Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development of a BCI master switch based on single-trial detection of contingent negative variation related potentials

To control the startup/shutdown of a conventional brain-computer interface (BCI) that is always running for daily use, we proposed and developed a new BCI system called a BCI master switch. We designed it with on/off switching functions by detecting the contingent negative variation (CNV) — related potentials. We chose CNV to improve the single-trial discrimination of user intentions to switch because CNV had a high signal-to-noise ratio and needed high concentration for its elicitation. We also applied a support vector machine (SVM) to improve the single-trial detection of CNV-related potentials. As the best parameters of SVM were estimated and applied, the offline evaluation's best performance achieved a CNV detection rate of 99.3% for the intention to switch and 2.1% for the intention not to switch. Remarkably, this performance was achieved from single-trial detection, imaginary response of user's intention without physical reaction, and the data from only one recording electrode. These results suggest that our proposed BCI system might work as a master switch by single-trial detection.
Short-Term Magnetic Field Variations From the Post-depositional Remanence of Lake Sediments

Palaeomagnetic records obtained from lake sediments provide important constraints on geomagnetic field behaviour. Secular variation recorded in sediments is used in global geomagnetic field models, particularly over longer timescales when archaeomagnetic data are sparse. In addition, by matching distinctive secular variation features, lake sediment palaeomagnetic records have proven useful for dating sediments on various time scales. If there is a delay between deposition of the sediment and acquisition of magnetic remanence (usually described as a post-depositional remanent magnetisation, pDRM) the magnetic signal is smoothed and offset in time. This so-called lock-in masks short-term field variations that are of key importance both for geomagnetic field reconstructions and in dating applications. Understanding the nature of lock-in is crucial if such models are to describe correctly the evolution of the field and for making meaningful correlations among records. An accurate age-depth model, accounting for changes in sedimentation rate, is a further prerequisite if high fidelity palaeomagnetic records are to be recovered. Here we present a new method, which takes advantage of the stratigraphic information of sedimentary data and existing geomagnetic field models, to account for both of these unknowns. We apply the new method to two sedimentary records from lakes Kalksjon and Gyltigesjon where 14C wiggle-match dating floating varve chronologies provide an independent test of the method. By using a reference magnetic field model built from thermoremanent magnetisation data, we are able to demonstrate clearly the effect of post-depositional lock-in and obtain an age-depth model consistent with other dating methods. The method has the potential to improve the resolution of sedimentary records of environmental proxies and to increase the fidelity of geomagnetic field models. Furthermore, it is an important step toward fully explaining the acquisition of post-depositional remanence, which is presently poorly understood.
The Safety and Efficacy of Treatment With a 1,927-nm Diode Laser With and Without Topical Hydroquinone for Facial Hyperpigmentation and Melasma in Darker Skin Types

BACKGROUND The nonablative, fractional, 1,927-nm diode laser is theoretically a safe and effective treatment for hyperpigmentation and melasma in darker skin and may potentiate topical cosmeceutical delivery. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the use of a nonablative, fractional, 1,927-nm diode laser with and without topical 2% hydroquinone (HQ) cream for moderate-to-severe facial hyperpigmentation in Fitzpatrick skin Types III–V. METHODS Forty adults underwent 4 laser treatments at 2-week intervals and were randomized to daily application of 2% HQ cream or moisturizer. Follow-ups were conducted 4 and 12 weeks after the final laser treatment. RESULTS Hydroquinone and moisturizer groups demonstrated Mottled Pigmentation Area and Severity Index improvements of approximately 50% at post-treatment Weeks 4 and 12. Blinded investigator–assessed hyperpigmentation and photodamage improved significantly for both the groups at post-treatment Weeks 4 and 12. Subject satisfaction improved significantly in both the groups by post-treatment Week 4. Although investigator-rated Global Aesthetic Improvement Scale scores were significantly better in the HQ group at post-treatment Week 12, satisfaction was higher among those using moisturizer. No adverse events were noted. CONCLUSION The nonablative, fractional, 1,927-nm diode laser produced significant improvement in hyperpigmentation in Fitzpatrick skin Types III–V by 4 weeks, with maintenance of results at 12 weeks after treatment even without HQ.
Power sandbox: power awareness redefined

Many apps benefit from knowing their power consumption and adapting their behaviors on the fly. To offer apps power knowledge at run time, an OS often meters system power and divides it among apps. Since the impacts of concurrent apps on system power are entangled, this approach not only makes it difficult to reason about power but also results in power side channels, a serious vulnerability. To this end, we introduce a new OS principal called power sandbox, which enables one app to observe the fine-grained power consumption of itself running in its vertical slice of the hardware/software stack. The observed power is insulated from the impacts of other apps. Our contribution is a set of lightweight kernel extensions that simultaneously i) enforce the power sandbox boundaries and ii) confine entailed performance loss to the sandboxed apps. Our experiences on two embedded platforms show that power sandboxes simplify reasoning about power, maintain fairness among apps, and minimize power side channels, thus facilitating construction of power-aware apps.
Overcharging and reentrant condensation of thermoresponsive ionic microgels

We investigated the complexation of thermoresponsive anionic poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNiPAM) microgels and cationic ε-polylysine chains. We show that the volume phase transition of the microgels triggers polyion adsorption and gives rise to a thermosensitive microgel overcharging and reentrant condensation.
Effects of antibiotic resistance (AR) and microbiota shifts on Campylobacter jejuni-mediated diseases

Abstract Campylobacter jejuni is an important zoonotic pathogen recently designated a serious antimicrobial resistant (AR) threat. While most patients with C. jejuni experience hemorrhagic colitis, serious autoimmune conditions can follow including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and the acute neuropathy Guillain Barré Syndrome (GBS). This review examines inter-relationships among factors mediating C. jejuni diarrheal versus autoimmune disease especially AR C. jejuni and microbiome shifts. Because both susceptible and AR C. jejuni are acquired from animals or their products, we consider their role in harboring strains. Inter-relationships among factors mediating C. jejuni colonization, diarrheal and autoimmune disease include C. jejuni virulence factors and AR, the enteric microbiome, and host responses. Because AR C. jejuni have been suggested to affect the severity of disease, length of infections and propensity to develop GBS, it is important to understand how these interactions occur when strains are under selection by antimicrobials. More work is needed to elucidate host–pathogen interactions of AR C. jejuni compared with susceptible strains and how AR C. jejuni are maintained and evolve in animal reservoirs and the extent of transmission to humans. These knowledge gaps impair the development of effective strategies to prevent the emergence of AR C. jejuni in reservoir species and human populations.
Oral Bacterial and Fungal Microbiome Impacts Colorectal Carcinogenesis

Host’s physiology is significantly influenced by microbiota colonizing the epithelial surfaces. Complex microbial communities contribute to proper mucosal barrier function, immune response, and prevention of pathogen invasion and have many other crucial functions. The oral cavity and large intestine are distant parts of the digestive tract, both heavily colonized by commensal microbiota. Nevertheless, they feature different proportions of major bacterial and fungal phyla, mostly due to distinct epithelial layers organization and different oxygen levels. A few obligate anaerobic strains inhabiting the oral cavity are involved in the pathogenesis of oral diseases. Interestingly, these microbiota components are also enriched in gut inflammatory and tumor tissue. An altered microbiota composition – dysbiosis – and formation of polymicrobial biofilms seem to play important roles in the development of oral diseases and colorectal cancer. In this review, we describe the differences in composition of commensal microbiota in the oral cavity and large intestine and the mechanisms by which microbiota affect the inflammatory and carcinogenic response of the host.
Predictive Factors of Cochlear Implant Outcomes in the Elderly

Objective: To analyze predictive factors of cochlear implant outcomes and postoperative complications in the elderly. Study Design: Prospective, longitudinal study performed in 10 tertiary referral centers. Methods: Ninety-four patients aged 65-85 years with a profound, postlingual hearing loss were evaluated before implantation, at time of activation, and 6 and 12 months after cochlear implantation. Speech perception and lipreading were measured using disyllabic word recognition in quiet and noise, and lipreading using disyllabic words and sentences. The influence of preoperative factors on speech perception in quiet and noise at 12 months was tested in a multivariate analysis. Complications, presence of tinnitus and of vestibular symptoms were collected at each evaluation. Results: The effect of age was observed only in difficult noisy conditions at SNR 0 dB. Lipreading ability for words and sentences was negatively correlated with speech perception in quiet and noise. Better speech perception scores were observed in patients with shorter duration of hearing deprivation, persistence of residual hearing for the low frequencies, the use of a hearing aid before implantation, the absence of cardiovascular risk factors, and in those with implantation in the right ear. General and surgical complications were very rare, and the percentage of vestibular symptoms remained stable over time. Conclusion:This study demonstrates that cochlear implantation in the elderly is a well-tolerated procedure and an effective method to improve communication ability. Advanced age has a low effect on cochlear implant outcome. Analyses of predictive factors in this population provide a convincing argument to recommend treatment with cochlear implantation as early as possible in elderly patients with confirmed diagnosis of a severe-to-profound hearing loss and with only limited benefit from hearing aid use in one ear.
Peak Load Shifting in the Internet of Energy With Energy Trading Among End-Users

Recent advances in renewable energy generation and the Internet of things (IoT) has urged energy management to enter the era of the Internet of energy (IoE). The IoE adopts a huge number of distributed energy-generating facilities, distributed energy storage facilities, and IoT technologies to implement energy sharing, promote utilization of electrical grids, and maintain safety of electrical grids. Rapid economic and social development makes energy shortage tend to be increasingly serious. Most cases of energy shortage occur during the peak energy load, and hence the previous works focused on shifting peak load to address energy shortage. However, few of these works took the IoE framework into account. Consequently, this work aims to consider the IoE framework to investigate the peak load shifting problem in which end-users in the energy market can adopt their respective energy storage facilities to charge and discharge energy to minimize the total operating costs. In such a problem setting, each end-user can not only be a demander, but also be a supplier in the energy market, so that operating costs are concerned; the energies from both conventional electrical grids and distributed renewable energy sources can be stored in energy storage facilities; real-time price of energy will be applied adequately to affect energy distribution of supply and demand. Simulation results of a case study show that the proposed model can obtain the optimal result and achieve peak load shifting.
Gaia: 3-dimensional census of the Milky Way Galaxy*

Abstract Astrometry from space has unique advantages over ground-based observations: the all-sky coverage, relatively stable, and temperature and gravity invariant, operating environment delivers precision, accuracy and sample volume several orders of magnitude greater than ground-based results. Even more importantly, absolute astrometry is possible. The European Space Agency Cornerstone mission Gaia is delivering that promise. Gaia provides 5-D phase space measurements, 3 spatial coordinates and 2 space motions in the plane of the sky, for a representative sample of the Milky Way’s stellar populations (over 2 billion stars, being ~1% of the stars over 50% of the radius). Full 6-D phase space data are delivered from line-of-sight (radial) velocities for the 300 million brightest stars. These data make substantial contributions to astrophysics and fundamental physics on scales from the Solar System to cosmology. A knowledge revolution is underway.
Response of Gut Microbiota to Metabolite Changes Induced by Endurance Exercise

A few animal studies have shown that wheel running could reverse an unhealthy status by shifting the gut microbial composition, but no investigations have studied the effect of endurance running, such as marathon running, on human gut microbial communities. Since many findings have shown that marathon running immediately causes metabolic changes in blood, urine, muscles and lymph that potentially impact the gut microbiota (GM) within several hours. Here, we investigated whether the GM immediately responds to the enteric changes in amateur half-marathon runners. Alterations in the metabolic profile and microbiota were investigated in fecal samples based on an untargeted metabolomics methodology and 16S rDNA sequencing analysis. A total of 40 fecal metabolites were found significantly changed after finishing a half-marathon race. The most significantly different metabolites were organic acids (the major increased metabolites) and nucleic acid components (the major decreased metabolites). The enteric changes induced by running did not affect the α-diversity of the GM, but the abundances of certain microbiota members were shown to be significantly different before and after running. The family Coriobacteriaceae was identified as a potential biomarker that links exercise with health improvement. Functional prediction showed a significantly activated “Cell motility” function of GM within participants after running. Correlation analysis indicated that the observed differential GM in our study might have been the shared outcome of running and diet. This study provided knowledge regarding the health impacts of marathon running from the perspective of GM for the first time. Our data indicated that long-distance endurance running can immediately cause striking metabolic changes in the gut environment. Gut microbes can rapidly respond to the altered fecal metabolites by adjusting certain bacterial taxa. These findings highlighted the health-promoting benefits of exercise from the perspective of GM.
Overexpression of TRIM 24 is correlated with the progression of human cervical cancer

TRIM24, originally known as intermediary factor 1-alpha, is involved in the development of several cancers. This study aimed to evaluate the expression level and prognostic value of TRIM24 in cervical cancer. In the present study, we showed that the expression of TRIM24 was markedly upregulated in cervical cancer cell lines and cancerous specimens at both transcriptional and translational levels. TRIM24 expression was analyzed in 147 archived cervical cancer specimens using immunohistochemistry, and the correlation between TRIM24 expression and clinicopathological parameters was evaluated. Statistical analysis suggested that TRIM24 expression was significantly correlated with clinical stage and (P=0.007) and lymphatic metastasis (P=0.001). Patients with higher TRIM24 expression had shorter overall (P=0.005) and recurrence-free (P=0.011) survival time. Moreover, we found that silencing TRIM24 by short hairpin RNAi caused an inhibition of cell migration and invasion. Further study indicated that TRIM24 induced cervical cancer cell migration and invasion was through the NF-κB and AKT signaling pathways. In conclusion, TRIM24 is overexpressed in cervical cancer and regulates malignant cell metastasis, which makes TRIM24 a candidate therapeutic target for cervical cancer.
Transportation modes behaviour analysis based on raw GPS dataset

Significant information exists in the global positioning system (GPS) data for understanding behaviours and transport planning. However, fine-grained identification of transportation modes is still required. In this paper, we present a robust framework to identify different means of transportation modes from raw GPS dataset. We make the following contributions: 1) we design an effective trajectory segmentation algorithm to divide raw GPS trajectory into single mode segments based on logical assumptions; 2) we propose several modern features, which are more discriminating than traditional features; 3) we adopt an additional segments expansion procedure by considering the wholeness of trajectory. Experiments prove that our framework achieves a promising accuracy for identifying transportation modes.
Improvement of the Patient Safety Culture in the Primary Health Care Corporation – Qatar

Objectives Primary Health Care Corporation (PHCC) is the public primary health care provider in Qatar. Having a patient safety culture (PSC) is the keystone to enabling a continuous process to improve the quality of services and to reduce errors. The objective of this study was to assess the impact of accreditation, quality improvement trainings, and patient safety (PS) trainings on the improvement of the PSC at the PHCC in Qatar. Methods The Medical Office Survey on Patient Safety Culture from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality was used in 2012 and 2015 to assess the culture of PS and health care quality in the 21 health centers. The results of the two surveys were compared using the χ2 test. A P value of less than 0.05 was considered significant. Results Out of 2689 staff working in the 21 health centers, 1810 (67.3%) completed the survey in 2012, and 2616 (70.0%) of 3735 completed the survey in 2015. The comparison between 2012 and 2015 survey’s results showed a statistically significant improvement for all the 10 dimensions (P < 0.05). Although a statistically significant difference was observed between 2012 and 2015 results for work pressure and pace, three of the four questions of the work pressure and pace dimension presented nonsignificant differences. Conclusions The survey was a good tool to raise awareness on PS and quality issues at PHCC. There is evidence that the implementation of accreditation program, the quality improvement trainings, and PS trainings helped the organization improve its PS culture.
ANALYSIS STUDY OF SINGLE GOLD NANOPARTICLE SYSTEM OF INTERDIGITATED DEVICE ELECTRODES ( IDES ) BY USING ENERGY-DISPERSIVE X-RAY ( EDX )

Rapid identification of viruses has been important implications for medical healthcare. This paper presents an analysis study of a single gold nanoparticle system of Interdigitated Device Electrodes (IDEs) by using Energy-Dispersive X-ray (EDX). The presently available methods of detection are mainly based on rapid immunoassay techniques that require trained manpower and are time consuming and expensive. However a biosensor facilitates a doctor to identify the specific virus quickly and prescribe an appropriate course of treatment. In this study, a nanobiosensor based on gold nanoparticles (GNPs) and oligonucleotide probe was designed for the visual detection of Human Papillomavirus (HPV). A simple and facile method for the depositing of gold nanoparticles (GNPs) colloid was described via a simple deposition method on Interdigitated device electrodes (IDEs). The GNP pattern deposition on IDE was investigated by using an SEM combined with an EDX. The study demonstrates the use 30 nm of gold nanoparticles functionalized with single stranded oligonucleotide (GNPoligo probe) as visual detection probes for rapid and specific detection of HPV. By addition of gold nanoparticles, it enhances the signal and sensitivity of IDE for detection of HPV.
Local SAR Estimation for Human Brain Imaging Using Multi-channel Transceiver Coil at 7 T

Introduction: Parallel transmission technique has been recognized as a potential powerful tool for B1 inhomogeneities compensation at UHF; however, elevated SAR associated with increased main magnetic field strength remains as a major safety concern in its application. As an alternative to the conventionally used numerical model-based electromagnetic simulation method, a B1-based subject-specific local SAR estimation approach for single channel transmission is presented in this study. A series of imaging methods [1-2], which were developed to deal with biological tissues with complex anatomical structures, have been adapted for human brain imaging. The feasibility of present approach was demonstrated in a human subject experiment at 7T using a 16-channel transceiver head coil. Methods: A healthy volunteer who signed an IRB approved consent form was imaged in a 7T scanner (Siemens) equipped with an elliptical 16-channel head transceiver coil [3]. A volume of interest containing 12 contiguous transverse slices was chosen for the study at a spatial resolution of 1.5×1.5×5mm. A series of 16 small flip angle GRE images were acquired with each individual channel transmitting at a time while receiving all together; a long TR, short TE, GRE image was obtained in order to produce a map of proton density (PD) biased j B , 1 ~ , after normalization by the sinus of the excitation flip angle to remove the + 1 ~ B component; a 3D map of the excitation flip angle was obtained with the AFI technique [4]. Based on these data, k B , 1 ~ , PD biased j B , 1 ~ and corresponding relative phase maps were calculated [5-6]. The 2D GRE images (small flip angle) were obtained in 29 mins with ten averages, while the long TR GRE images in 21 mins with one average, and the 3D AFI map in 18 mins with two averages. Based on the empirical observation of approximately symmetric nature of the magnitude of transmit and receive B1 fields [7], the relative PD distribution was extracted first, and j B , 1 ~ can be estimated as discussed in [2]. Then utilizing measured relative phase information, by applying Gauss Law for magnetism and ignoring z B ~