Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Australian Assassins, Part II: A review of the new assassin spider genus Zephyrarchaea (Araneae, Archaeidae) from southern Australia

Abstract The Assassin Spiders of the family Archaeidae from southern Australia are revised, with a new genus (Zephyrarchaea gen. n.) and nine new species described from temperate, mesic habitats in southern Victoria, South Australia and south-western Western Australia: Zephyrarchaea austini sp. n. , Zephyrarchaea barrettae sp. n. , Zephyrarchaea grayi sp. n. , Zephyrarchaea janineae sp. n. , Zephyrarchaea marae sp. n. , Zephyrarchaea marki sp. n. , Zephyrarchaea melindae sp. n. , Zephyrarchaea porchi sp. n. and Zephyrarchaea vichickmani sp. n. Specimens of the type species, Zephyrarchaea mainae (Platnick, 1991), comb. n. , are redescribed from the Albany region of Western Australia, along with the holotype female of Zephyrarchaea robinsi (Harvey, 2002) comb. n. from the Stirling Range National Park. The previously described species Archaea hickmani Butler, 1929 from Victoria is here recognised as a nomen dubium. A key to species and multi-locus molecular phylogeny complement the species-level taxonomy, with maps, habitat photos, natural history information and conservation assessments provided for all species.
Cost‐Effectiveness Analysis of First‐Line Treatment With Biologic Agents in Polyarticular Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis

The optimal timing of biologic agent treatment in polyarticular juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is unknown. This study evaluated the costs and outcomes of first‐line treatment with etanercept (ETN), an anti–tumor necrosis factor (anti‐TNF) agent, compared with step‐wise therapy in JIA.
A Horizontal Gene Transfer Event Defines Two Distinct Groups within Burkholderia pseudomallei That Have Dissimilar Geographic Distributions

ABSTRACT Burkholderia pseudomallei is the etiologic agent of melioidosis. Many disease manifestations are associated with melioidosis, and the mechanisms causing this variation are unknown; genomic differences among strains offer one explanation. We compared the genome sequences of two strains of B. pseudomallei: the original reference strain K96243 from Thailand and strain MSHR305 from Australia. We identified a variable homologous region between the two strains. This region was previously identified in comparisons of the genome of B. pseudomallei strain K96243 with the genome of strain E264 from the closely related B. thailandensis. In that comparison, K96243 was shown to possess a horizontally acquired Yersinia-like fimbrial (YLF) gene cluster. Here, we show that the homologous genomic region in B. pseudomallei strain 305 is similar to that previously identified in B. thailandensis strain E264. We have named this region in B. pseudomallei strain 305 the B. thailandensis-like flagellum and chemotaxis (BTFC) gene cluster. We screened for these different genomic components across additional genome sequences and 571 B. pseudomallei DNA extracts obtained from regions of endemicity. These alternate genomic states define two distinct groups within B. pseudomallei: all strains contained either the BTFC gene cluster (group BTFC) or the YLF gene cluster (group YLF). These two groups have distinct geographic distributions: group BTFC is dominant in Australia, and group YLF is dominant in Thailand and elsewhere. In addition, clinical isolates are more likely to belong to group YLF, whereas environmental isolates are more likely to belong to group BTFC. These groups should be further characterized in an animal model.
The Agony of Choice: How Plants Balance Growth and Survival under Water-Limiting Conditions1

A comprehensive overview is presented of the effects of water limitation on growing shoot tissues, with a focus on molecular mechanisms and networks restricting growth, adaptations for maintained growth, and the molecular interplay between growth and stress tolerance with potential for crop engineering. When confronted with water limitation, plants actively reprogram their metabolism and growth. Recently, it has become clear that growing tissues show specific and highly dynamic responses to drought, which differ from the well-studied responses in mature tissues. Here, we provide an overview of recent advances in understanding shoot growth regulation in water-limiting conditions. Of special interest is the balance between maintained growth and competitiveness on the one hand and ensured survival on the other hand. A number of master regulators controlling this balance have been identified, such as DELLAs and APETALA2/ETHYLENE RESPONSE FACTOR-type transcription factors. The possibilities of engineering or breeding crops that maintain growth in periods of mild drought, while still being able to activate protective tolerance mechanisms, are discussed.
Eficiência da inseminação artificial em tempo fixo em fêmeas zebuínas na mesorregião Sudeste do Pará, Brasil

Fixed-time artificial insemination (FTAI) is considered a reproductive biotechnology capable of promoting the increase of reproductive indices, having a significant effect on the bioeconomic efficiency of the property. However, the success of FTAI depends on several factors that directly affect the pregnancy rate. This study aims to evaluate the effect of FTAI on the fertility of Nelore females of the Southeastern Mesoregion of Para and to verify the influence of some factors that may compromise the pregnancy rate. Based on a field study, the information on the reproductive control records of 9,455 Nelore females belonging to nine farms was collected and submitted to the same insemination protocol. The variables considered were farm, animal category, reuse of the intravaginal progesterone device, body condition score, bull semen and inseminator. The pregnancy rate was 53.4% (5,052 out of 9,455), with an association between the farms (p 0.05) regarding the reuse of the first, second, third and fourth use intravaginal progesterone device, with the respective rates of 54.3%, 53.1%, 53% and 51.2%. According to the body condition score (p<0.05), females with score of 3 and 3.25 presented higher pregnancy rates, with 59.8% and 54.8%, respectively. In relation to the bull variable, fourteen were responsible for a pregnancy rate above 50%; three with results above 60% and one bull with 38.3% (p<0.05). There was a difference between the pregnancy rate and the inseminator (p<0.05), with results ranging from 45.5% to 71.4%. Improvements in the management systems of each farm may significantly increase the pregnancy rate of the herds in the Southeastern region.
Lifetime Prediction for Power Electronics Module Substrate Mount-down Solder Interconnect

A numerical modeling method for the prediction of the lifetime of solder joints of relatively large solder area under cyclic thermal-mechanical loading conditions has been developed. The method is based on the Miner's linear damage accumulation rule and the properties of the accumulated plastic strain in front of the crack in large area solder joint. The nonlinear distribution of the damage indicator in the solder joints have been taken into account. The method has been used to calculate the lifetime of the solder interconnect in a power module under mixed cyclic loading conditions found in railway traction control applications. The results show that the solder thickness is a parameter that has a strong influence on the damage and therefore the lifetime of the solder joint while the substrate width and the thickness of the baseplate are much less important for the lifetime.
The Implications of a Graying Japan for Government Policy

Japan is in the midst of a demographic transition that is both rapid and large by international standards. As recently as 1990, Japan had the youngest population among the Group of 6 large, developed countries. However, the combined effects of aging of the baby boomer generation and low fertility rates have produced very rapid aging. Japan now finds itself with the oldest population among the Group of 6, and its population will continue to age at a rapid pace in future years. Aging is already placing a burden on government finances, and Japan's ability to confront the negative fiscal implications of future aging is constrained by its very high debt-to-GDP ratio. We find that Japan faces a severe fiscal crisis if remedial action is not undertaken soon, and we analyze alternative strategies for correcting Japan's fiscal imbalances.
A Markovian Approach to the Optimal Demodulation of Diffusion-Based Molecular Communication Networks

In a diffusion-based molecular communication network, transmitters and receivers communicate by using signalling molecules (or ligands) in a fluid medium. This paper assumes that the transmitter uses different chemical reactions to generate different emission patterns of signalling molecules to represent different transmission symbols, and the receiver consists of receptors. When the signalling molecules arrive at the receiver, they may react with the receptors to form ligand-receptor complexes. Our goal is to study the demodulation in this setup assuming that the transmitter and receiver are synchronised. We derive an optimal demodulator using the continuous history of the number of complexes at the receiver as the input to the demodulator. We do that by first deriving a communication model which includes the chemical reactions in the transmitter, diffusion in the transmission medium and the ligand-receptor process in the receiver. This model, which takes the form of a continuous-time Markov process, captures the noise in the receiver signal due to the stochastic nature of chemical reactions and diffusion. We then adopt a maximum a posteriori framework and use Bayesian filtering to derive the optimal demodulator. We use numerical examples to illustrate the properties of this optimal demodulator.
Learning to generate video object segment proposals

This paper proposes a fully automatic pipeline to generate accurate object segment proposals in realistic videos. Our approach first detects generic object proposals for all video frames and then learns to rank them using a Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) descriptor built on appearance and motion cues. The ambiguity of the proposal set can be reduced while the quality can be retained as highly as possible Next, high-scoring proposals are greedily tracked over the entire sequence into distinct tracklets. Observing that the proposal tracklet set at this stage is noisy and redundant, we perform a tracklet selection scheme to suppress the highly overlapped tracklets, and detect occlusions based on appearance and location information. Finally, we exploit holistic appearance cues for refinement of video segment proposals to obtain pixel-accurate segmentation. Our method is evaluated on two video segmentation datasets i.e. SegTrack v1 and FBMS-59 and achieves competitive results in comparison with other state-of-the-art methods.
Transmission of Facial Expressions of Emotion Co-Evolved with Their Efficient Decoding in the Brain: Behavioral and Brain Evidence

Competent social organisms will read the social signals of their peers. In primates, the face has evolved to transmit the organism's internal emotional state. Adaptive action suggests that the brain of the receiver has co-evolved to efficiently decode expression signals. Here, we review and integrate the evidence for this hypothesis. With a computational approach, we co-examined facial expressions as signals for data transmission and the brain as receiver and decoder of these signals. First, we show in a model observer that facial expressions form a lowly correlated signal set. Second, using time-resolved EEG data, we show how the brain uses spatial frequency information impinging on the retina to decorrelate expression categories. Between 140 to 200 ms following stimulus onset, independently in the left and right hemispheres, an information processing mechanism starts locally with encoding the eye, irrespective of expression, followed by a zooming out to processing the entire face, followed by a zooming back in to diagnostic features (e.g. the opened eyes in “fear”, the mouth in “happy”). A model categorizer demonstrates that at 200 ms, the left and right brain have represented enough information to predict behavioral categorization performance.
A synthetic-focusing strategy for real-time high-frequency annular-array imaging

A single-pass approach of collecting all transmit-to-receive (T/R) echo data from an annular array was utilized and the data were synthetically focused (SF) to create an arbitrary number of focal zones. A spatial-impulse response model was implemented to simulate the acoustic field of a 5-ring, 38 MHz annular array with 12 mm geometric focus and 6 mm aperture. Acoustic field simulations included lateral beamwidth (LBW) and axial depth-of-field (DOF) for focusing over the 8 to 20 mm range. Full SF of all 25 T/R pairs was compared to fixed focusing and to cases with receive channels eliminated. Due to the reciprocal nature of the acoustic path, it was possible to recover some of the lost aperture by doubling the contribution of the reciprocal T/R pairs. The technique was applied to mouse embryo T/R data and as receive channels were dropped, SNR decreased and resolution degraded. Simulations and experiments showed that when using an SF beamforming approach based on individual T/R pairs, the outer receive channels of an annular array could be eliminated without drastically affecting LBW, DOF, or SNR. This permitted faster frame rates by reducing the amount of data that had to be beamformed.
Mapping Dynamical Mechanical Properties of Osteonal Bone by Scanning Acoustic Microscopy in Time-of-Flight Mode

Abstract An important determinant of mechanical properties of bone is Young’s modulus and its variation in individual osteons of cortical bone tissue. Its mechanical behavior also depends on deformation rate owing to its visco- or poroelastic properties. We developed a method to measure dynamical mechanical properties of bulk bone tissue at osteonal level based on scanning acoustic microscopy (SAM) using time-of-flight (TOF) measurements in combination with quantitative backscattered electron imaging (qBEI). SAM-TOF yields local sound velocities and qBEI corresponding material densities together providing elastic properties. Osteons (n=55) were measured in three human femoral diaphyseal ground bone sections (∼30 µm in thickness). In addition, subchondral bone and mineralized articular cartilage were investigated. The mean mineral contents, the mean sound velocities, and the mean elastic modulus of the osteons ranged from 20 to 26 wt%, from 3,819 to 5,260 m/s, and from 21 to 44 GPa, respectively. There was a strong positive correlation between material density and sound velocity (Pearson’s r=0.701; p<0.0001) of the osteons. Sound velocities between cartilage and bone was similar, though material density was higher in cartilage (+4.46%, p<0.0001). These results demonstrate the power of SAM-TOF to estimate dynamic mechanical properties of the bone materials at the osteonal level.
Comparing genomes to computer operating systems in terms of the topology and evolution of their regulatory control networks

The genome has often been called the operating system (OS) for a living organism. A computer OS is described by a regulatory control network termed the call graph, which is analogous to the transcriptional regulatory network in a cell. To apply our firsthand knowledge of the architecture of software systems to understand cellular design principles, we present a comparison between the transcriptional regulatory network of a well-studied bacterium (Escherichia coli) and the call graph of a canonical OS (Linux) in terms of topology and evolution. We show that both networks have a fundamentally hierarchical layout, but there is a key difference: The transcriptional regulatory network possesses a few global regulators at the top and many targets at the bottom; conversely, the call graph has many regulators controlling a small set of generic functions. This top-heavy organization leads to highly overlapping functional modules in the call graph, in contrast to the relatively independent modules in the regulatory network. We further develop a way to measure evolutionary rates comparably between the two networks and explain this difference in terms of network evolution. The process of biological evolution via random mutation and subsequent selection tightly constrains the evolution of regulatory network hubs. The call graph, however, exhibits rapid evolution of its highly connected generic components, made possible by designers’ continual fine-tuning. These findings stem from the design principles of the two systems: robustness for biological systems and cost effectiveness (reuse) for software systems.
Partitioning Default Effects: Why People Choose Not to Choose

Default options exert an influence in areas as varied as retirement program design, organ donation policy, and consumer choice. Past research has offered potential reasons why no-action defaults matter: (a) effort, (b) implied endorsement, and (c) reference dependence. The first two of these explanations have been experimentally demonstrated, but the latter has received far less attention. In three experiments we produce default effects and demonstrate that reference dependence can play a major role in their effectiveness. We find that the queries formulated by defaults can produce differences in constructed preferences and further that manipulating queries can also mitigate default effects. The experimental context involves two environmentally consequential alternatives: cheap, inefficient incandescent light bulbs, and expensive, efficient compact fluorescent bulbs. Within this context we also measure the impact of each potential rationale for a default effect.
Detecting travel modes from smartphone-based travel surveys with continuous hidden Markov models

In the last decades, studies on travel mode detection from location data have been increasing exponentially. However, these studies have struggled with three limitations: data collection-, feature selection-, and classification approach–related issues. Thus, we propose a novel framework to collect trajectory data and infer travel modes by making a great deal of effort. First, we conduct a travel survey with smartphones in Shanghai City, China. Furthermore, we use a prompted recall survey with surveyor intervention by telephones. In the survey, the surveyor asks respondents to validate the travel information automatically detected from trajectory data. Second, we use well-known sequential forward selection procedures to select the most reasonable combination of features. This set of features is expected to help achieve high classification accuracy with few features. Third, as a machine learning approach incorporating high resistance to noise in features, a continuous hidden Markov model is used to classify segments in dataset 1 that comprises Global Positioning System data alone. Consequently, 94.37% of segments are flagged correctly for the training dataset, while 93.47% are detected properly for the test dataset by making a comparison between detected travel modes and travel modes validated during the prompted recall survey. A higher accuracy (95.28%) is achieved in the test dataset on dataset 2 that consists of Global Positioning System, accelerometer, Global System for Mobile communication, and Wi-Fi data. The promising results obtained with this method provide a new perspective in understanding travel mode detection and other related issues in Global Positioning System travel surveys, including trip purpose detection.
How Cognitive and Affective Empathy Relate to Emotion Regulation: Divergent Patterns from Trait and Task-Based Measures

Evidence suggests that empathy and emotion regulation may be related, but few studies have directly investigated this relationship. Here we report two experiments which examined: 1) how different components of empathy (cognitive & affective) relate to the habitual use of cognitive reappraisal to regulate emotions (N=220), and 2) how these components of empathy relate to implicit reappraisal in a context-framing task (N=92). In study 1, a positive correlation between cognitive empathy and reappraisal use was observed. Affective empathy showed no relationship with reappraisal use. In study 2, participants completed an implicit reappraisal task in which previously viewed negative images were paired with either a neutralising (intended to reduce negative emotionality) or descriptive (which simply described the image) framing sentence. Participants then reported how unpleasant/pleasant each image made them feel. In contrast to study 1, a positive correlation between affective empathy and the implicit reappraisal task metric (rating of neutralising–descriptive framing conditions) was observed. There was no relationship between cognitive empathy and implicit reappraisal. These findings suggest that both components of empathy are related to reappraisal, but in different ways: Cognitive empathy is related to more deliberate use of reappraisal, while affective empathy is associated with more implicit reappraisal processes.
Multivariate estimate of heritability for quality traits in tomatoes by the multiple factor analysis

Abstract: The objective of this work was to evaluate a multiple factor analysis approach to estimate heritability for quality traits in tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum), taking as a reference the values of heritability obtained through the classical method offspring-parent regression. A total of 18 F3 tomato families originated from the selfing of 18 individuals from a second-cycle hybrid were evaluated. In both generations, ten quantitative traits related to fruit quality were assessed. The multiple factor analysis showed that some of the evaluated traits performed differently and others similarly between generations. Heritability is low or null for some traits, such as shelf life and reflectance percentage, and high for others, as weight and shape. That analysis also enables the study of the global connection between both generations through the RV (F3, F2) coefficient, which measures the correlation between two matrix configurations. RV was 0.503 and may be associated with the general heritability of all data. The multiple factor analysis is a valid multivariate technique to evaluate heritability for quality traits in tomatoes.
The Cytolytically Inactive Terminal Complement Complex Activates Endothelial Cells to Express Adhesion Molecules and Tissue Factor Procoagulant Activity

The membrane attack complex of complement (C) in sublytic concentrations stimulates endothelial cells (EC) to express adhesion molecules and to release biologically active products. We have examined the ability of a cytolytically inactive form of this complex, which is incapable of inserting into the cell membrane, to upregulate the expression of adhesion molecules and of tissue factor (TF) procoagulant activity. The inactive terminal C complex (iTCC) was prepared by mixing C5b6, C7, C8, and C9 and was purified by fast protein liquid chromatography on a Superose 12 column. Binding of this complex to EC was found to be dose dependent and was inhibited by anti-C9 antibodies, as assessed both by ELISA using an mAb anti-C9 neoantigen and by measuring cell-bound 125I-labeled iTCC. Exposure of EC to iTCC resulted in a dose- and time-dependent expression of endothelial leukocyte adhesion molecule 1, intercellular adhesion molecule 1, and vascular cell adhesion molecule 1 accompanied by increased levels of the corresponding mRNA, but not in the rapid expression of P-selectin. Inactive TCC also induced increased TF activity evaluated by a chromogenic assay that measures the formation of factor Xa. These effects were inhibited by anti-C9 antibodies. The data support the conclusion that iTCC may induce proinflammatory and procoagulant activities on EC.