Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE CLUSTER AGES EXPERIMENT (CASE). III. ANALYSIS OF THE ECCENTRIC ECLIPSING BINARY V32 IN THE GLOBULAR CLUSTER NGC 6397

We present spectroscopic and photometric observations of the eclipsing binary V32 located in the central field of the globular cluster NGC 6397. The variable is a single-line spectroscopic binary with an orbital period of 9.8783 days and a large eccentricity of e = 0.32. Its systemic velocity (γ = 20.7 km s−1) and metallicity ([Fe/H] ∼−1.9) are both consistent with cluster membership. The primary component of the binary is located at the top of the main-sequence turnoff on the cluster color–magnitude diagram. Only a shallow primary eclipse is observed in the light curve. Based on stellar models for an age of 12 Gyr and the mass function derived from the radial velocity curve, we estimate the masses to be Mp = 0.79 M☉ and Ms = 0.23 M☉. The light curve of V32 can be reproduced by adopting Rp = 1.569 R☉ and Rs = 0.236 R☉ for the radii and i = 85.44 deg for the system inclination. The system geometry precludes observations of the secondary eclipse. The large eccentricity of the orbit is puzzling given that for metal-poor, halo binaries the transition from circular to eccentric orbit occurs at an orbital period of about 20 days. We suppose that the orbit of V32 was modified relatively recently by dynamical interaction with other cluster star(s). An alternative explanation of the observed eccentricity calls for the presence of a third body in the system.
Strengthening inter-cultural literacy and minority voices through narratives of healthy religious pluralism in higher education

ABSTRACT Religious faith and spiritual practices, although increasingly important to some students, are often avoided in the Western University classroom and student experience. There are some understandable and valid reasons for this. However, when two academics (Education/Social Work and Theology) were asked to evaluate a co-curricular, interreligious dialogue program in an Australian University, called Finding Common Ground (FCG), the data was so compelling that consideration for pedagogies in the university ‘classroom’ took on additional significance. More so in the contemporary context, where religious pluralism and respectful religious expression is to be encouraged, over and against polarisation, in today’s global and multi-religious world. This article reports on the evaluation of the FCG program’s social inclusion and inter-cultural literacy objectives. As a co-curricular program, FCG offers a safe space for students to discuss their religious faith, or alternative value base, and to learn from those of others. Research findings on two iterations of the program indicated that creating safe spaces, respectful dialogue and eliciting personal narratives supported the development of inter-cultural literacy in participants and encouraged participation of minority student voices. We examine this informal learning process, exploring possibilities that might affirm more inclusive practices in higher education and cross-culturally informed graduate outcomes.
Do Singing Rock Hyraxes Exploit Conspecific Calls to Gain Attention?

Signal detection theory predicts that signals directed at distant or busy receivers in noisy backgrounds will begin with an alert component, in order to draw attention. Instead of an alert component, however, animals could get the same effect by using an external stimulus. Here we combined observations of free-living rock hyraxes (Procavia capensis) with playback experiments to elucidate the circumstances under which males begin singing. We show that males sing following hyrax pup screams, which elicit a strong response from hyraxes within hearing distance, which are potential receivers. We hypothesize that singers enhance their singing display by exploiting the rarely emitted pup screams. To our knowledge, our findings are the first indication that animals may enhance signal reception by exploiting conspecifics' signals and the differential attention to these signals. We suggest that the utilization of external stimuli by signalers may be widespread, as an adaptive strategy for communication in complex environments.
Kidney Transplantation From Donors with Hepatitis B

The growing demand for organ donors to supply the increasing number of patients on kidney waiting lists has led most transplant centers to develop protocols that allow safe use of organs from donors with special clinical situations previously regarded as contraindications. Deceased donors with previous hepatitis B may be a safe resource to increase the donor pool even if there is still controversy among transplantation centers regarding the use of hepatitis B surface antigen-positive donors for renal transplantation. However, when allocated to serology-matched recipients, kidney transplantation from donors with hepatitis B may result in excellent short-term outcome. Many concerns may arise in the long-term outcome, and studies must address the evaluation of the progression of liver disease and the rate of reactivation of liver disease in the recipients. Accurate selection and matching of both donor and recipient and correct post-transplant management are needed to achieve satisfactory long-term outcomes.
Background and interpretation of the ‘Marine Trophic Index’ as a measure of biodiversity

Since the demonstration, in 1998, of the phenomenon now widely known as ‘fishing down marine food webs’, and the publication of a critical rejoinder by Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) staff, a number of studies have been conducted in different parts of the world, based on more detailed data than the global FAO fisheries statistics originally used, which established the validity and ubiquity of this phenomenon. In this contribution, we briefly review how, rather than being an artefact of biased data, this phenomenon was in fact largely masked by such data, and is in fact more widespread than was initially anticipated. This is made visible here by comparing two global maps of trophic level (TL) changes from the early 1950s to the present. The first presents the 50-year difference of the grand mean TL values originally used to demonstrate the fishing down effect, while the second is based on means above a cut-off TL (here set at 3.25), thus eliminating the highly variable and abundant small pelagic fishes caught throughout the world. Based on this, we suggest that using mean TL as ‘Marine Trophic Index’ (MTI), as endorsed by the Convention on Biological Diversity , always be done with an explicitly stated cut-off TL (i.e. cutMTI), chosen (as is the case with our proposed value of 3.25) to emphasize changes in the relative abundance of the more threatened, high-TL fishes. We also point out the need to improve the taxonomic resolution, completeness and accuracy of the national and international fisheries catch data series upon which the cutMTI is to be based.
Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics of the Proton Pump Inhibitors

Proton pump inhibitor (PPI) is a prodrug which is activated by acid. Activated PPI binds covalently to the gastric H+, K+-ATPase via disulfide bond. Cys813 is the primary site responsible for the inhibition of acid pump enzyme, where PPIs bind. Omeprazole was the first PPI introduced in market, followed by pantoprazole, lansoprazole and rabeprazole. Though these PPIs share the core structures benzimidazole and pyridine, their pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics are a little different. Several factors must be considered in understanding the pharmacodynamics of PPIs, including: accumulation of PPI in the parietal cell, the proportion of the pump enzyme located at the canaliculus, de novo synthesis of new pump enzyme, metabolism of PPI, amounts of covalent binding of PPI in the parietal cell, and the stability of PPI binding. PPIs have about 1hour of elimination half-life. Area under the plasmic concentration curve and the intragastric pH profile are very good indicators for evaluating PPI efficacy. Though CYP2C19 and CYP3A4 polymorphism are major components of PPI metabolism, the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of racemic mixture of PPIs depend on the CYP2C19 genotype status. S-omeprazole is relatively insensitive to CYP2C19, so better control of the intragastric pH is achieved. Similarly, R-lansoprazole was developed in order to increase the drug activity. Delayed-release formulation resulted in a longer duration of effective concentration of R-lansoprazole in blood, in addition to metabolic advantage. Thus, dexlansoprazole showed best control of the intragastric pH among the present PPIs. Overall, PPIs made significant progress in the management of acid-related diseases and improved health-related quality of life.
Is it all about religious faith? Exploring the value of contemporary pilgrimage among senior travelers

ABSTRACT This study explores the values of pilgrimage exhibited by senior travelers in Taiwan. We identify and explore both spiritual and social values by applying means-end chain theory and the laddering technique. This study investigates the hierarchical relationship among pilgrimage attributes, the consequences that senior pilgrims obtained, and the satisfaction of personal values as an ultimate goal. The clear links are found among attributes, consequences, and values with social interactions that are acquired by keeping in touch with friends, followed by spiritual succor and support that connects with supporting temples, praying, and vow redemption. These findings provide novel insights into pilgrimage literature.
Analytical Modeling and Experimental Validation of the Braided Pneumatic Muscle

Static models of braided pneumatic muscles (BPMs) reported in the research literature fairly accurately predict the muscle-force-carrying capacity. These models, however, rely on experimentally determined parameters that are valid only for the specific muscle configuration under consideration. This paper presents a fully analytical BPM static model that does not depend on experimentally determined parameters. The proposed approach is based on Newtonian mechanics that considers the mechanical and the geometrical properties of the muscle. Distinctively, this paper includes the muscle end-fixture-diameter effect. Results from the developed model are compared with the experimental ones that have been obtained from prototype BPMs.
On the bits per joule optimization in cellular cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radio has emerged as a promising paradigm to improve the spectrum usage efficiency and to cope with the spectrum scarcity problem through dynamically detecting and re-allocating white spaces in licensed radio band to unlicensed users. However, cognitive radio may cause extra energy consumption because it relies on new and extra technologies and algorithms. The main objective of this work is to enhance the energy efficiency of proposed cellular cognitive radio network (CRN), which is defined as bits/Joule/Hz. In this paper, a typical frame structure of a secondary user (SU) is considered, which consists of sensing and data transmission slots. We analyze and derive the expression for energy efficiency for the proposed CRN as a function of sensing and data transmission duration. The optimal frame structure for maximum bits per joule is investigated under practical network traffic environments. he impact of optimal sensing time and frame length on the achievable energy efficiency, throughput and interference are investigated and verified by simulation results compared with relevant state of art. Our analytical results are in perfect agreement with the empirical results and provide useful insights on how to select sensing length and frame length subject to network environment and required network performance.
Modeling Event Importance for Ranking Daily News Events

We deal with the problem of ranking news events on a daily basis for large news corpora, an essential building block for news aggregation. News ranking has been addressed in the literature before but with individual news articles as the unit of ranking. However, estimating event importance accurately requires models to quantify current day event importance as well as its significance in the historical context. Consequently, in this paper we show that a cluster of news articles representing an event is a better unit of ranking as it provides an improved estimation of popularity, source diversity and authority cues. In addition, events facilitate quantifying their historical significance by linking them with long-running topics and recent chain of events. Our main contribution in this paper is to provide effective models for improved news event ranking. To this end, we propose novel event mining and feature generation approaches for improving estimates of event importance. Finally, we conduct extensive evaluation of our approaches on two large real-world news corpora each of which span for more than a year with a large volume of up to tens of thousands of daily news articles. Our evaluations are large-scale and based on a clean human curated ground-truth from Wikipedia Current Events Portal. Experimental comparison with a state-of-the-art news ranking technique based on language models demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.
The Rational Expectations Hypothesis of the Term Structure, Monetary Policy, and Time-Varying Term Premia

Most empirical studies of the rational expectations hypothesis of the term structure find that the data offer little support for the theory. This observation has led some investigators to search for alternative “irrational” theories of behavior in order to explain the data. The authors, on the other hand, find that a model that incorporates Federal Reserve behavior and a reasonable parameterization of term premia is consistent with empirical results.
Genome-Wide Survey and Analysis of Microsatellite Sequences in Bovid Species

Microsatellites or simple sequence repeats (SSRs) have become the most popular source of genetic markers, which are ubiquitously distributed in many eukaryotic and prokaryotic genomes. This is the first study examining and comparing SSRs in completely sequenced genomes of the Bovidae. We analyzed and compared the number of SSRs, relative abundance, relative density, guanine-cytosine (GC) content and proportion of SSRs in six taxonomically different bovid species: Bos taurus, Bubalus bubalis, Bos mutus, Ovis aries, Capra hircus, and Pantholops hodgsonii. Our analysis revealed that, based on our search criteria, the total number of perfect SSRs found ranged from 663,079 to 806,907 and covered from 0.44% to 0.48% of the bovid genomes. Relative abundance and density of SSRs in these Bovinae genomes were non-significantly correlated with genome size (Pearson, r < 0.420, p > 0.05). Perfect mononucleotide SSRs were the most abundant, followed by the pattern: perfect di- > tri- > penta- > tetra- > hexanucleotide SSRs. Generally, the number of SSRs, relative abundance, and relative density of SSRs decreased as the motif repeat length increased in each species of Bovidae. The most GC-content was in trinucleotide SSRs and the least was in the mononucleotide SSRs in the six bovid genomes. The GC-contents of tri- and pentanucleotide SSRs showed a great deal of similarity among different chromosomes of B. taurus, O. aries, and C. hircus. SSR number of all chromosomes in the B. taurus, O.aries, and C. hircus is closely positively correlated with chromosome sequence size (Pearson, r > 0.980, p < 0.01) and significantly negatively correlated with GC-content (Pearson, r < -0.638, p < 0.01). Relative abundance and density of SSRs in all chromosomes of the three species were significantly negatively correlated with GC-content (Pearson, r < -0.333, P < 0.05) but not significantly correlated with chromosome sequence size (Pearson, r < -0.185, P > 0.05). Relative abundances of the same nucleotide SSR type showed great similarity among different chromosomes of B. taurus, O. aries, and C. hircus.
Induction of Neurite Outgrowth in PC12 Cells Treated with Temperature-Controlled Repeated Thermal Stimulation

To promote the functional restoration of the nervous system following injury, it is necessary to provide optimal extracellular signals that can induce neuronal regenerative activities, particularly neurite formation. This study aimed to examine the regulation of neuritogenesis by temperature-controlled repeated thermal stimulation (TRTS) in rat PC12 pheochromocytoma cells, which can be induced by neurotrophic factors to differentiate into neuron-like cells with elongated neurites. A heating plate was used to apply thermal stimulation, and the correlation of culture medium temperature with varying surface temperature of the heating plate was monitored. Plated PC12 cells were exposed to TRTS at two different temperatures via heating plate (preset surface temperature of the heating plate, 39.5°C or 42°C) in growth or differentiating medium for up to 18 h per day. We then measured the extent of growth, neuritogenesis, or acetylcholine esterase (AChE) activity (a neuronal marker). To analyze the mechanisms underlying the effects of TRTS on these cells, we examined changes in intracellular signaling using the following: tropomyosin-related kinase A inhibitor GW441756; p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) inhibitor SB203580; and MAPK/extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) kinase (MEK) inhibitor U0126 with its inactive analog, U0124, as a control. While a TRTS of 39.5°C did not decrease the growth rate of cells in the cell growth assay, it did increase the number of neurite-bearing PC12 cells and AChE activity without the addition of other neuritogenesis inducers. Furthermore, U0126, and SB203580, but not U0124 and GW441756, considerably inhibited TRTS-induced neuritogenesis. These results suggest that TRTS can induce neuritogenesis and that participation of both the ERK1/2 and p38 MAPK signaling pathways is required for TRTS-dependent neuritogenesis in PC12 cells. Thus, TRTS may be an effective technique for regenerative neuromedicine.
Utterance preparation and Stress Clash : Planning prosodic alternations

Abstract: Models of speech planning and production allow for the prosodic structure of an utterance to be only partially built when the utterance is produced. Previous studies have found evidence that higher-level prosodic units exert a stronger influence in relatively prepared speech compared to unprepared speech. A related issue is whether prosodic alternations are likewise influenced by preparation. This chapter reviews phonological and phonetic treatments of a clash-driven prosodic alternation known as the "rhythm rule", and reports on a preliminary analysis of an experimental study. The experiment tested the hypothesis that the extent to which an utterance has been prepared will affect the magnitude of prominence reduction that typically occurs in the rhythm rule. Durational decreases due to clash were observed only in prepared utterances; in unprepared speech clash unexpectedly resulted in an increase in segmental durations. These results suggest that variation due to prosodic alternations is substantially influenced by the extent to which an utterance has been prepared, and hence provide a new direction for exploration of the interaction between prosody and time-constraints on planning.
Oriented Thin Films of a Benzodithiophene Covalent Organic Framework

A mesoporous electron-donor covalent organic framework based on a benzodithiophene core, BDT-COF, was obtained through condensation of a benzodithiophene-containing diboronic acid and hexahydroxytriphenylene (HHTP). BDT-COF is a highly porous, crystalline, and thermally stable material, which can be handled in air. Highly porous, crystalline oriented thin BDT-COF films were synthesized from solution on different polycrystalline surfaces, indicating the generality of the synthetic strategy. The favorable orientation, crystallinity, porosity, and the growth mode of the thin BDT-COF films were studied by means of X-ray diffraction (XRD), 2D grazing incidence diffraction (GID), transmission and scanning electron microscopy (TEM, SEM), and krypton sorption. The highly porous thin BDT-COF films were infiltrated with soluble fullerene derivatives, such as [6,6]-phenyl C61 butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM), to obtain an interpenetrated electron-donor/acceptor host–guest system. Light-induced charge transfer from the BDT-framework to PCBM acceptor molecules was indicated by efficient photoluminescence quenching. Moreover, we monitored the dynamics of photogenerated hole-polarons via transient absorption spectroscopy. This work represents a combined study of the structural and optical properties of highly oriented mesoporous thin COF films serving as host for the generation of periodic interpenetrated electron-donor and electron-acceptor systems.
A New Approach to Change Vector Analysis Using Distance and Similarity Measures

The need to monitor the Earth’s surface over a range of spatial and temporal scales is fundamental in ecosystems planning and management. Change-Vector Analysis (CVA) is a bi-temporal method of change detection that considers the magnitude and direction of change vector. However, many multispectral applications do not make use of the direction component. The procedure most used to calculate the direction component using multiband data is the direction cosine, but the number of output direction cosine images is equal to the number of original bands and has a complex interpretation. This paper proposes a new approach to calculate the spectral direction of change, using the Spectral Angle Mapper and Spectral Correlation Mapper spectral-similarity measures. The chief advantage of this approach is that it generates a single image of change information insensitive to illumination variation. In this paper the magnitude component of the spectral similarity was calculated in two ways: as the standard Euclidean distance and as the Mahalanobis distance. In this test the best magnitude measure was the Euclidean distance and the best similarity measure was Spectral Angle Mapper. The results show that the distance and similarity measures are complementary and need to be applied together.
Physiological and proteomic approaches to address the active role of ozone in kiwifruit post-harvest ripening

Post-harvest ozone application has recently been shown to inhibit the onset of senescence symptoms on fleshy fruit and vegetables; however, the exact mechanism of action is yet unknown. To characterize the impact of ozone on the post-harvest performance of kiwifruit (Actinidia deliciosa cv. ‘Hayward’), fruits were cold stored (0 °C, 95% relative humidity) in a commercial ethylene-free room for 1, 3, or 5 months in the absence (control) or presence of ozone (0.3 μl l−1) and subsequently were allowed to ripen at a higher temperature (20 °C), herein defined as the shelf-life period, for up to 12 days. Ozone blocked ethylene production, delayed ripening, and stimulated antioxidant and anti-radical activities of fruits. Proteomic analysis using 1D-SDS-PAGE and mass spectrometry identified 102 kiwifruit proteins during ripening, which are mainly involved in energy, protein metabolism, defence, and cell structure. Ripening induced protein carbonylation in kiwifruit but this effect was depressed by ozone. A set of candidate kiwifruit proteins that are sensitive to carbonylation was also discovered. Overall, the present data indicate that ozone improved kiwifruit post-harvest behaviour, thus providing a first step towards understanding the active role of this molecule in fruit ripening.