainty.
Genotypic and phenotypic correlation in bread wheat ... 260 MATERIALS AND METHODS This study was conducted during 2005-06 to 2007-08 at Cereal Crops

Knowledge of genetic and phenotypic association among economic traits helps plant breeders in outlying efficient breeding strategies for development of high yielding wheat cultivars. Two diverse wheat cultivars forming two contrasting groups viz. tall stature with late maturity (cultivar “Fakhre Sarhad”) vs short stature with early maturity (cultivar “Saleem-2000”) were used to develop the F1, F2 and first backcross generations (BC11 and BC12) from their direct and reciprocal crosses during crop seasons of 200506 and 2006-07 at Cereal Crops Research Institute (CCRI), Pirsabak, Nowshera (Pakistan). Significant genetic variation existed among the six generations for various spike and yield related traits of the direct as well as reciprocal crosses both under normal and late planting environments. Significant and positive genetic correlations among yield related traits predominated the phenotypic association for the direct cross Fakhre Sarhad × Saleem-2000 and its reciprocal under both planting conditions. The strong relationship of yield with yield component traits suggested that grain yield potential can be effectively improved by obtaining maximum expression of spike length, spikes plant, number of grains spike, biological yield and harvest index.
Influence of winter and summer surface wind anomalies on summer Arctic sea ice extent

Based on a statistical analysis incorporating 925‐hPa wind fields from the NCEP/NCAR Reanalyses, it is shown that the combined effect of winter and summer wind forcing accounts for 50% of the variance of the change in September Arctic sea ice extent from one year to the next (ΔSIE) and it also explains roughly 1/3 of the downward linear trend of SIE over the past 31 years. In both seasons meridional wind anomalies to the north and east of Greenland are correlated with September SIE, presumably because they modulate the export of ice through Fram Strait. Anticyclonic wind anomalies over the Beaufort Sea during summer favor low September SIE and have contributed to the record‐low values in recent summers, perhaps by enhancing the flux of ice toward Fram Strait in the trans‐polar drift.
"Scared to go to the Hospital": Inpatient Experiences with Undesirable Events

Involving patients in healthcare safety practices has long been an area of priority and importance. However, we still need to understand how patients perceive undesirable events during their hospital stay, and what role patients play in the prevention of these events. To address this gap, we surveyed pediatric inpatients and caregivers to understand their perspectives on undesirable events. By giving them an opportunity to use their own words to describe their experiences, we found a diverse array of undesirable events. Our qualitative analysis revealed four major types of events that patients and caregivers experienced: mismanagement, communication, policy, and lack of care coordination. We also examined the information needs that patients and caregivers experienced during these situations, and learned how they would prefer to receive this information. Based on these results, we provide recommendations for inpatient technologies that could enable patients to identify and prevent such undesirable events.
Heart failure risk prediction in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis

Objective Heart failure (HF) is a leading cause of mortality especially in older populations. Early detection of high-risk individuals is imperative for primary prevention. The purpose of this study was to develop a HF risk model from a population without clinical cardiac disease. Methods The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis is a multicentre observational cohort study following 6814 subjects (mean age 62±10 years; 47% men) who were free of clinical cardiovascular disease at baseline. Median follow-up was 4.7 years. HF events developed in 176 participants. Cox proportional hazards models and regression coefficients were used to determine independent risk factors and generate a 5-year risk score for incident HF. Bootstrapping with bias correction was used for internal validation. Results Independent predictors for HF (HR, p value) were age (1.30 (1.10 to 1.50) per 10 years), male gender (2.27 (1.53 to 3.36)), current smoking (1.97 (1.15 to 3.36)), body mass index (1.40 (1.10 to 1.80) per 5 kg/m2), systolic blood pressure (1.10 (1.00 to 1.10) per 10 mm Hg), heart rate (1.30) (1.10 to 1.40) per 10 bpm), diabetes (2.27 (1.48 to 3.47)), N-terminal pro-B-type natriuretic peptide (NT proBNP) (2.48 (2.16 to 2.84) per unit log increment) and left ventricular mass index (1.40 (1.30 to 1.40) per 10 g/m2). A parsimonious model based on age, gender, body mass index, smoking status, systolic blood pressure, heart rate, diabetes and NT proBNP natriuretic peptide predicted incident HF risk with a c-statistic of 0.87. Conclusions A clinical algorithm based on risk factors readily available in the primary care setting can used to identify individuals with high likelihood of developing HF without pre-existing cardiac disease.
Secure erasure codes with partial decodability

The MDS property (aka the k-out-of-n property) requires that if a file is split into several symbols and subsequently encoded into n coded symbols, each being stored in one storage node of a distributed storage system (DSS), then an user can recover the file by accessing any k nodes. We study the so-called p-decodable μ-secure erasure coding scheme (1 ≤ p ≤ k - μ, 0 ≤ μ <; k, p|(k - μ)), which satisfies the MDS property and the following additional properties: (P1) strongly secure up to a threshold: an adversary which eavesdrops at most μ storage nodes gains no information (in Shannon's sense) about the stored file, (P2) partially decodable: a legitimate user can recover a subset of p file symbols by accessing some μ + p storage nodes. (P2) partially decodable: a legitimate user can recover a subset of p file symbols by accessing some μ + p storage nodes. The scheme is perfectly p-decodable μ-secure if it satisfies the following additional property: (P3) weakly secure up to a threshold: an adversary which eavesdrops more than μ but less than μ + p storage nodes cannot reconstruct any part of the file. Most of the related work in the literature only focused on the case p = k - μ. In other words, no partial decodability is provided: an user cannot retrieve any part of the file by accessing less than k nodes. For our more general code, Property (P2) guarantees partial decodability: once the user accesses p more nodes than the strong security threshold μ, it can start to decode some subset of p file symbols. We provide an explicit construction of p-decodable μ-secure coding schemes over small fields for all μ and p. That construction also produces perfect p-decodable μ-secure schemes over small fields when p = 1 (for every μ), and when μ = 0, 1 (for every p). We establish that perfect schemes exist over sufficiently large fields for almost all μ and p.
Performance analysis of adaptive physical layer network coding for wireless two-way Relaying

The analysis of modulation schemes for the physical layer network-coded two way relaying scenario is presented which employs two phases: Multiple access (MA) phase and Broadcast (BC) phase. Depending on the signal set used at the end nodes, the minimum distance of the effective constellation seen at the relay becomes zero for a finite number of channel fade states referred as the singular fade states. The singular fade states fall into the following two classes: (i) the ones which are caused due to channel outage and whose harmful effect cannot be mitigated by adaptive network coding called the non-removable singular fade states and (ii) the ones which occur due to the choice of the signal set and whose harmful effects can be removed called the removable singular fade states. In this paper, we derive an upper bound on the average end-to-end Symbol Error Rate (SER), with and without adaptive network coding at the relay, for a Rician fading scenario. It is shown that without adaptive network coding, at high Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), the contribution to the end-to-end SER comes from the following error events which fall as SNR-1: the error events associated with the removable and nonremovable singular fade states and the error event during the BC phase. In contrast, for the adaptive network coding scheme, the error events associated with the removable singular fade states fall as SNR-2, thereby providing a coding gain over the case when adaptive network coding is not used. Also, it is shown that for a Rician fading channel, the error during the MA phase dominates over the error during the BC phase. Hence, adaptive network coding, which improves the performance during the MA phase provides more gain in a Rician fading scenario than in a Rayleigh fading scenario. Furthermore, it is shown that for large Rician factors, among those removable singular fade states which have the same magnitude, those which have the least absolute value of the phase angle alone contribute dominantly to the end-to-end SER and it is sufficient to remove the effect of only such singular fade states.
Fit of bicycle safety helmets and risk of head injuries in children

Background—Although bicycle helmets are effective in preventing head and brain injury, some helmeted individuals nevertheless sustain head injury. One of the possible reasons may be poor fit of the helmet on the head. This study was undertaken to examine the relationship between helmet fit and risk of injury. Methods—1718 individuals who were helmeted riders in a crash were queried on helmet fit and position. A sample of 28 children 2–14 years of age who sustained a head injury while wearing a bicycle helmet and 98 helmeted individuals of the same age treated in the same hospital emergency departments for injuries other than to the head, underwent anthropometric measurements of helmet fit. Measurements were made of the child's head, the helmet, and on a cast made of the child's head. Results—Individuals whose helmets were reported to fit poorly had a 1.96-fold increased risk of head injury compared with those whose helmets fit well. Children with head injuries had helmets which were significantly wider than their heads compared with children without head injuries. Helmet fit was poorer among males and among younger children. Conclusions—Poor fit of helmets may be associated with an increased risk of head injury in children, especially in males. Helmets may not be designed to provide optimal protection.
Mapping the functional versatility and fragility of Ras GTPase signaling circuits through in vitro network reconstitution

The Ras-superfamily GTPases are central controllers of cell proliferation and morphology. Ras signaling is mediated by a system of interacting molecules: upstream enzymes (GEF/GAP) regulate Ras’s ability to recruit multiple competing downstream effectors. We developed a multiplexed, multi-turnover assay for measuring the dynamic signaling behavior of in vitro reconstituted H-Ras signaling systems. By including both upstream regulators and downstream effectors, we can systematically map how different network configurations shape the dynamic system response. The concentration and identity of both upstream and downstream signaling components strongly impacted the timing, duration, shape, and amplitude of effector outputs. The distorted output of oncogenic alleles of Ras was highly dependent on the balance of positive (GAP) and negative (GEF) regulators in the system. We found that different effectors interpreted the same inputs with distinct output dynamics, enabling a Ras system to encode multiple unique temporal outputs in response to a single input. We also found that different Ras-to-GEF positive feedback mechanisms could reshape output dynamics in distinct ways, such as signal amplification or overshoot minimization. Mapping of the space of output behaviors accessible to Ras provides a design manual for programming Ras circuits, and reveals how these systems are readily adapted to produce an array of dynamic signaling behaviors. Nonetheless, this versatility comes with a trade-off of fragility, as there exist numerous paths to altered signaling behaviors that could cause disease. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.12435. 001
Optoelectronic devices

OPTOELECTRONIC devices either produce light or use light in their operation. An optoelectronic device includes an optoelectronic component, the optoelectronic component having an active region and at least one first conductive path on a first substrate, wherein the first conductive path is electrically connected to the active region. Further, the optoelectronic device comprises a second substrate with at least one second conductive path, wherein the first conductive path and the second conductive path are electrically connected to one another.
Targeted expression of Cre recombinase to cone photoreceptors in transgenic mice.

PURPOSE Disruption of widely expressed essential genes in mice often leads to embryonic or neonatal lethality. To circumvent this problem and dissect gene functions in the cone photoreceptors, we elected to generate cone photoreceptor specific cre transgenic mice. METHODS Transgenic mice expressing Cre recombinase directed by the human red/green pigment (HRGP) gene promoter were generated. Candidate Cre-expressing lines were identified with RT-PCR. Cre-expressing mice were characterized with immunocytochemical assays and functional studies using a Cre activatable lacZ reporter mouse strain (R26R). Cone distribution was determined by immunohistochemistry and retinal function was measured by electroretinography (ERG) on six month old HRGP-cre mice. RESULTS RT-PCR analysis suggested that several transgenic lines expressed cre mRNA in the retina. Beta-galactosidase staining on retinal flat mounts and sections from F1 mice derived from the HRGP-cre and R26R reporter mice suggested that two mouse strains were capable of carrying out efficient Cre mediated recombination in cone photoreceptors. Immunocytochemical staining of retinal sections demonstrated that Cre expression was localized to cone photoreceptors. Cone distribution and cone ERG analysis suggested that cone photoreceptors were normal in adult HRGP-cre mice. CONCLUSIONS We have generated transgenic mice that efficiently express Cre recombinase in cone photoreceptor cells. The adult transgenic mice have normal cone distribution and function. They can be used in conditional knockout experiments for gene function studies in cone photoreceptors.
Progesterone Induces the Growth and Infiltration of Human Astrocytoma Cells Implanted in the Cerebral Cortex of the Rat

Progesterone (P4) promotes cell proliferation in several types of cancer, including brain tumors such as astrocytomas, the most common and aggressive primary intracerebral neoplasm in humans. In this work, we studied the effects of P4 and its intracellular receptor antagonist, RU486, on growth and infiltration of U373 cells derived from a human astrocytoma grade III, implanted in the motor cortex of adult male rats, using two treatment schemes. In the first one, fifteen days after cells implantation, rats were daily subcutaneously treated with vehicle (propylene glycol, 160 μL), P4 (1 mg), RU486 (5 mg), or P4 + RU486 (1 mg and 5 mg, resp.) for 21 days. In the second one, treatments started 8 weeks after cells implantation and lasted for 14 days. In both schemes we found that P4 significantly increased the tumor area as compared with the rest of the treatments, whereas RU486 blocked P4 effects. All rats treated with P4 showed tumor infiltration, while 28.6% and 42.9% of the animals treated with RU486 and P4 + RU486, respectively, presented it. Our data suggest that P4 promotes growth and migration of human astrocytoma cells implanted in the motor cortex of the rat through the interaction with its intracellular receptor.