Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ecological strategies shape the insurance potential of biodiversity

Biodiversity is thought to provide insurance for ecosystem functioning under heterogeneous environments; however, such insurance potential is under serious threat following unprecedented loss of biodiversity. One of the key mechanism underlying ecological insurance is that niche differentiation allows asynchronous responses to fluctuating environments, although the role of different ecological strategies (e.g., specialists vs. generalists) has yet to be formally evaluated. We present here a simple experimental study that illustrates how different ecological strategies (i.e., generalists vs. specialists) can shape the biodiversity-insurance relationship. We assembled microcosm of generalists and specialist bacteria over a gradient of salinity and found that, bacterial communities made up of generalists were more productive and more stable over time under environmental fluctuations. We discuss our results in context with simple theoretical predictions and propose future directions for biological insurance theory. We argue that beyond species richness itself, it is essential to incorporate the distribution of ecological strategies across relevant environmental gradients as predictors of the insurance potential of biodiversity in natural ecosystems.
Information leverage in interconnected ecosystems: Overcoming the curse of dimensionality

Harnessing complexity in ecology Ecology concerns the behavior of complex, dynamic, interconnected systems of populations, communities, and ecosystems over time. Yet ecological time series can be relatively short, owing to practical limits on study duration. Ye and Sugihara introduce an analytical approach called multiview embedding, which harnesses the complexity of short, noisy time series that are common in ecology and other disciplines such as economics. Using examples from published data sets, they show how this approach enhances the tractability of complex data from multiple interacting components and offers a way forward in ecological forecasting. Science, this issue p. 922 Multiview embedding uses complexity as an asset for modeling interconnected systems for ecological forecasting. In ecological analysis, complexity has been regarded as an obstacle to overcome. Here we present a straightforward approach for addressing complexity in dynamic interconnected systems. We show that complexity, in the form of multiple interacting components, can actually be an asset for studying natural systems from temporal data. The central idea is that multidimensional time series enable system dynamics to be reconstructed from multiple viewpoints, and these viewpoints can be combined into a single model. We show how our approach, multiview embedding (MVE), can improve forecasts for simulated ecosystems and a mesocosm experiment. By leveraging complexity, MVE is particularly effective for overcoming the limitations of short and noisy time series and should be highly relevant for many areas of science.
INTEGRATED ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN AND OPTIMIZATION OF CONCRETE FLOOR STRUCTURES FOR BUILDINGS

Integrated environmental design represents a new approach integrating material, structural and environmental aspects in one complex design and optimization process. The target goal is reduction of negative environmental impacts, while increasing the structure’s serviceability, durability and reliability throughout its entire expected life. This should be achieved while keeping the cost on reasonable (minimum) level and performance at a feasible (maximum) level. A theoretical and practical approach to environmentbased integrated design and optimization of concrete structures is presented. The concept of integrated design and optimization is shown and proved on the two cases of RC floor structures with lightening fillers from recycled waste plastics. These optimized solutions have been approved by realizations in situ. The analysis showed that using recycled waste plastics and the optimized shape of shell fillers, it was possible to reduce consumption of non-renewable silicate materials, the resulting embodied CO2, SO2 . and primary energy consumption. Moreover, due to the new structural concept the functionality and overall performance quality have been increased.
Five-Aminosalicylic Acid: An Update for the Reappraisal of an Old Drug

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) comprises several conditions with chronic or recurring immune response and inflammation of the gastrointestinal apparatus, of which ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease are the commonest forms. This disease has a significant prevalence and it is of an unknown aethiology. Five-aminosalicylic acid (5-ASA) and its derivatives are among the oldest drugs approved for the treatment of the IBD. In this review we reapprise aspects of 5-ASA mechanism of action, safety, and efficacy that in our opinion make it a valuable drug that can be fruitfully tailored in personalised treatments as a therapeutic option alongside other immune-modifying agents.
TGF beta1 expression and angiogenesis in colorectal cancer tissue.

AIM Transforming growth factor TGF beta1 is involved in a variety of important cellular functions,including cell growth and differentiation, angiogenesis, immune function and extracellular matrix formation. However, the role of TGF beta(1) as an angiogenic factor in colorectal cancer is still unclear. We investigate the relationship between transforming growth factor beta(1) and angiogenesis by analyzing the expression of transforming growth factor TGF beta(1) in colorectal cancer, as well as its association with VEGF and MVD. METHODS The expression of TGF beta(1),VEGF, as well as MVD were detected in 98 colorectal cancer by immunohistochemical staining. The relationship between the TGF beta(1) expression and VEGF expression,MVD was evaluated. To evaluate the effect of TGF beta(1) on the angiogenesis of colorectal cancers. RESULTS Among 98 cases of colorectal cancer,37 were positive for TGF beta(1) 37.8% 36 for VEGF 36.7% respectively. The microvessel counts ranged from 19 to 139.8, with a mean of 48.7(standard deviation,21.8). The expression of TGF beta(1) was correlated significantly with the depth of invasion, stage of disease, lymph node metastasis, VEGF expression and MVD. Patients in T3-T4, stage III-IV and with lymph node metastasis had much higher expression of TGF beta(1) than patients in T1-T2, stage I-II and without lymph node metastasis (P<0.05). The positive expression rate of VEGF(58.3%) in the TGF-beta(1) positive group is higher than that in the TGF-beta(1) negative group(41.7%, P<0.05). Also, the microvessel count (54+/-18) in TGF-beta(1) positive group is significantly higher than that in TGF-beta(1) negative group(46+/-15, P<0.05). The microvessel count in tumors with both TGF-beta(1) and VEGF positive were the highest (58+/-20 36-140, P<0.05). Whereas that in tumors with both TGF-beta(1) and VEGF negative were the lowest (38+/-16, 19-60, P<0.05). CONCLUSION TGF beta(1) might be associated with tumor progression by modulating the angiogenesis in colorectal cancer and TGF beta(1) may be used as a possible biomarker.
THE HURRICANE RAINBAND AND INTENSITY CHANGE EXPERIMENT Observations and Modeling of Hurricanes Katrina, Ophelia, and Rita

The Hurricane Rainband and Intensity Change Experiment (RAINEX) used three P3 aircraft aided by high-resolution numerical modeling and satellite communications to investigate the 2005 Hurricanes Katrina, Ophelia, and Rita. The aim was to increase the understanding of tropical cyclone intensity change by interactions between a tropical cyclone's inner core and rainbands. All three aircraft had dual-Doppler radars, with the Electra Doppler Radar (ELDORA) on board the Naval Research Laboratory's P3 aircraft, providing particularly detailed Doppler radar data. Numerical model forecasts helped plan the aircraft missions, and innovative communications and data transfer in real time allowed the flights to be coordinated from a ground-based operations center. The P3 aircraft released approximately 600 dropsondes in locations targeted for optimal coordination with the Doppler radar data, as guided by the operations center. The storms were observed in all stages of development, from tropical depression to category .
Normotonic cell shrinkage induces apoptosis under extracellular low Cl− conditions in human lymphoid and epithelial cells

Aim: Sustained cell shrinkage is associated with apoptosis. Apoptotic volume decrease, which is known to be induced by release of osmolytes including Cl− ions, may be an essential event for apoptosis induction. Provided any anion channels and/or anion transporters are basally functioning, there is a possibility that imposition of a driving force for Cl− efflux per se results in sustained cell shrinkage and thereby induces apoptotic death. Here, this possibility was tested by reducing the extracellular Cl− concentration.
Immunocytochemical Localization of the GABACReceptor ρ Subunits in the Mammalian Retina

Polyclonal antibodies against the N terminus of the rat ρ1 subunit were generated to study the distribution of GABAC receptors in the mammalian retina. The specificity of the antibodies was tested in Western blots and transfected HEK-293 cells. No cross-reactivity with the GABAA receptor subunits α1–3, β1–3, γ2, δ or with the glycine receptor subunits α1 and β could be detected. In contrast, the ρ1, ρ2, and ρ3 subunits were all recognized by the antibodies. In vertical sections of rat, rabbit, cat, and macaque monkey retinae, strong punctate immunoreactivity was present in the inner plexiform layer. Weaker immunoreactivity was also present in the outer plexiform layer, and cell bodies of bipolar cells were faintly labeled. Double immunostaining of vertical sections and immunostaining of dissociated rat retinae showed the punctate immunofluorescence to colocalize with bipolar cell axon terminals. The puncta possibly represent clustering of the ρ subunits at postsynaptic sites.
Circulating cardiovascular risk factors in obstructive sleep apnoea: data from randomised controlled trials

Background: Obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) is associated with high cardiovascular morbidity and mortality and is an independent risk factor for hypertension. Novel circulating cardiovascular risk markers enabling a more accurate prediction of cardiovascular risk have been identified. Examination of these markers may clarify the increased risk in OSA and contribute to an analysis of the benefits of treatment. Methods: Plasma levels of total cholesterol and triglyceride and activated coagulation factors XIIa and VIIa, factors VII, VIII, XII, fibrinogen, thrombin-antithrombin (TAT), von Willebrand factor antigen (vWFAg), soluble P-selectin (sP-sel), and homocysteine were measured before and after treatment for 1 month with therapeutic or subtherapeutic (control) continuous positive airways pressure (CPAP) in 220 patients with OSA. Results: Levels of activated coagulation factors XIIa, VIIa, TAT and sP-sel were higher in OSA patients at baseline than in unmatched controls, but did not fall with 1 month of therapeutic CPAP treatment. The raised sP-sel levels correlated only with body mass index (p = 0.002). There was a trend towards a significant fall in total cholesterol with therapeutic CPAP (p = 0.06) compared with the control group. In the therapeutic group there was a clinically significant mean fall in total cholesterol of 0.28 mmol/l (95% confidence interval 0.11 to 0.45, p = 0.001) which may reduce cardiovascular risk by about 15%. Conclusion: A number of activated coagulation factors are increased in untreated OSA patients, potentially contributing to vascular risk, but they do not fall with 1 month of CPAP treatment. Nasal CPAP may produce a clinically relevant fall in total cholesterol level, potentially reducing cardiovascular risk, but this needs to be verified in a larger prospective study.
Off-Axis Beam Efficiencies of Parabolic Reflectors Fed by Focal Plane Arrays Comprising Hard Rectangular Waveguides

The efficiencies of off-axis beams of paraboloidal reflector antennas fed by focal plane arrays (FPA) are investigated. The FPA considered here comprises hard rectangular waveguides. The focal plane field, which the FPA samples, is synthesized by physical-optics (PO) integration of the electric currents over the reflector surface caused by the off-axis incident plane wave arriving at that incidence angle of interest. Full mutual coupling analysis has been performed in the FPA sampling, thereby taking into account mutual coupling losses in the arrays. The fields over the tilted elliptical aperture of off-axis beams needed for calculation of the aperture efficiency are obtained by projecting the focal plane fields to this tilted aperture using geometrical optics (GO). Results show that the total efficiency of the FPA-fed reflector decreases with increasing beam angle, and increases with larger number of FPA elements. It is also found that the maximum directive gain of the reflector radiation patterns falls with beam angle.
A Humble Task: Restoring Virtue in an Age of Conflicted Interests

Virtues define how we behave when no one else is watching; accordingly, they serve as a bedrock for professional self-regulation, particularly at the level of the individual physician. From the time of William Osler through the end of the 20th century, physician virtue was viewed as an important safeguard for patients and research participants. However, the Institute of Medicine, Association of American Medical Colleges, and other policy groups—relying on social science data indicating that ethical decisions often result from unconscious and biased processes, particularly in the face of financial conflicts of interest—have increasingly rejected physician virtue as an important safeguard for patients. The authors argue that virtue is still needed in medicine—at least as a supplement to regulatory solutions (such as mandatory disclosures). For example, although rarely treated as a reportable conflict of interest, standard fee-for-service medicine can present motives to prioritize self-interest or institutional interests over patient interests. Because conflicts of interest broadly construed are ubiquitous, physician self-regulation (or professional virtue) is still needed. Therefore, the authors explore three strategies that physicians can adopt to minimize the influence of self-serving biases when making medical business ethics decisions. They further argue that humility must serve as a crowning virtue—not a meek humility but, rather, a courageous willingness to recognize one’s own limitations and one’s need to use “compensating strategies,” such as time-outs and consultation with more objective others, when making decisions in the face of conflicting interests.
Hover Control of a PVTOL Using Nonlinear Regulator Theory

In the last few years, there has been a great deal of interest in the design of control laws to the purpose of achieving trajectory trackdng in nonlinear control systems. The simplest approach to this problem is so-called "inversion-based" control. Here, state feedback is used to modify the internal dynamics of the system so that part of it becomes identical to the system "zero dynamics" (and therefore cancels with the latter and does not contribute to the input-output behavior), while the other part becomes linear and input-output-wise equivalent to a string of r integrators (where r is the relative degree of the system). On the system
Understanding protein dispensability through machine-learning analysis of high-throughput data

MOTIVATION Protein dispensability is fundamental to the understanding of gene function and evolution. Recent advances in generating high-throughput data such as genomic sequence data, protein-protein interaction data, gene-expression data and growth-rate data of mutants allow us to investigate protein dispensability systematically at the genome scale. RESULTS In our studies, protein dispensability is represented as a fitness score that is measured by the growth rate of gene-deletion mutants. By the analyses of high-throughput data in yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, we found that a protein's dispensability had significant correlations with its evolutionary rate and duplication rate, as well as its connectivity in protein-protein interaction network and gene-expression correlation network. Neural network and support vector machine were applied to predict protein dispensability through high-throughput data. Our studies shed some lights on global characteristics of protein dispensability and evolution. AVAILABILITY The original datasets for protein dispensability analysis and prediction, together with related scripts, are available at http://digbio.missouri.edu/~ychen/ProDispen/ CONTACT xudong@missouri.edu.
Fusion of acoustic, linguistic and psycholinguistic features for Speaker Personality Traits recognition

Behavioral analytics is an emerging research area that aims at automatic understanding of human behavior. For the advancement of this research area, we are interested in the problem of learning the personality traits from spoken data. In this study, we investigated the contribution of different types of speech features to the automatic recognition of Speaker Personality Trait (SPT) across diverse speech corpora (broadcast news and spoken conversation). We have extracted acoustic, linguistic, and psycholinguistic features and modeled their combination as input to the classification task. For the classification, we used Sequential Minimal Optimization for Support Vector Machine (SMO) together with Relief feature selection. The present study shows different levels of performance for automatically selected feature sets, and overall improved performance with their combination across diverse corpora.
Optimal Energy-Efficient Power Allocation Scheme with Low Complexity for Distributed Antenna System

In this paper, by maximizing the energy efficiency (EE), an optimal power allocation scheme is developed for downlink distributed antenna system (DAS). Different from conventional optimal power allocation schemes that need iterative calculation, the developed scheme can provide closed-form power allocation and no iteration is required. Based on the definition of EE, the optimized objective function is firstly formulated, and then a computationally efficient algorithm is proposed to obtain the optimal number of active remote antennas and the corresponding power allocation. Using the optimal number, the multidimensional solution for the optimized function is transformed into searching one-dimensional solution. As a result, closed-form expression of power allocation coefficients is attained. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. The scheme can obtain the same EE as the conventional optimal scheme but with lower complexity, and it has more accuracy than the existing low-complexity scheme.
A Continuum of Accretion Burst Behavior in Young Stars Observed by K2

We present 29 likely members of the young ρ Oph or Upper Sco regions of recent star formation that exhibit “accretion burst” type light curves in K2 time series photometry. The bursters were identified by visual examination of their ∼80-day light curves, though all satisfy the flux asymmetry criterion for burst behavior defined by Cody et al. The burst sources represent ≈9% of cluster members with strong infrared excess indicative of circumstellar material. Higher amplitude burster behavior is correlated with larger inner disk infrared excesses, as inferred from WISE color. The burst sources are also outliers in their large Hα emission equivalent widths. No distinction between bursters and non-bursters is seen in stellar properties such as multiplicity or spectral type. The frequency of bursters is similar between the younger, more compact ρ Oph region, and the older, more dispersed Upper Sco region. The bursts exhibit a range of shapes, amplitudes (∼10%–700%), durations (∼1–10 days), repeat timescales (∼3–80 days), and duty cycles (∼10%–100%). Our results provide important input to models of magnetospheric accretion, in particular, by elucidating the properties of accretion-related variability in the low state between major longer duration events such as EX Lup and FU Ori type accretion outbursts. We demonstrate the broad continuum of accretion burst behavior in young stars—extending the phenomenon to lower amplitudes and shorter timescales than traditionally considered in the theory of pre-main sequence accretion history.
Expression of the green fluorescent protein in the oligodendrocyte lineage: A transgenic mouse for developmental and physiological studies

We generated a transgenic mouse expressing the enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) under the control of the 2′‐3′‐cyclic nucleotide 3′‐phosphodiesterase (CNP) promoter. EGFP+ cells were visualized in live tissue throughout embryonic and postnatal development. Immunohistochemical analysis in brain tissue and in sciatic nerve demonstrated that EGFP expression was restricted to cells of the oligodendrocyte and Schwann cell lineages. EGFP was also strongly expressed in “adult” oligodendrocyte progenitors (OPs) and in gray matter oligodendrocytes. Fluorescence‐activated cell sorting allowed high‐yield purification of EGFP+ oligodendrocyte‐lineage cells from transgenic brains. Electrophysiological patch clamp recordings of EGFP+ cells in situ demonstrated that OP cells displayed large outward tetraethylammonium (TEA)‐sensitive K+ currents and very small inward currents, whereas mature oligodendrocytes were characterized by expression of large inward currents and small outward K+ currents. The proliferation rate of EGFP+ cells in developing white matter decreased with the age of the animals and was strongly inhibited by TEA. Oligodendrocyte development and physiology can be studied in live tissue of CNP‐EGFP transgenic mice, which represent a source of pure EGFP+ oligodendrocyte‐lineage cells throughout development. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Ground Improvement of Mekong Delta Soft Clay by Preloading with PVD and Vacuum at A Site in Southern Vietnam *

Soil improvement by preloading with PVD in combination with vacuum is helpful when a considerable load is required to meet the desired rate of settlement in a relative short time. To facilitate the vacuum propagation, vertical drains are usually employed in conjunction. This relatively new ground improvement method is more and more applied in the Mekong delta to meet the needs of fast infrastructure development in this southern part of Vietnam. This paper reports on a pilot test that was carried out to investigate the effect of ground improvement by vacuum and PVD on the rate of consolidation at the site of Saigon International Terminals Vietnam (SITV) in Ba RiaVung Tau Province, Viet Nam. Three main aspects of the test will be presented, and namely, instrumentation and field monitoring program, calculation of consolidation settlement and backanalysis of soil properties to see the difference before and after ground improvement.