Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effects of Metallicity and Grain Size on Gravitational Instabilities in Protoplanetary Disks

Observational studies show that the probability of finding gas giant planets around a star increases with the star's metallicity. Our latest simulations of disks undergoing gravitational instabilities (GIs) with realistic radiative cooling indicate that protoplanetary disks with lower metallicity generally cool faster and thus show stronger overall GI activity. More importantly, the global cooling times in our simulations are too long for disk fragmentation to occur, and the disks do not fragment into dense protoplanetary clumps. Our results suggest that direct gas giant planet formation via disk instabilities is unlikely to be the mechanism that produced most observed planets. Nevertheless, GIs may still play an important role in a hybrid scenario, compatible with the observed metallicity trend, where structure created by GIs accelerates planet formation by core accretion.
Can Accurate Predictions Improve Video Streaming in Cellular Networks?

Existing video streaming algorithms use various estimation approaches to infer the inherently variable bandwidth in cellular networks, which often leads to reduced quality of experience (QoE). We ask the question: "If accurate bandwidth prediction were possible in a cellular network, how much can we improve video QoE? ". Assuming we know the bandwidth for the entire video session, we show that existing streaming algorithms only achieve between 69%-86% of optimal quality. Since such knowledge may be impractical, we study algorithms that know the available bandwidth for a few seconds into the future. We observe that prediction alone is not sufficient and can in fact lead to degraded QoE. However, when combined with rate stabilization functions, prediction outperforms existing algorithms and reduces the gap with optimal to 4%. Our results lead us to believe that cellular operators and content providers can tremendously improve video QoE by predicting available bandwidth and sharing it through APIs.
Repetition as ratification: How parents and children place information in common ground*

ABSTRACT Repetition is used for a range of functions in conversation. In this study, we examined all the repetitions used in spontaneous conversations by 41 French adult–child dyads, with children aged 2 ; 3 and 3 ; 6, to test the hypotheses that adults repeat to establish that they have understood, and that children repeat to ratify what adults have said. Analysis of 978 exchanges containing repetitions showed that adults use them to check on intentions and to correct errors, while children use them to ratify what the adult said. With younger children, adults combine their repeats with new information. Children then re-repeat the form originally targeted by the adult. With older children, adults check on intentions but less frequently, and only occasionally check on forms. Older children also re-repeat in the third turn but, like adults, add further information. For both adults and children, repeats signal attention to the other's utterances, and place the information repeated in common ground.
The multitoken interarrival time (MTIT) access protocol for supporting variable size packets over WDM ring network

One of the approaches currently pursued to provide an optical network architecture for supporting the next generation Internet consists of transmitting the Internet protocol (IP) packets directly over the wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) layer. The challenge of this approach is to make the optical bandwidth directly accessible to IP with the statistical multiplexing necessary to support the bursty nature of IP traffic in a cost effective way. This paper proposes a WDM ring architecture with a multitoken interarrival time (MTIT) access protocol designed to achieve a bandwidth efficient multiplexing technique in local and metropolitan network applications. The MTIT protocol achieves efficient multiplexing of all-optically transmitted packets by means of multiple control tokens whose rotation speed along the ring is regulated via the "token interarrival time," as opposed to the "token rotation time" adopted in existing standards. The proposed WDM architecture and protocol provide a unique medium access control that allows one to maintain the channel access delay at a node within a limited range of values, possibly reaching average values that are below the roundtrip propagation time of the ring. In the paper it is shown that the MTIT protocol efficiency grows with the number of wavelengths-in agreement with today's WDM technology trends-and it is not a function of the packet size-a mandatory feature to support IP traffic.
Late onset of development of natural anti‐nonGal antibodies in infant humans and baboons: implications for xenotransplantation in infants

If an ABO‐incompatible heart is transplanted into an infant before natural antibodies have developed to the specific donor carbohydrate A/B antigen(s), then B‐cell tolerance to the donor A/B antigen is achieved, and these antibodies never develop. Anti‐carbohydrate antibodies play a role in the rejection of wild type (WT) and α1,3‐galactosyltransferase gene‐knockout (GT‐KO) pig xenografts. We investigated development of these antibodies in infant baboons and humans. Serum samples from infant baboons (n = 42) and humans (n = 42) were tested by flow cytometry for immunoglobulin M and immunoglobulin G binding to peripheral blood mononuclear cells from WT and GT‐KO pigs, and for complement‐dependent cytotoxicity. The presence of anti‐blood group antibodies was tested in baboon serum. In infant baboons and humans, cytotoxic anti‐Galα1,3Gal antibodies develop during the first 3 months, and steadily increase with age, whereas cytotoxic anti‐nonGal antibodies are either absent or minimal in the majority of cases throughout the first year of life. Anti‐blood group antibodies were not detected before 16 weeks of age. Our data suggest GT‐KO pig organ/cell transplants could be carried out in early infancy in the absence of preformed cytotoxic anti‐nonGalα1,3Gal antibodies.
Approximate Inference and Stochastic Optimal Control

We propose a novel reformulation of the stochastic optimal control problem as an approximate inference problem, demonstrating, that such a interpretation leads to new practical methods for the original problem. In particular we characterise a novel class of iterative solutions to the stochastic optimal control problem based on a natural relaxation of the exact dual formulation. These theoretical insights are applied to the Reinforcement Learning problem where they lead to new model free, o policy methods for discrete and continuous problems.
Supplementary Information For “ Mechanical coupling between myosin molecules causes differences between ensemble and single molecule measurements ”

We consider the 4-state model for actomyosin interaction shown in Fig. 1 of the main text and reproduced here below (see Fig. 1). Briefly, unbound (or weakly-bound) myosin with ADP and phosphate (Pi) in its active site transitions to a state where it strongly binds to actin. We label the former state (un-/weaklybound with ADP and Pi in the active site) state 1, while the latter state (bound with ADP in the active site) is state 2. Once strongly bound, myosin may release ADP in a force-dependent process. It then enters the rigor state, state 3. Having released both ADP and phosphate, myosin’s nucleotide binding pocket is empty and the molecule may bind ATP, and upon doing so, unbind from actin. This unbound state with ATP in the active site is state 4. Once ATP is bound and myosin has detached from actin, myosin may hydrolyze ATP and revert to the pre-powerstroke conformation, state 1 (see Fig. 1).
Toxoplasmosis: the time has come.

Toxoplasmosis is a serious disease in persons with the congenital infection and in immunocompromised patients. The tragedy of toxoplasmosis as a cause of blindness or near-blindness or of psychomotor or mental retardation in children and the fact that it can be prevented have never concerned the medical community in the United States as much as in Europe. Almost 15 years ago Desmonts and Couvreur of Paris defined in the Journal the risk and range of severity of congenital toxoplasmosis, the value of systematic screening and patient education, and the value of treatment of the mother during pregnancy to prevent transmission .
An Investigation of Speechreading With and Without Cued Speech

The speechreading of deaf individuals familiar with Cued Speech was tested with and without the benefit of cues. With cues, the subjects correctly identified nearly twice as many phonetically balanced monosyllabic words as under the non-cued condition. This difference was highly significant statistically. Analyses of speechreading scores before and after a three-day "brush-up" Cued Speech workshop revealed insignificant improvement in both the cued and non-cued conditions. An informal item analysis of responses to cued words suggested that vowel-type in general was linked to accuracy in speechreading with cues whereas consonant-type was not, that vowel-initial words were more difficult to speechread with cues than were consonant-initial items with cues, and that one vowel-related cue position was less effective in clarifying speech than were the other cued vowel positions.
Galectin‐3 binds Neisseria meningitidis and increases interaction with phagocytic cells

Galectin‐3 is expressed and secreted by immune cells and has been implicated in multiple aspects of the inflammatory response. It is a glycan binding protein which can exert its functions within cells or exogenously by binding cell surface ligands, acting as a molecular bridge or activating signalling pathways. In addition, this lectin has been shown to bind to microorganisms. In this study we investigated the interaction between galectin‐3 and Neisseria meningitidis, an important extracellular human pathogen, which is a leading cause of septicaemia and meningitis. Immunohistochemical analysis indicated that galectin‐3 is expressed during meningococcal disease and colocalizes with bacterial colonies in infected tissues from patients. We show that galectin‐3 binds to N. meningitidis and we demonstrate that this interaction requiresfull‐length, intact lipopolysaccharide molecules. We found that neither exogenous nor endogenous galectin‐3 contributes to phagocytosis of N. meningitidis; instead exogenous galectin‐3 increases adhesion to monocytes and macrophages but not epithelial cells. Finally we used galectin‐3 deficient (Gal‐3−/−) mice to evaluate the contribution of galectin‐3 to meningococcal bacteraemia. We found that Gal‐3−/− mice had significantly lower levels of bacteraemia compared with wild‐type mice after challenge with live bacteria, indicating that galectin‐3 confers an advantage to N. meningitidis during systemic infection.
Minimal Convex Combinations of Sequential Laplace-Dirichlet Eigenvalues

We propose a computational approach based on the level set method to solve shape optimization problems where the objective function is dependent on the Laplace-Dirichlet eigen- values of the domain. The approach is applied to the parameterized problem of minimizing the convex combination of sequential Laplace-Dirichlet eigenvalues, λ k and λ k +1 . We show that as a function of the combination parameter, the optimal value is non-decreasing, Lipschitz continuous, and concave and that the minimizing set is upper hemicontinuous. The domains which mini- mize the ﬁrst few Laplace-Dirichlet eigenvalues are known analytically and/or have been studied computationally and it is known that the optimal solution for some values of k have multiply connected components. Our computations reproduce these previous results for the appropriate parameter values and extend these results, eﬀectively capturing intermediate topology changes. The results are also compared to values obtained analytically for rectangular and elliptical shapes and to values for domains with nearly-circular boundary.
Acoustic Detail But Not Predictability of Task-Irrelevant Speech Disrupts Working Memory

Attended speech is comprehended better not only if more acoustic detail is available, but also if it is semantically highly predictable. But can more acoustic detail or higher predictability turn into disadvantages and distract a listener if the speech signal is to be ignored? Also, does the degree of distraction increase for older listeners who typically show a decline in attentional control ability? Adopting the irrelevant-speech paradigm, we tested whether younger (age 23–33 years) and older (60–78 years) listeners’ working memory for the serial order of spoken digits would be disrupted by the presentation of task-irrelevant speech varying in its acoustic detail (using noise-vocoding) and its semantic predictability (of sentence endings). More acoustic detail, but not higher predictability, of task-irrelevant speech aggravated memory interference. This pattern of results did not differ between younger and older listeners, despite generally lower performance in older listeners. Our findings suggest that the focus of attention determines how acoustics and predictability affect the processing of speech: first, as more acoustic detail is known to enhance speech comprehension and memory for speech, we here demonstrate that more acoustic detail of ignored speech enhances the degree of distraction. Second, while higher predictability of attended speech is known to also enhance speech comprehension under acoustically adverse conditions, higher predictability of ignored speech is unable to exert any distracting effect upon working memory performance in younger or older listeners. These findings suggest that features that make attended speech easier to comprehend do not necessarily enhance distraction by ignored speech.
Effect of daytime, weekday and year of admission on outcome in acute ischaemic stroke patients treated with thrombolytic therapy

Background: Since doubts were raised, if a challenging medical procedure such as acute stroke treatment including thrombolysis with recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rTPA) is available with identical standard and outcome 24 h and 7 days a week our aim was to examine if acute stroke patients defined by onset‐admission time (OAT) of ≤ 3 h were treated differently or had distinct outcome when admitted during off duty hours (day versus night and weekend versus weekdays) and if any differences in treatment or outcome were apparent when comparing patients admitted in the year 2003 with patients admitted in the year 2006.
Effects of Fluoride on Two Chemical Models of Enamel Demineralization

This study evaluated the effects of fluoride on subsurface enamel demineralization induced by two commonly used chemical models. Forty-eight enamel blocks were demineralized at pH = 5.0 by an acetate buffer (Group 1), a lactate buffer (Group 2), an acetate buffer with 0.02 ppm fluoride (Group 3) and a lactate buffer with 0.02 ppm fluoride (Group 4) at 25 °C for 3 weeks. The surface destruction percentage (SDP), mineral loss and lesion depth of the blocks were studied using micro-computed tomography. An elemental analysis of the enamel surface was evaluated using an energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. Surface micro-hardness was determined by the Knoop Hardness Test. The mean lesion depth of Groups 1 through 4 were 134.1 ± 27.2 μm, 96.1 ± 16.5 μm, 97.5 ± 22.4 μm and 91.1 ± 16.2 μm, respectively (p < 0.001; group 1 > 2, 3 > 4). The SDPs of groups 1 through 4 were 7.8 ± 8.93%, 0.71 ± 1.6%, 0.36 ± 1.70% and 1.36 ± 2.94% (p < 0.001; group 1 > 2, 3, 4). The fluoride in mean weight percentages of groups 1 through 4 were 1.12 ± 0.24%, 1.10 ± 0.20%, 1.45 ± 0.40% and 1.51 ± 0.51%, respectively (p < 0.001; group 3, 4 > 1, 2). The mean Knoop hardness values of groups 1 through 4 were 27.5 ± 13.3, 39.7 ± 19.3, 73.6 ± 44.2 and 91.0 ± 57.2, respectively (p < 0.001; group 4 > 3 > 2 > 1). The chemical model using an acetate buffer solution created significantly deeper zones of subsurface demineralization on enamel than the lactate buffer solution. An acetate buffer may damage the enamel surface, but the surface damage can be prevented by adding fluoride.
AT2R Agonist, Compound 21, Is Reno-Protective Against Type 1 Diabetic Nephropathy

The hemodynamic and nonhemodynamic effects of angiotensin II on diabetic complications are considered to be primarily mediated by the angiotensin II type 1 receptor subtype. However, its biological and functional effect mediated through the angiotensin II type 2 receptor subtype is still unclear. Activation of the angiotensin II type 2 receptors has been postulated to oppose angiotensin II type 1 receptor–mediated actions and thus attenuate fibrosis. This study aimed to elucidate the reno-protective role of the novel selective angiotensin II type 2 receptor agonist, Compound 21, in an experimental model of type 1 diabetic nephropathy. Compound 21 treatment significantly attenuated diabetes mellitus–induced elevated levels of cystatin C, albuminuria, mesangial expansion, and glomerulosclerosis in diabetic mice. Moreover, Compound 21 markedly inhibited the expression of various proteins implicated in oxidative stress, inflammation, and fibrosis, in association with decreased extracellular matrix production. These findings demonstrate that monotherapy of Compound 21 is protective against the progression of experimental diabetic nephropathy by inhibiting renal oxidative stress, inflammation, and fibrosis.
Detection of Broken Bars in Induction Motor Through the Analysis of Supply Voltage Modulation

This paper presents an application of a novel method for the diagnostics of electric and magnetic asymmetries of rotor cage in induction motor (IM) due to broken rotor bars. An increasing anomaly in magnetic field distribution results in degradation of steady-state and dynamic performance of an IM. This degradation can be determined through the analysis of the average duty cycle of the modulated supply voltage. Broken rotor bars would cause torque and speed ripple which is mitigated by an efficient speed-control algorithm. Consequently, specific oscillation in the duty cycle of the modulated stator voltage appears. This effect can be simply detected without additional hardware and therefore provides a correct evaluation of faulty motor performance, which is a very significant part of condition monitoring and diagnostic procedure in modern supervision systems for electrical drives.
Adaptive course authoring: My Online Teacher

With the expansion of successful applications of adaptive techniques for telecommunications in education, in particular, for various web-based education and training systems, there is a growing need of creating the respective authoring support. A hypermedia tool, called 'My Online Teacher' (MOT), has been developed and extended at the Eindhoven University of Technology that can be used for authoring adaptive hypermedia courses. With this tool, the subject-matter of the course to be designed can be modeled by means of concept maps from which lessons can be constructed. Concept maps and lessons form the two levels of pre-adaptive content, and they are stored in a database. This structure lays the basis for various types of adaptation, as it uses both the expressivity of metadata annotation and the flexibility of the database structure as will be illustrated. This paper describes this tool's design, implementation and first evaluation remarks. MOT is being presently used for the creation of a variant of the classical Neural Network course for third year students at the Eindhoven University of Technology.
Squares of $3$-sun-free split graphs

AbstractThesquareofagraphG,denotedbyG 2 ,isobtainedfromGbyputtinganedge between twodistinct verticeswhenevertheirdistanceis two. ThenG is called a square root of G 2 . Deciding whether a given graph has asquarerootisknowntobeNP-complete,eveniftherootisrequiredtobeasplit graph,thatis,agraphinwhichthevertexsetcanbepartitionedintoastablesetandaclique.Wegiveawiderangeofpolynomialtimesolvablecasesfortheproblemofrecognizing ifagivengraph isthesquareofsomespecial kindofsplitgraph. To the best of our knowledge, our result properly contains allpreviously known such cases. Ourpolynomial time algorithms are buildonastructuralinvestigationofgraphsthatadmitasplitsquarerootthatis 3-sun-free, and may pave the way toward a dichotomy theorem forrecognizingsquaresof(3-sun-free)splitgraphs.Keywords: Squareofgraphs,squareofsplitgraphs.2010 MSC:05C75,05C85. 1 Introduction The k-th power of a graph G, written G k , is obtained from G by adding newedges between any two diﬀerent vertices at distance at most k in G. In casek= 2, G
Availability and toxicity of Fe(II) and Fe(III) in Caco-2 cells

The objective of the present study was to compare the toxicity and availability of Fe(II) and Fe(III) to Caco-2 cells. Cellular damage was studied by measuring cell proliferation and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) release. The activities of two major antioxidative enzymes [superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione peroxidase (GPx)] and differentiation marker (alkaline phosphatase) were determined after the cells were exposed to different levels of iron salts. The cellular iron concentration was investigated to evaluate iron bioavailability. The results show that iron uptake of the cells treated with Fe(II) is significantly higher than that of the cells treated with Fe(III) (P<0.05). Fe(II) at a concentration >1.5 mmol/L was found to be more effective in reducing cellular viability than Fe(III). LDH release investigation suggests that Fe(II) can reduce stability of the cell membrane. The activities of SOD and GPx of the cells treated with Fe(II) were higher than those of the cells treated with Fe(III), although both of them increased with raising iron supply levels. The results indicate that both Fe(II) and Fe(III) could reduce the cellular antioxidase gene expression at high levels.
The Effects of Fair Trade on Coffee Producers : A Case Study of Ethiopian Coffee Cooperatives

The role of cooperatives has been reevaluated due to the retreat of governments from rural development behind economic liberalization policy in African countries. Coffee farmers’ cooperatives have been reestablished in Ethiopia since 1999 and they have provided higher profits to coffee farmers than private traders partly thanks to premium fairtrade price and the price offered by private traders has also increased in line with the cooperative price.