Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Limited Population Structure, Genetic Drift and Bottlenecks Characterise an Endangered Bird Species in a Dynamic, Fire-Prone Ecosystem

Fire is a major disturbance process in many ecosystems world-wide, resulting in spatially and temporally dynamic landscapes. For populations occupying such environments, fire-induced landscape change is likely to influence population processes, and genetic patterns and structure among populations. The Mallee Emu-wren Stipiturus mallee is an endangered passerine whose global distribution is confined to fire-prone, semi-arid mallee shrublands in south-eastern Australia. This species, with poor capacity for dispersal, has undergone a precipitous reduction in distribution and numbers in recent decades. We used genetic analyses of 11 length-variable, nuclear loci to examine population structure and processes within this species, across its global range. Populations of the Mallee Emu-wren exhibited a low to moderate level of genetic diversity, and evidence of bottlenecks and genetic drift. Bayesian clustering methods revealed weak genetic population structure across the species' range. The direct effects of large fires, together with associated changes in the spatial and temporal patterns of suitable habitat, have the potential to cause population bottlenecks, serial local extinctions and subsequent recolonisation, all of which may interact to erode and homogenise genetic diversity in this species. Movement among temporally and spatially shifting habitat, appears to maintain long-term genetic connectivity. A plausible explanation for the observed genetic patterns is that, following extensive fires, recolonisation exceeds in-situ survival as the primary driver of population recovery in this species. These findings suggest that dynamic, fire-dominated landscapes can drive genetic homogenisation of populations of species with low-mobility and specialised habitat that otherwise would be expected to show strongly structured populations. Such effects must be considered when formulating management actions to conserve species in fire-prone systems.
Fast loop-closure detection using visual-word-vectors from image sequences

In this paper, a novel pipeline for loop-closure detection is proposed. We base our work on a bag of binary feature words and we produce a description vector capable of characterizing a physical scene as a whole. Instead of relying on single camera measurements, the robot’s trajectory is dynamically segmented into image sequences according to its content. The visual word occurrences from each sequence are then combined to create sequence-visual-word-vectors and provide additional information to the matching functionality. In this way, scenes with considerable visual differences are firstly discarded, while the respective image-to-image associations are provided subsequently. With the purpose of further enhancing the system’s performance, a novel temporal consistency filter (trained offline) is also introduced to advance matches that persist over time. Evaluation results prove that the presented method compares favorably with other state-of-the-art techniques, while our algorithm is tested on a tablet device, verifying the computational efficiency of the approach.
Distributed Cycle Detection and Removal

In this paper, we provide distributed algorithms to detect and remove cycles in a directed relational graph by exploiting the underlying undirected communication graph; the relational graph models a relation among the agents, e.g., a pairwise ordering, while the communication graph captures how information can be shared among them. Specifically, we provide a synchronous distributed algorithm to detect cycles in the relational graph, by exploiting the fact that nodes with zero in-degree or zero out-degree can not be part of a cycle, and can be iteratively removed without creating new loops in the relational topology. The proposed algorithm considerably improves transmission efficiency (the number of messages and bandwidth required) compared to the state of the art. We demonstrate that the problem of making the relational graph acyclic by swapping the orientation of a minimum number of edges is NP-Complete and APX-Hard; for this reason, we develop an efficient, yet suboptimal, distributed algorithm to remove the cycles by swapping the direction of some of the links. The methodology provided in this paper finds application in several distributed control problems where the agents must be interconnected via a directed acyclic graph, such as cluster consensus, formation control or multiple leader election. Extensive numerical analysis emphasizes the effectiveness of the proposed solution with respect to the state of the art.
WHO Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region: A Systematic Review on Environmental Noise and Cognition

This systematic review assesses the quality of the evidence across individual studies on the effect of environmental noise (road traffic, aircraft, and train and railway noise) on cognition. Quantitative non-experimental studies of the association between environmental noise exposure on child and adult cognitive performance published up to June 2015 were reviewed: no limit was placed on the start date for the search. A total of 34 papers were identified, all of which were of child populations. 82% of the papers were of cross-sectional design, with fewer studies of longitudinal or intervention design. A range of cognitive outcomes were examined. The quality of the evidence across the studies for each individual noise source and cognitive outcome was assessed using an adaptation of GRADE methodology. This review found, given the predominance of cross-sectional studies, that the quality of the evidence across studies ranged from being of moderate quality for an effect for some outcomes, e.g., aircraft noise effects on reading comprehension and on long-term memory, to no effect for other outcomes such as attention and executive function and for some noise sources such as road traffic noise and railway noise. The GRADE evaluation of low quality evidence across studies for some cognitive domains and for some noise sources does not necessarily mean that there are no effects: rather, that more robust and a greater number of studies are required.
The Assessment of Bone Regulatory Pathways, Bone Turnover, and Bone Mineral Density in Vegetarian and Omnivorous Children

Vegetarian diets contain many beneficial properties as well as carry a risk of inadequate intakes of several nutrients important to bone health. The aim of the study was to evaluate serum levels of bone metabolism markers and to analyze the relationships between biochemical bone markers and anthropometric parameters in children on vegetarian and omnivorous diets. The study included 70 prepubertal children on a lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet and 60 omnivorous children. Body composition, bone mineral content (BMC), and bone mineral density (BMD) were assessed by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. Biochemical markers—bone alkaline phosphatase (BALP), C-terminal telopeptide of type I collagen (CTX-I), osteoprotegerin (OPG), nuclear factor κB ligand (RANKL), sclerostin, and Dickkopf-related protein 1 (Dkk-1)—were measured using immunoenzymatic assays. In vegetarians, we observed a significantly higher level of BALP (p = 0.002) and CTX-I (p = 0.027), and slightly lower spine BMC (p = 0.067) and BMD (p = 0.060) than in omnivores. Concentrations of OPG, RANKL, sclerostin, and Dkk-1 were comparable in both groups of children. We found that CTX-I was positively correlated with BMC, total BMD, and lumbar spine BMD in vegetarians, but not in omnivores. A well-planned vegetarian diet with proper dairy and egg intake does not lead to significantly lower bone mass; however, children following a lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet had a higher rate of bone turnover and subtle changes in bone regulatory markers. CTX-I might be an important marker for the protection of vegetarians from bone abnormalities.
Increased Release of Mercury from Dental Amalgam Fillings due to Maternal Exposure to Electromagnetic Fields as a Possible Mechanism for the High Rates of Autism in the Offspring: Introducing a Hypothesis

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), factors such as growing electricity demand, ever-advancing technologies and changes in social behaviour have led to steadily increasing exposure to man-made electromagnetic fields. Dental amalgam fillings are among the major sources of exposure to elemental mercury vapour in the general population. Although it was previously believed that low levels are mercury (i.g. release of mercury from dental amalgam) is not hazardous, now numerous data indicate that even very low doses of mercury cause toxicity. There are some evidence indicating that perinatal exposure to mercury is significantly associated with an increased risk of developmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Furthermore, mercury can decrease the levels of neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, noreprenephrine, and acetylcholine in the brain and cause neurological problems. On the other hand, a strong positive correlation between maternal and cord blood mercury levels is found in some studies. We have previously shown that exposure to MRI or microwave radiation emitted by common mobile phones can lead to increased release of mercury from dental amalgam fillings. Moreover, when we investigated the effects of MRI machines with stronger magnetic fields, our previous findings were confirmed. As a strong association between exposure to electromagnetic fields and mercury level has been found in our previous studies, our findings can lead us to this conclusion that maternal exposure to electromagnetic fields in mothers with dental amalgam fillings may cause elevated levels of mercury and trigger the increase in autism rates. Further studies are needed to have a better understanding of the possible role of the increased mercury level after exposure to electromagnetic fields and the rate of autism spectrum disorders in the offspring.
Quantification of precipitates in advanced creep resistant 9-12% Cr steels

In this paper a procedure is introduced for the quantification of precipitates appearing in 9-12%Cr-steels. Results gained from conventional transmission electron microscopic (TEM) investigations are compared with results from energy filtering transmission electron microscopic (EFTEM) investigations. The study was performed on a creep rupture specimen of the cast material G-X12CrMoWVNbN10-1-1 exposed at 600°C and ruptured after 33000 h. The size distribution of M23C6 carbides, MX phase and Laves phase were measured for both the un-stressed head and the stressed shank (gauge length) part of the investigated specimen. In particular, problems and sources of uncertainty concerning the quantitative determination of particle parameters in this type of steel are discussed. It is shown that quantification of the MX-particles by means of TEM bright field images is hardly possible. The size distributions of M23C6 carbides and MX phase overlap significantly which makes a separation based only on their size nearly impossible. Only Laves phase occupies a different size range. The difference between the size distributions of head and shank is pronounced only for M23C6 carbides. The measured particle distributions obey more closely a log-normal distribution rather than a normal distribution.
Barriers to Breastfeeding for US Physicians Who Are Mothers

Barriers to Breastfeeding for US Physicians Who Are Mothers The benefits of breastfeeding for both women and infants are well established.1 Despite recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Health Organization, initiating and sustaining lactation remains a challenge for many women.2 Although 79% of mothers in the United States initiate breastfeeding, only 27% are still breastfeeding at 12 months postpartum.3 Physicians who are mothers face substantial challenges that may undermine efforts to sustain lactation after they return to work. Elsewhere, we demonstrated that the career satisfaction of physicians who are mothers was negatively affected by the short duration of maternity leave, associated financial losses, and inflexible work schedules.4-6 Given the paucity of data on lactation practices among physicians who are mothers, the aim of this studywastousealargerepresentativenationwidecohorttoevaluate the barriers to breastfeeding for physicians who are mothers.
Prevalence and Correlates of Cyberbullying Perpetration. Findings from a German Representative Student Survey

Based on a survey of 9512 ninth-grade students conducted in Lower Saxony in 2013, this paper examines the prevalence of cyberbullying perpetration and the correlates of this behavior. Binary logistic multilevel regression was used in order to analyze correlates of sexual and psychological cyberbully perpetration. In the preceding semester, 2.4% of the adolescents were perpetrators of psychological cyberbullying and 0.4% bullied someone online sexually. Low levels of empathy, frequent consumption of violent media, and being victims of aggressive online behaviors are correlated with the risk that a child will become a bully. Female adolescents are less likely than boys to engage in sexual cyberbullying perpetration, but they are more likely to engage in psychological cyberbullying perpetration. Only a small share of adolescents engage in sexual and psychological cyberbullying perpetration. Both behaviors differ in their correlates, however being a victim of aggressive online behaviors increase the risk for perpetration of both behaviors, respectively.
QTL Mapping of Fiber Quality and Yield-Related Traits in an Intra-Specific Upland Cotton Using Genotype by Sequencing (GBS)

Fiber quality and yield improvement are crucial for cotton domestication and breeding. With the transformation in spinning techniques and multiplicity needs, the development of cotton fiber quality and yield is of great importance. A genetic map of 5178 Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) markers were generated using 277 F2:3 population, from an intra-specific cross between two upland cotton accessions, CCRI35 a high fiber quality as female and Nan Dan Ba Di Da Hua (NH), with good yield properties as male parent. The map spanned 4768.098 cM with an average distance of 0.92 cM. A total of 110 Quantitative Traits Loci (QTLs) were identified for 11 traits, but only 30 QTLs were consistent in at least two environments. The highest percentage of phenotypic variance explained by a single QTL was 15.45%. Two major cluster regions were found, cluster 1 (chromosome17-D03) and cluster 2 (chromosome26-D12). Five candidate genes were identified in the two QTL cluster regions. Based on GO functional annotation, all the genes were highly correlated with fiber development, with functions such as protein kinase and phosphorylation. The five genes were associated with various fiber traits as follows: Gh_D03G0889 linked to qFM-D03_cb, Gh_D12G0093, Gh_D12G0410, Gh_D12G0435 associated with qFS-D12_cb and Gh_D12G0969 linked to qFY-D12_cb. Further structural annotation and fine mapping is needed to determine the specific role played by the five identified genes in fiber quality and yield related pathway.
Dynamic-Structured Semantic Propagation Network

Semantic concept hierarchy is still under-explored for semantic segmentation due to the inefficiency and complicated optimization of incorporating structural inference into dense prediction. This lack of modeling semantic correlations also makes prior works must tune highly-specified models for each task due to the label discrepancy across datasets. It severely limits the generalization capability of segmentation models for open set concept vocabulary and annotation utilization. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic-Structured Semantic Propagation Network (DSSPN) that builds a semantic neuron graph by explicitly incorporating the semantic concept hierarchy into network construction. Each neuron represents the instantiated module for recognizing a specific type of entity such as a super-class (e.g. food) or a specific concept (e.g. pizza). During training, DSSPN performs the dynamic-structured neuron computation graph by only activating a sub-graph of neurons for each image in a principled way. A dense semantic-enhanced neural block is proposed to propagate the learned knowledge of all ancestor neurons into each fine-grained child neuron for feature evolving. Another merit of such semantic explainable structure is the ability of learning a unified model concurrently on diverse datasets by selectively activating different neuron sub-graphs for each annotation at each step. Extensive experiments on four public semantic segmentation datasets (i.e. ADE20K, COCO-Stuff, Cityscape and Mapillary) demonstrate the superiority of our DSSPN over state-of-the-art segmentation models. Moreoever, we demonstrate a universal segmentation model that is jointly trained on diverse datasets can surpass the performance of the common fine-tuning scheme for exploiting multiple domain knowledge.
A Collaborative Neurodynamic Approach to Multiple-Objective Distributed Optimization

This paper is concerned with multiple-objective distributed optimization. Based on objective weighting and decision space decomposition, a collaborative neurodynamic approach to multiobjective distributed optimization is presented. In the approach, a system of collaborative neural networks is developed to search for Pareto optimal solutions, where each neural network is associated with one objective function and given constraints. Sufficient conditions are derived for ascertaining the convergence to a Pareto optimal solution of the collaborative neurodynamic system. In addition, it is proved that each connected subsystem can generate a Pareto optimal solution when the communication topology is disconnected. Then, a switching-topology-based method is proposed to compute multiple Pareto optimal solutions for discretized approximation of Pareto front. Finally, simulation results are discussed to substantiate the performance of the collaborative neurodynamic approach. A portfolio selection application is also given.
Review of Plonaphacarus (Acari: Oribatida: Steganacaridae), with descriptions of eight new species from China

The oribatid mite genus Plonaphacarus Niedbala, 1986 (Steganacaridae) is reviewed. Ten species of Plonaphacarus including eight new species, P. bicarinatus sp. nov., P. concavus sp. nov., P. cristatus sp. nov., P. foveolatus sp. nov., P. hainanensis sp. nov., P. lanceolatus sp. nov., P. protrusus sp. nov. and P. rotundus sp. nov., and one newly recorded species from China are identified. A checklist of all known species and a key to Chinese known species of this genus are provided.
Prophet Secretary for Combinatorial Auctions and Matroids

The secretary and the prophet inequality problems are central to the field of Stopping Theory. Recently, there has been a lot of work in generalizing these models to multiple items because of their applications in mechanism design. The most important of these generalizations are to matroids and to combinatorial auctions (extends bipartite matching). Kleinberg-Weinberg \cite{KW-STOC12} and Feldman et al. \cite{feldman2015combinatorial} show that for adversarial arrival order of random variables the optimal prophet inequalities give a $1/2$-approximation. For many settings, however, it's conceivable that the arrival order is chosen uniformly at random, akin to the secretary problem. For such a random arrival model, we improve upon the $1/2$-approximation and obtain $(1-1/e)$-approximation prophet inequalities for both matroids and combinatorial auctions. This also gives improvements to the results of Yan \cite{yan2011mechanism} and Esfandiari et al. \cite{esfandiari2015prophet} who worked in the special cases where we can fully control the arrival order or when there is only a single item. Our techniques are threshold based. We convert our discrete problem into a continuous setting and then give a generic template on how to dynamically adjust these thresholds to lower bound the expected total welfare.
High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) as salvage therapy for radio-recurrent prostate cancer: predictors of disease response

ABSTRACT Background Some men with localized radio-recurrent prostate cancer may benefit from salvage high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU). Herein, we describe oncologic outcomes and predictors of disease response after salvage whole gland HIFU from our prospective cohort. Materials and Methods Patients with localized radio-recurrent prostate cancer were prospectively enrolled from January 2005 to December 2014. Participants had to meet both biochemical and histological definitions of recurrence. Exclusion criteria included the receipt of prior salvage therapy, presence of metastatic disease, and administration of ADT in the 6-months prior to enrollment. Participants were treated with a single session of whole-gland HIFU ablation with the AblathermTM device (EDAP, France). The primary endpoint was recurrence-free survival (RFS), defined as a composite endpoint of PSA progression (Phoenix criteria), receipt of any further salvage therapy, receipt of ADT, clinical progression, or death. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis was used to determine the primary end-point and stratifications were used to determine the significance of 6 pre-specified predictors of improved RFS (TRUS biopsy grade, number of study entry TRUS biopsy cores positive, palpable disease at study enrollment, pre-HIFU PSA, an undetectable post-HIFU PSA nadir, and receipt of prior hormone therapy). Survival analysis was performed on participants with a minimum of 1-year follow-up. Results Twenty-four participants were eligible for study inclusion with a median follow-up of 31.0 months. Median PSA at study entry was 4.02ng/ml. Median time to PSA nadir was 3 months after treatment and median post-HIFU PSA nadir was 0.04ng/ml. Median 2-year and 5-year RFS was 66.3% and 51.6% respectively. Of our 6 prespecified predictors, an undetectable PSA nadir was the only significant predictor of improved RFS (HR 0.07, 95% CI 0.02-0.29, log-rank P<0.001). One participant underwent an intervention for a urethral stricture. No participants developed osteitis pubis or rectourethral fistulae. Conclusions Salvage HIFU allows for disease control in selected patients with localized radio-recurrent prostate cancer. An undetectable PSA nadir serves as an early predictor of disease response.
Protection against herpes simplex virus-induced eye disease after vaccination with seven individually expressed herpes simplex virus 1 glycoproteins.

PURPOSE To compare the efficacy of each of seven expressed herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) glycoproteins as vaccines to protect against ocular disease after primary ocular HSV-1 infection. METHODS Mice were vaccinated three times with equal amounts of each of seven individually expressed HSV-1 glycoproteins (gB, gC, gD, gE, gG, gH, and gI) and then ocularly challenged with McKrae, a corneal disease-producing strain of HSV-1. Viral clearance from the eye, blepharitis, keratitis, and neovascularization were determined at various times after infection. RESULTS Mice vaccinated with gD or gB had the best protection against eye disease. Vaccination with gI, gC, or gE produced moderate protection against eye disease. Vaccination with gG produced less protection, and vaccination with gH produced no apparent protection against eye disease. CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that when used as vaccines, different HSV-1 glycoproteins provide different levels of protection against HSV-1-induced eye disease. Based on comparison with the authors' previously published results, the ability of each glycoprotein to protect against eye disease correlated with the ability of the glycoprotein to induce high serum neutralizing antibody titers and killer cell activity. Results suggest that the effectiveness of these seven glycoproteins in protecting against eye disease can be ranked as follows: gD > gB > gI > (gC = gE) > gG > gH.