Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Supplementary Artificial Light on Growth of the Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) in a Chinese Solar Greenhouse

Light is one of the most limiting factors affecting plant growth in greenhouses. Recently, supplementary artificial light has been widely used in greenhouse production in winter or on overcast days when solar radiation is weak. However, plant responses to supplementary artificial light in a Chinese Solar Greenhouse (CSG) and the economic feasibility of the lighting strategy are poorly understood. The tomato, one of the most widely produced and consumed vegetables in the world, was tested in this study. A CSG was divided into three sections, and three treatments were arranged. They were top lighting with HPS lamps (TL), TL plus interlighting with LEDs (TL+IL), and control treatment without artificial light, respectively. We showed that supplementary artificial light improved the uniformity of light distribution from the south to north end of the CSG, and increased the average greenhouse temperature by ~1–1.4°C. Tomato yield was increased by 21.8% and 32.9% in TL and TL+IL, respectively, compared with that of the control. The higher yield under supplementary artificial light resulted from a larger number of ripe fruits rather than bigger fruit size. Moreover, fruit quality was improved by supplementary artificial light as indicated by a higher total soluble sugar content. There were no significant differences in total biomass production or total soluble sugar content in leaves, as well as fruits, between TL and TL+IL treatments, but TL+IL further stimulated fruit maturation compared with TL. Although supplementary artificial light confers an advantage in terms of tomato growth, it is not economically feasible as 28.8 kWh electricity was required to increase the tomato yield by 1 kg in the CSG. Therefore, it is important to find solutions to increase the efficiency of supplementary artificial light in the CSG.
Evolving therapies for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis

Introduction: Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most common liver disease in the world. Approved therapies for this disorder, however, are still lacking. In the last decade, pathophysiological insights into this disease have been tremendous. Various aspects, such as insulin resistance, innate immunity, metabolic inflammation and the microbiota, have been characterized as major players. Indeed, at least 1 in 10 sufferers will have the disease escalate toward its inflammatory phenotype, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). These pathways currently represent the most attractive treatment targets. Furthermore, interference with insulin resistance has shown some efficacy in the past, although more focused therapies, which also act anti-inflammatory, are needed. Areas covered: In this review, the authors highlight the current most promising treatment strategies in NASH/NAFLD. Expert opinion: Treatment of NAFLD is still in its infancy, although large controlled studies have demonstrated some efficacy for pioglitazone or vitamin E. The natural course of this disease demands long-term treatments besides diet and lifestyle changes. Based on the current view of NAFLD pathophysiology, effective therapies have to target metabolic inflammation, glucose and lipid metabolism. The search for agents interfering with all of these pathways has recently generated promising candidates for the treatment of NAFLD such as farnesoid X receptor, peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-α/δ agonists or AdipoR small-molecule agonists.
On the Comparative Performance Analysis of Turbo-Coded Non-Ideal Sigle-Carrier and Multi-Carrier Waveforms over Wideband Vogler-Hoffmeyer HF Channels

The purpose of this paper is to compare the turbo-coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and turbo-coded Single Carrier Frequency Domain Equalization (SC-FDE) systems under the effects of Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO), Symbol Timing Offset (STO) and phase noise in wide-band Vogler-Hoffmeyer HF channel model. In mobile communication systems multipath propagation occurs. Therefore channel estimation and equalization is additionally necessary. Furthermore a nonideal local oscillator generally is misaligned with the operating frequency at the receiver. This causes carrier frequency offset. Hence in coded SC-FDE and coded OFDM systems; a very efficient, low complex frequency domain channel estimation and equalization is implemented in this paper. Also Cyclic Prefix (CP) based synchronization synchronizes the clock and carrier frequency offset. The simulations show that non-ideal turbo-coded OFDM has better performance with greater diversity than non-ideal turbo-coded SC-FDE system in HF channel.
Multiple Conformations of Phosphodiesterase-5

Phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE5) is the target for sildenafil, vardenafil, and tadalafil, which are drugs for treatment of erectile dysfunction and pulmonary hypertension. We report here the crystal structures of a fully active catalytic domain of unliganded PDE5A1 and its complexes with sildenafil or icarisid II. These structures together with the PDE5A1-isobutyl-1-methylxanthine complex show that the H-loop (residues 660-683) at the active site of PDE5A1 has four different conformations and migrates 7-35Å upon inhibitor binding. In addition, the conformation of sildenafil reported herein differs significantly from those in the previous structures of chimerically hybridized or almost inactive PDE5. Mutagenesis and kinetic analyses confirm that the H-loop is particularly important for substrate recognition and that invariant Gly659, which immediately precedes the H-loop, is critical for optimal substrate affinity and catalytic activity.
Constructing an Environment and Providing a Performance Assessment of Android ’ s Dalvik Virtual Machine on x 86 and ARM

Android is one of the most popular operating systems (OS) for mobile touch screen devices, including smart-phones and tablet computers. Dalvik is a process virtual machine (VM) that provides an abstraction layer over the Android OS, and runs the Java-based Android applications. The first goal of this project is to construct a development environment for conveniently investigating the properties of Android’s Dalvik VM on contemporary x86 and ARM architectures. The normal development environment restricts the Dalvik VM to run on top of Android, and requires an updated Android image to be built and installed on the target device after any change to the Dalvik code. This update-build-install process unnecessarily slows down any Dalvik VM exploration. We have now discovered a configuration that enables us to study the Dalvik VM as a stand-alone application on top of the Linux OS on x86 machines. The second goal of this project is to understand the translation/compilation sub-system in the Dalvik VM, experiment with various modifications to determine the best translation parameters, and compare the Dalvik VM’s just-in-time (JIT) compilation characteristics (such as quality of code generated and compilation time) on the x86 and ARM systems with a state-of-the-art Java VM. As expected, we find that JIT compilation is able to significantly improve application performance over basic interpretation. Comparing Dalvik’s generated code quality with the Java HotSpot VM, we observe that Dalvik’s ARM target is a much more mature compared to Dalvik-x86. Therefore, Dalvik’s simple tracebased compilation generates code quality that is much worse than HotSpot on the x86, but achieves better performance on ARM. Finally, our experiments also reveal effective JIT compilation parameters for the Dalvik VM, and their effect on benchmark performance and memory usage.
Finite-Size Corrections of the $\mathbb{CP}^3$ Giant Magnons: the L\"{u}scher terms

We compute classical and first quantum finite-size corrections to the recently found giant magnon solutions in two different subspaces of $\mathbb{CP}^3$. We use the L\"{u}scher approach on the recently proposed exact S-matrix for $\mathcal{N}=6$ superconformal Chern-Simons theory. We compare our results with the string and algebraic curve computations and find agreement, thus providing a non-trivial test for the new $AdS_4/CFT_3$ correspondence within an integrability framework.
Evolutionary Calculations of Phase Separation in Crystallizing White Dwarf Stars

We present an exploration of the significance of carbon/oxygen phase separation in white dwarf stars in the context of self-consistent evolutionary calculations. Because phase separation can potentially increase the calculated ages of the oldest white dwarfs, it can affect the age of the Galactic disk as derived from the downturn in the white dwarf luminosity function. We find that the largest possible increase in ages due to phase separation is ~1.5 Gyr, with a most likely value of approximately 0.6 Gyr, depending on the parameters of our white dwarf models. The most important factors influencing the size of this delay are the total stellar mass, the initial composition profile, and the phase diagram assumed for crystallization. We find a maximum age delay in models with masses of ~0.6 M☉, which is near the peak in the observed white dwarf mass distribution. In addition, we note that the prescription that we have adopted for the mixing during crystallization provides an upper bound for the efficiency of this process, and hence a maximum for the age delays. More realistic treatments of the mixing process may reduce the size of this effect. We find that varying the opacities (via the metallicity) has little effect on the calculated age delays. In the context of Galactic evolution, age estimates for the oldest Galactic globular clusters range from 11.5 to 16 Gyr and depend on a variety of parameters. In addition, a 4-6 Gyr delay is expected between the formation of the globular clusters and the formation of the Galactic thin disk, while the observed white dwarf luminosity function gives an age estimate for the thin disk of 9.5 Gyr, without including the effect of phase separation. Using the above numbers, we see that phase separation could add between 0 and 3 Gyr to the white dwarf ages and still be consistent with the overall picture of Galaxy formation. Our calculated maximum value of ≲1.5 Gyr fits within these bounds, as does our best-guess value of ~0.6 Gyr.
Stable isotopes, hypsodonty, and the paleodiet of Hemiauchenia (Mammalia: Camelidae): a morphological specialization creating ecological generalization

Abstract Morphological adaptations may indicate increased specialization (narrowing of ecological niche) or expansion of the suite of lifestyles available to an organism (increasing niche breadth). Hypsodonty in mammals generally has been interpreted as a specialization into a grazing niche from a browsing niche. Here I examine the feeding strategy of the extinct hypsodont camel Hemiauchenia through an analysis of stable carbon isotope values from its tooth enamel, which was used to clarify its feeding strategy and to resolve conflicting interpretations of dental versus muzzle attributes. The paleodiet of Hemiauchenia is then used to test whether hypsodonty correlates to grazing within fossil Lamini. This study focuses on fossils from Florida, which is geographically ideal because unlike other regions of the country almost all extant plants on which animals browse use the C3 photosynthetic pathway. In contrast, most of the grasses and sedges utilized by grazers use the C4 photosynthetic pathway. If Hemiauchenia was an obligate grazer, the stable carbon isotope values of tooth enamel should reflect primarily a diet of C4 grass and sedge (>−1.3‰). If Hemiauchenia was mainly a browser, the isotopic value should be considerably more negative reflecting ingestion primarily of C3 browse (<−7.9‰). The mean δ13C values for Hemiauchenia during each time interval average more negative than −8.0‰, indicating a dominantly C3 browse diet, and there is no evidence for abandonment of the browsing niche from the Hemphillian through the Rancholabrean North American Land Mammal Ages. However, an increase in the range of isotopic values indicates a diet with a higher proportion of C4 grasses and sedges through time. This study therefore suggests that Hemiauchenia was a hypsodont intermediate feeder with preference for browse during the past 5 million years. Hypsodonty is not strictly associated with obligate grazing; instead it may, in this case, represent an adaptation to widen niche breadth that allowed grazing as well as browsing.
A comprehensive global genotype–phenotype database for rare diseases

The ability to discover genetic variants in a patient runs far ahead of the ability to interpret them. Databases with accurate descriptions of the causal relationship between the variants and the phenotype are valuable since these are critical tools in clinical genetic diagnostics. Here, we introduce a comprehensive and global genotype–phenotype database focusing on rare diseases.
In vitro ultraviolet–induced damage in human corneal, lens, and retinal pigment epithelial cells

Purpose The purpose was to develop suitable in vitro methods to detect ocular epithelial cell damage when exposed to UV radiation, in an effort to evaluate UV-absorbing ophthalmic biomaterials. Methods Human corneal epithelial cells (HCEC), lens epithelial cells (HLEC), and retinal pigment epithelial cells (ARPE-19) were cultured and Ultraviolet A/Ultraviolet B (UVA/UVB) blocking filters and UVB-only blocking filters were placed between the cells and a UV light source. Cells were irradiated with UV radiations at various energy levels with and without filter protections. Cell viability after exposure was determined using the metabolic dye alamarBlue and by evaluating for changes in the nuclei, mitochondria, membrane permeability, and cell membranes of the cells using the fluorescent dyes Hoechst 33342, rhodamine 123, calcein AM, ethidium homodimer-1, and annexin V. High-resolution images of the cells were taken with a Zeiss 510 confocal laser scanning microscope. Results The alamarBlue assay results of UV-exposed cells without filters showed energy level-dependent decreases in cellular viability. However, UV treated cells with 400 nm LP filter protection showed the equivalent viability to untreated control cells at all energy levels. Also, UV irradiated cells with 320 nm LP filter showed lower cell viability than the unexposed control cells, yet higher viability than UV-exposed cells without filters in an energy level-dependent manner. The confocal microscopy results also showed that UV radiation can cause significant dose-dependent degradations of nuclei and mitochondria in ocular cells. The annexin V staining also showed an increased number of apoptotic cells after UV irradiation. Conclusions The findings suggest that UV-induced HCEC, HLEC, and ARPE-19 cell damage can be evaluated by bioassays that measure changes in the cell nuclei, mitochondria, cell membranes, and cell metabolism, and these assay methods provide a valuable in vitro model for evaluating the effectiveness of UV-absorbing ophthalmic biomaterials, including contact lenses and intraocular lenses.
PFO: A ParallelFriendly High Performance System for Online Query and Update of Nearest Neighbors

Nearest Neighbor(s) search is the fundamental computational primitive to tackle massive dataset. Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) has been a bracing tool for Nearest Neighbor(s) search in high dimensional spaces. However, traditional LSH systems cannot be applied in online big data systems to handle a large volume of query/update requests, because most of the systems optimize the query efficiency with the assumption of infrequent updates and missing the parallel-friendly design. As a result, the state-of-the-art LSH systems cannot adapt the system response to the user behavior interactively. In this paper, we propose a new LSH system called PFO. It handles query/update requests in RAM and scales the system capacity by using flash memory. To achieve high streaming data throughput, PFO adopts a parallel-friendly indexing structure while preserving the distance between data points. Further, it accommodates inbound data in real-time and dispatches update requests intelligently to eliminate the cross-threads synchronization. We carried out extensive evaluations with large synthetic and standard benchmark datasets. Results demonstrate that PFO delivers shorter latency and offers scalable capacity compared with the existing LSH systems. PFO serves with higher throughput than the state-of-the-art LSH indexing structure when dealing with online query/update requests to nearest neighbors. Meanwhile, PFO returns neighbors with much better quality, thus being efficient to handle online big data applications, e.g. streaming recommendation system, interactive machine learning systems.
Effect of acute aerobic exercise on vaccine efficacy in older adults.

UNLABELLED The most effective way of avoiding influenza is through influenza vaccination. However, the vaccine is ineffective in about 25% of the older population. Immunosenescence with advancing age results in inadequate protection from disease because of ineffective responses to vaccination. Recently, a number of strategies have been tested to improve the efficacy of a vaccine in older adults. An acute bout of moderate aerobic exercise may increase the efficacy of the vaccine in young individuals, but there are limited efficacy data in older adults who would benefit most. PURPOSE This study sought to evaluate whether acute moderate-intensity endurance exercise immediately before influenza vaccination would increase the efficacy of the vaccine. METHODS Fifty-nine healthy volunteers between 55 and 75 yr of age were randomly allocated to an exercise or control group. Antibody titers were measured at baseline before exercise and 4 wk after vaccination. C-reactive protein (CRP) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) were measured at 24 and 48 h after vaccination. RESULTS Delta CRP and IL-6 at 24 and 48 h were significantly higher after vaccination as compared to the sham injection. There were no differences in the levels of antibody titers against the H3N2 influenza strain between groups. However, women in the exercise group had a significantly higher antibody response against the H1N1 influenza strain as compared to the men, probably because of lower prevaccine titers. There were no significant differences in seroprotection between groups. CONCLUSIONS Acute moderate aerobic exercise was not immunostimulatory in healthy older men but may serve as a vaccine adjuvant in older women.
Explicit Weight Bias Concerns in the Fitness Industry: A Quantitative Analysis

Limited and conflicting research is available regarding weight biases in the fitness industry, yet implications of such biases are pervasive. Individuals in larger bodies often experience stigma and prejudices due to their weight, and anti-fat attitudes have been normalized in the fitness industry and associated educational pipelines. Current literature on weight biases in the fitness industry lacks context and fails to examine these biases from an intersectional lens. Therefore, this study explored how social identities (e.g., age, gender, race, etc.) influence weight biases in fitness professionals. Fitness professionals completed an electronic survey that included demographic questions and measures of weight bias (Anti-Fat Attitudes Test; AFAT) and body dissatisfaction (Contour Drawing Rating Scale). Women in the healthy (2.02 $\pm$ 0.51) and overweight (1.97 $\pm$ 0.49) BMI categories had significantly greater total AFAT scores ($p = .003$ and $p = .023$, respectively) compared to women in the obese BMI category (1.63 $\pm$ 0.48). For participants who had completed some college, those who were classified in the healthy BMI category had significantly greater total AFAT scores (2.05 $\pm$ 0.50) compared to those in the overweight BMI category (1.72 $\pm$ 0.46). For participants who completed a master’s degree, those in the healthy BMI category (2.08 $\pm$ 0.56) and overweight BMI category (2.05 $\pm$ 0.43) had significantly greater total AFAT scores compared to those in the obese BMI category (1.48 $\pm$ 0.46). There was a direct effect of gender, body dissatisfaction, race, and BMI on AFAT subscales. There was also a significant direct effect of body dissatisfaction on AFAT subscales. Across all variables, AFAT scores were highest for the physical subscale (2.69 $\pm$ 0.91) and lowest for the social subscale (1.43 $\pm$ 0.45). Fitness professionals exhibit explicit weight biases, and future research should examine the implications of such biases.
Energy Efficient Power Control for Distributed Transmitters with ZF-Based Multiuser MIMO Precoding

Distributed transmitter (D-TX) system with multiple distributed TXs is considered. To support multiple users, the D-TX system employs a zero-forcing based multiuser multiple-input multiple-output precoding. An energy efficiency (EE) maximization problem is formulated under constraints on {per-user data rate} and per-antenna instantaneous transmit power. The latter constraint is to avoid severe distortion of transmit signals at a power amplifier, i.e., the clipping effects. A low-complexity and performance-effective power control method is then proposed by solving the modification of the original, intractable optimization problem. Transmit antenna selection is elucidated with respect to the EE. Numerical results verify the efficacy of D-TX system employing the proposed EE-aware power control and antenna selection with respect to both system EE and outage performance, and also impart the importance of equal power output capability, i.e., equal maximum output power of the distributed TXs, for energy efficient D-TX systems.
Dynamic Provisioning of Multi-tier Internet Applications

Dynamic capacity provisioning is a useful technique for handling the multi-time-scale variations seen in Internet workloads. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic provisioning technique for multitier Internet applications that employs (i) a flexible queuing model to determine how much resources to allocate to each tier of the application, and (ii) a combination of predictive and reactive methods that determine when to provision these resources, both at large and small time scales. Our experiments on a forty-machine Linux-based hosting platform demonstrate the responsiveness of our technique in handling dynamic workloads. In one scenario where a flash crowd caused the workload of a three-tier application to double, our technique was able to double the application capacity within five minutes, thus maintaining response time targets
Coverage Properties of Weibull Prediction Interval Procedures to Contain a Future Number of Failures

Prediction intervals are needed to quantify prediction uncertainty in, for example, warranty prediction and prediction of other kinds of field failures. Naïve prediction intervals (also known as intervals from the “plug-in method”) ignore the uncertainty in parameter estimates. Simulation-based calibration methods can be used to improve the accuracy of prediction interval coverage probabilities. This article investigates the finite-sample coverage probabilities for naive and calibrated prediction interval procedures for the number of future failures, based on the failure-time information obtained before a censoring time. We have designed and conducted a simulation experiment over combinations of factors with levels covering the ranges that are commonly encountered in practical applications. Our results indicate situations where the naïve prediction procedure performs poorly but where properly calibrated procedures do well. The simulation also uncovered exceptional cases, caused by the discreteness of the number of failures being predicted, where even the calibrated procedure can perform poorly.