Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SIMONI (Smart Integrated Monitoring) as a novel bioanalytical strategy for water quality assessment: Part II–field feasibility survey

Because it is impossible to chemically analyze all relevant micropollutants, the implementation of bioanalytical tools is essential to estimate ecological risks of chemical mixtures in regular water‐monitoring programs. The first tier of the Smart Integrated Monitoring (SIMONI) strategy, which was described in part I, is based on the combination of passive sampling and bioanalytical measurements. Bioassay responses are compared with effect‐based trigger values (EBT), and an overall SIMONI score on all bioassay data was designed to indicate environmental risks. The present study is focused on analyzing the feasibility of the hazard identification tier by evaluating results of 45 field campaigns at sites with different pollution profiles near the city of Amsterdam. A Daphnia assay was performed in situ, while silicon rubber or polar organic chemical integrative sampler (POCIS) extracts were tested with 4 nonspecific (daphnids, algae, bacteria, and cell culture) and 10 specific (9 Chemical Activated Luciferase Gene Expression [CALUX] assays and antibiotics scan) bioassays. Sensitivity analyses demonstrated the relevance of 2 classification variables in the SIMONI score formula on all bioanalytical data. The model indicated increased risks for the ecosystem at surface waters in greenhouse areas and undiluted wastewater‐treatment plant (WWTP) effluents. The choice of testing specific bioassays on either polar or nonpolar passive sampling extracts is cost‐effective and still provided meaningful insights on micropollutant risks. Statistical analyses revealed that the model provides a relevant overall impact assessment based on bioassay responses. Data analyses on the chemically determined mixture toxic pressure and bioanalytical methods provided similar insights in relative risk ranking of water bodies. The SIMONI combination of passive sampling and bioanalytical testing appears to be a feasible strategy to identify chemical hazards. Environ Toxicol Chem 2017;36:2400–2416. © 2017 SETAC
Effect of Diets Supplemented with Bacterial Culture (Lactobacillus bulgaricus + Lactococcus lactis lactis) on the Performances, Haemato-Biochemical Parameters and Carcass Characteristics of Broiler Chicken

The effect of three levels of probiotic bacterial culture (Lactobacillus bulgaricus + Lactococcus lactis lactis) was studied in 240, day-old Ven Cobb broiler chicks. Chicks were randomly allocated to three groups (4 replicates per group; 10 chicks per replicate) following randomized block design. The starter (0-14 day) diets contained 23% CP and 2978 kcal ME/kg feed. Grower’s (14 -28 day) diet contained 22.5% CP and 3141 kcal ME/kg while finisher’s (28-42 day) diet contained 20.10% CP and 3241 kcal ME/kg feed. Treatment T1 was control (basal diet without probiotic and E-Care-Se) and T2 and T3. Treatment were supplemented with probiotic bacterial culture: Lactobacillus bulgaricus + Lactococcus lactis lactis @ 2.7 × 105 + 2.7 × 105 and 5.4 × 105 + 5.4 × 105 CFU / g feed, respectively. Significant (p<0.05) reduction in DM intake and FCR in T3 was observed. In spite of lower intake of DMI and FCR from T2 to T3 showed significant (p<0.05)) increase in body weight gain, calcium and phosphorus balances and efficiency of utilization of protein and energy for gained biomass in broilers. The nonsignificantly higher increased in weight of different cuts of carcass were measured in broilers of T3. With regards to the hemato-biochemical profile there was significant (p<0.05) increased in the number of lymphocytes and HDL and significantly (p<0.05) decreases in the total serum cholesterol in the broilers of T3 decreased. The higher performances and immunological responses (p<0.05) were noticed the in broilers treatment T3 supplemented with 5.4×10 5CFU/g+5.4x105CFU/g bacterial culture of Lactobacillus bulgaricus + lactococcus lactis lactis.
Gas Wettability of Coal and Implications for Gas Desorption and Drainage

A key parameter affecting the flow of gas in coal is the wetting potential of gas, in comparision to water, to spread over the wall of coal micropores and microfissures. Wettability is quantified in terms of the contact angle of the fluid interface with the solid surface. A fluid with a small angle of contact would spread over the pore walls and eventually displace the non-wetting fluid. Depending on the nature of the coal, gas type and environmental conditions in coal reservoirs, either water or the gas phase could wet coal more strongly. Furthermore, in mixed gas conditions, one gas may be more strongly attached to coal than the other gases. In water-saturated coal, gas desorption in small pores -where most adsorbed gas is stored can be totally inhibited by water if it is a strong wetting phase. Reducing the hydraulic head (drawdown to achieve the gas desorption pressure) should allow desorption of gas in larger fractures, whereas in small pores, gas desorption could be inhibited by capillary pressure due to the effect of interfacial tension and gas-wetting properties of coal. In this study, we built a new system to quantify the wettability of coal by gas. The contact angle of the water-gas interface with the coal surface inside the gas phase was measured using a captive gas bubble technique. The contact angles of CH4 and CO2 bubbles in water with a coal from the Sydney Basin were measured at different gas-water pressures of up to 15 MPa for CH4 and 6.1 MPa for CO2. The results show that as gas bubbles dissolve in water, the contact angle of the bubble with the coal surface reduces. The contact angle values were smaller for CO2 gas than CH4, and in general, the contact angle value decreases as gas–water pressure increases.
The gesture recognition technology based on IMU sensor for personal active spinning

Recently, as the desire for sustaining good health, has increased, spinning exercise to increase the exercise effect in a short time is getting the spotlight. In this paper, we developed a gesture recognition technology which enables busy persons to enjoy spinning exercise at any time and at any place they want using easy to carry wearable device. The proposed scheme provides a training system which collects real time data from an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) sensor attached to wrist and head of sports participants and analyzes the accuracy of spinning exercise using the decision tree-based classification scheme. For the validation of the spinning gesture recognition technology, we analyzed the performance of the proposal algorithm by applying it to the interactive gaming content platform. The results shows that the proposed the proposed technology can help users to enjoy correct spinning exercise program.
Double Pile-Up Resonance Energy Harvesting Circuit for Piezoelectric and Thermoelectric Materials

This paper presents a double pile-up resonance energy harvesting circuit that efficiently and simultaneously extracts energy from a piezoelectric transducer (PZT) and a thermoelectric generator. The proposed harvester operates in a double pile-up mode (DPM) to efficiently extract energy from PZT with the enhanced damping force, resulting in a 1452% improvement in power extraction, which is the best performance among the state-of-the-art works. The harvester also operates in a boost converter mode (BCM) without an additional power switch, achieving 75% conversion efficiency at 450-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{W}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> output power. With a single-shared inductor, a simple control scheme enables the harvester to operate in both DPM and BCM by time-multiplexing method, consuming a low quiescent current of 240 nA. The prototype chip fabricated in a 0.18-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> BCD occupies an area of 1.5 mm <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> 1 mm, and it was tested with a 20-nF PZT product (PPA-1001) vibrated by a shaker (Type 4810).
The miR‐139‐5p regulates proliferation of supratentorial paediatric low‐grade gliomas by targeting the PI3K/AKT/mTORC1 signalling

Paediatric low‐grade gliomas (pLGGs) are a heterogeneous group of brain tumours associated with a high overall survival: however, they are prone to recur and supratentorial lesions are difficult to resect, being associated with high percentage of disease recurrence. Our aim was to shed light on the biology of pLGGs.
A Molecular Basis for the Presentation of Phosphorylated Peptides by HLA-B Antigens*

As aberrant protein phosphorylation is a hallmark of tumor cells, the display of tumor-specific phosphopeptides by Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) class I molecules can be exploited in the treatment of cancer by T-cell-based immunotherapy. Yet, the characterization and prediction of HLA-I phospholigands is challenging as the molecular determinants of the presentation of such post-translationally modified peptides are not fully understood. Here, we employed a peptidomic workflow to identify 256 unique phosphorylated ligands associated with HLA-B*40, -B*27, -B*39, or -B*07. Remarkably, these phosphopeptides showed similar molecular features. Besides the specific anchor motifs imposed by the binding groove of each allotype, the predominance of phosphorylation at peptide position 4 (P4) became strikingly evident, as was the enrichment of basic residues at P1. To determine the structural basis of this observation, we carried out a series of peptide binding assays and solved the crystal structures of HLA-B*40 in complex with a phosphorylated ligand or its nonphosphorylated counterpart. Overall, our data provide a clear explanation to the common motif found in the phosphopeptidomes associated to different HLA-B molecules. The high prevalence of phosphorylation at P4 is dictated by the presence of the conserved residue Arg62 in the heavy chain, a structural feature shared by most HLA-B alleles. In contrast, the preference for basic residues at P1 is allotype-dependent and might be linked to the structure of the A pocket. This molecular understanding of the presentation of phosphopeptides by HLA-B molecules provides a base for the improved prediction and identification of phosphorylated neo-antigens, as potentially used for cancer immunotherapy.
Stereotypes and Prejudice Affect the Recognition of Emotional Body Postures

Most research on emotion recognition focuses on facial expressions. However, people communicate emotional information through bodily cues as well. Prior research on facial expressions has demonstrated that emotion recognition is modulated by top-down processes. Here, we tested whether this top-down modulation generalizes to the recognition of emotions from body postures. We report three studies demonstrating that stereotypes and prejudice about men and women may affect how fast people classify various emotional body postures. Our results suggest that gender cues activate gender associations, which affect the recognition of emotions from body postures in a top-down fashion.
Mining advisor-advisee relationships from research publication networks

Information network contains abundant knowledge about relationships among people or entities. Unfortunately, such kind of knowledge is often hidden in a network where different kinds of relationships are not explicitly categorized. For example, in a research publication network, the advisor-advisee relationships among researchers are hidden in the coauthor network. Discovery of those relationships can benefit many interesting applications such as expert finding and research community analysis. In this paper, we take a computer science bibliographic network as an example, to analyze the roles of authors and to discover the likely advisor-advisee relationships. In particular, we propose a time-constrained probabilistic factor graph model (TPFG), which takes a research publication network as input and models the advisor-advisee relationship mining problem using a jointly likelihood objective function. We further design an efficient learning algorithm to optimize the objective function. Based on that our model suggests and ranks probable advisors for every author. Experimental results show that the proposed approach infer advisor-advisee relationships efficiently and achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy (80-90%). We also apply the discovered advisor-advisee relationships to bole search, a specific expert finding task and empirical study shows that the search performance can be effectively improved (+4.09% by NDCG@5).
Modeling the Interaction of Carbon Monoxide with Flexible Graphene: From Coupled Cluster Calculations to Molecular-Dynamics Simulations.

The interaction of CO with graphene was studied at different theoretical levels. Quantum-mechanical calculations on finite graphene models with the use of coronene for coupled cluster calculations and circumcoronene for B97D calculations showed that there was no preferential site for adsorption and that the most important factor was the orientation of CO relative to graphene. The parallel orientation was preferred, with binding energies around 9 kJ mol-1 at the CCSD(T) and B97D levels, which was in good agreement with experimental findings. From a large number of CO-circumcoronene and CO-CO interactions, computed at different distances and randomly generated orientations, parameters were fit to the improved Lennard-Jones potential. Such potentials, together with others describing the intramolecular dynamics of graphene, were subsequently employed in classical molecular-dynamics simulations of the adsorption of CO on graphene by using the canonical ensemble. The obtained results showed that the introduction of flexibility in graphene, which simulated the effects associated to curvature of the surface, diminished the adsorption level and that, as expected, adsorption also diminished with temperature.
PDNet: Prior-Model Guided Depth-Enhanced Network for Salient Object Detection

Fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) have shown outstanding performance in many computer vision tasks including salient object detection. However, there still remains two issues needed to be addressed in deep learning based saliency detection. One is the lack of tremendous amount of annotated data to train a network. The other is the lack of robustness for extracting salient objects in images containing complex scenes. In this paper, we present a new architecture—PDNet, a robust prior-model guided depth-enhanced network for RGB-D salient object detection. In contrast to existing works, in which RGB-D values of image pixels are fed directly to a network, the proposed architecture is composed of a master network for processing RGB values, and a sub-network making full use of depth cues and incorporate depth-based features into the master network. To overcome the limited size of the labeled RGB-D dataset for training, we employ a large conventional RGB dataset to pre-train the master network, which proves to contribute largely to the final accuracy. Extensive evaluations over five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art approaches.
Taxonomic patterns in the nitrogen assimilation of soil prokaryotes

Nitrogen (N) is frequently a limiting nutrient in soil; its availability can govern ecosystem functions such as primary production and decomposition. Assimilation of N by microorganisms impacts the availability of N in soil. Despite its established ecological significance, the contributions of microbial taxa to N assimilation are unknown. Here we measure N uptake and use by microbial phylotypes and taxonomic groups within a diverse assemblage of soil microbes through quantitative stable isotope probing (qSIP) with 15 N. Following incubation with 15 NH4+, distinct patterns of 15 N assimilation among taxonomic groups were observed. For instance, glucose addition stimulated 15 N assimilation in most members of Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria but generally decreased 15 N use by Firmicutes and Bacteriodetes. While NH4+ is considered a preferred and universal source of N to prokaryotes, the majority (> 80%) of N assimilation in our soils could be attributed to a handful of active orders. Characterizing N assimilation of taxonomic groups with 15 N qSIP may provide a basis for understanding how microbial community composition influences N availability in the environment.
Pneumo-Encephalographic and Computerized Axial Tomography Scan Changes in Affective Disorder

Summary The pneumo-encephalographs and computerized axial tomography scans of fifty patients with severe affective disorder were studied. Measures of ventricular size were compared with those reported by other workers. Findings suggested that some patients suffering from severe affective illness showed abnormalities of brain structure as demonstrated by ventricular enlargement.
A linked land-sea modeling framework to inform ridge-to-reef management in high oceanic islands

Declining natural resources have led to a cultural renaissance across the Pacific that seeks to revive customary ridge-to-reef management approaches to protect freshwater and restore abundant coral reef fisheries. Effective ridge-to-reef management requires improved understanding of land-sea linkages and decision-support tools to simultaneously evaluate the effects of terrestrial and marine drivers on coral reefs, mediated by anthropogenic activities. Although a few applications have linked the effects of land cover to coral reefs, these are too coarse in resolution to inform watershed-scale management for Pacific Islands. To address this gap, we developed a novel linked land-sea modeling framework based on local data, which coupled groundwater and coral reef models at fine spatial resolution, to determine the effects of terrestrial drivers (groundwater and nutrients), mediated by human activities (land cover/use), and marine drivers (waves, geography, and habitat) on coral reefs. We applied this framework in two ‘ridge-to-reef’ systems (Hā‘ena and Ka‘ūpūlehu) subject to different natural disturbance regimes, located in the Hawaiian Archipelago. Our results indicated that coral reefs in Ka‘ūpūlehu are coral-dominated with many grazers and scrapers due to low rainfall and wave power. While coral reefs in Hā‘ena are dominated by crustose coralline algae with many grazers and less scrapers due to high rainfall and wave power. In general, Ka‘ūpūlehu is more vulnerable to land-based nutrients and coral bleaching than Hā‘ena due to high coral cover and limited dilution and mixing from low rainfall and wave power. However, the shallow and wave sheltered back-reef areas of Hā‘ena, which support high coral cover and act as nursery habitat for fishes, are also vulnerable to land-based nutrients and coral bleaching. Anthropogenic sources of nutrients located upstream from these vulnerable areas are relevant locations for nutrient mitigation, such as cesspool upgrades. In this study, we located coral reefs vulnerable to land-based nutrients and linked them to priority areas to manage sources of human-derived nutrients, thereby demonstrating how this framework can inform place-based ridge-to-reef management.
PCMT1 is an unfavorable predictor and functions as an oncogene in bladder cancer

The role of protein l‐isoaspartate (d‐aspartate) O‐methyltransferase (PCMT1) in human cancer was generally cognized. The clinical significance and biological function of PCMT1 in bladder cancer is still unknown. PCMT1 mRNA and protein expression levels in bladder cancer tissues and cell lines were detected by qRT‐PCR, immunohistochemistry, or western blot. The correlation between PCMT1 expression and clinicopathological factors was analyzed through immunohistochemistry in 108 bladder cancer patients. Loss‐of‐function and gain‐of‐function studies were conducted to explore the biological function of PCMT1 in bladder cancer cell lines in regulating cell proliferation, migration, and invasion. In our results, we found that PCMT1 was overexpressed in bladder cancer tissues compared with normal urothelium tissues in microarray datasets (GSE3167). Then, we confirmed PCMT1 mRNA and protein expression were increased in bladder cancer tissues and cell lines compared with paired normal urothelium tissues and normal uroepithelial cell line. PCMT1 protein expression was obviously correlated with clinical stage, muscularis invasion, lymph node metastasis, and distant metastasis. Survival analysis showed that PCMT1 protein high‐expression was an independent unfavorable prognostic factor for bladder cancer patients. The in vitro experiments showed PCMT1 regulated bladder cancer cells migration and invasion through modulating epithelial‐mesenchymal transition (EMT)‐associated genes expression including E‐cadherin, vimentin, Snail and Slug, but had no effect on proliferation. In conclusion, PCMT1 is an unfavorable prognostic biomarker and involves in cells migration and invasion through regulating EMT‐associated genes. © 2018 IUBMB Life, 70(4):291–299, 2018
Affective Associations as Predictors of Health Behavior in Urban Minority Youth

Objective: Affective associations are key predictors of health-relevant action that can mediate the relationships between cognitive variables and health behavior. Little data, however, has examined affective associations in high-risk groups, the individuals with the greatest need for intervention. Further, few studies have examined the unique predictive ability of positive and negative affective associations. Methods: The present study assessed positive affective associations, negative affective associations, cognitive beliefs, subjective norms, and reports of 4 obesity-related behaviors (physical activity, fruit consumption, vegetable consumption, and soft drink consumption) across a cross-sectional (n = 1,499) and a longitudinal sample (n = 104) of predominantly African American adolescents of low socioeconomic status from the inner city of urban Detroit. Results: In both samples, positive (not negative) affective associations were the strongest and most consistent predictor of health behavior. Analyses also suggested that positive affective associations mediate the relationships between cognitive beliefs, subjective norms, and health behavior. Interaction tests revealed no evidence that the link between positive affective associations and health behavior is moderated by negative affective associations, cognitive beliefs, subjective norms, sex, or age. Conclusions: The results are consistent with affective association research and support the development of health interventions for urban minority youth aimed at changing positive (rather than negative) affective associations. The consistency across behaviors and the lack of reliable interactive effects suggests that changing positive affective associations may benefit urban youth regardless of behavior domain, age, sex, negative affective associations, subjective norm, and cognitive beliefs.