Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Peculiar features of ionospheric F3 layer during prolonged solar minimum (2007–2009)

We present the seasonal and local time occurrence of ionospheric F3 layer over Tirunelveli (geographic longitude 77.8°E, geographic latitude 8.7°N, dip 0.7°) during extremely low and prolonged solar activity period (2007–2009). Canadian Advanced Digital Ionosonde observations from this station are used in the present study. We find that the occurrence of F3 layer is nearly 3 times higher during 2009 (∼ 48%) as compared to that during 2007 (∼16%). The increase of this order just within the low solar activity period is unusual. In earlier studies similar increase in F3 occurrence has been reported when solar activity changes from high (F10.7=182) to low (F10.7=72). The other important feature is the presence of postnoon F3 layers which are observed dominantly during summer solstice of 2009. Such occurrence of postnoon F3 layers was nearly absent during summer solstice of the previous solar minimum (1996) over nearby dip equatorial station Trivandrum. We take equatorial electrojet (EEJ) as a proxy for eastward electric field. It is noticed that the EEJ strength and the maximum rate of change of EEJ are higher for F3 days as compared to those on non‐F3 days. We find that the peak occurrence of prenoon F3 layer closely coincides with the time of maximum rate of change of EEJ. It is in general accordance with the theory proposed by Balan et al. (1998) that suggests the formation of F3 through vertically upward E × B drift in presence of equatorward neutral wind. The present study reveals that the rate of change of eastward electric field (dE/dt) as well plays an important role in the formation of F3 layer.
When A Small Leak Sinks A Great Ship: Deanonymizing Tor Hidden Service Users Through Bitcoin Transactions Analysis

With the rapid increase of threats on the Internet, people are continuously seeking privacy and anonymity. Services such as Bitcoin and Tor were introduced to provide anonymity for online transactions and Web browsing. Due to its pseudonymity model, Bitcoin lacks retroactive operational security, which means historical pieces of information could be used to identify a certain user. We investigate the feasibility of deanonymizing users of Tor hidden services who rely on Bitcoin as a payment method by exploiting public information leaked from online social networks, the Blockchain, and onion websites. This, for example, allows an adversary to link a user with @alice Twitter address to a Tor hidden service with private.onion address by finding at least one past transaction in the Blockchain that involves their publicly declared Bitcoin addresses. To demonstrate the feasibility of this deanonymization attack, we carried out a real-world experiment simulating a passive, limited adversary. We crawled 1.5K hidden services and collected 88 unique Bitcoin addresses. We then crawled 5B tweets and 1M BitcoinTalk forum pages and collected 4.2K and 41K unique Bitcoin addresses, respectively. Each user address was associated with an online identity along with its public profile information. By analyzing the transactions in the Blockchain, we were able to link 125 unique users to 20 Tor hidden services, including sensitive ones, such as The Pirate Bay and Silk Road. We also analyzed two case studies in detail to demonstrate the implications of the resulting information leakage on user anonymity. In particular, we confirm that Bitcoin addresses should always be considered exploitable, as they can be used to deanonymize users retroactively. This is especially important for Tor hidden service users who actively seek and expect privacy and anonymity.
Quantifying and Valuing Community Health Worker Time in Improving Access to Malaria Diagnosis and Treatment

Background. Community health workers (CHWs) are members of a community who are chosen by their communities as first-line, volunteer health workers. The time they spend providing healthcare and the value of this time are often not evaluated. Our aim was to quantify the time CHWs spent on providing healthcare before and during the implementation of an integrated program of diagnosis and treatment of febrile illness in 3 African countries. Methods. In Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and Uganda, CHWs were trained to assess and manage febrile patients in keeping with Integrated Management of Childhood Illness recommendations to use rapid diagnostic tests, artemisinin-based combination therapy, and rectal artesunate for malaria treatment. All CHWs provided healthcare only to young children usually <5 years of age, and hence daily time allocation of their time to child healthcare was documented for 1 day (in the high malaria season) before the intervention and at several time points following the implementation of the intervention. Time spent in providing child healthcare was valued in earnings of persons with similar experience. Results. During the high malaria season of the intervention, CHWs spent nearly 50 minutes more in daily healthcare provision (average daily time, 30.2 minutes before the intervention vs 79.5 minutes during the intervention; test for difference in means P < .01). On average, the daily time spent providing healthcare during the intervention was 55.8 minutes (Burkina Faso), 77.4 minutes (Nigeria), and 72.2 minutes (Uganda). Using the country minimum monthly salary, CHWs’ time allocated to child healthcare for 1 year was valued at US Dollars (USD) $52 in Burkina Faso, USD $295 in Nigeria, and USD $141 in Uganda. Conclusions. CHWs spend up to an hour and a half daily on child healthcare in their communities. These data are informative in designing reward systems to motivate CHWs to continue providing good-quality services. Clinical Trials Registration. ISRCTN13858170.
The 38K-Mediated Specific Dephosphorylation of the Viral Core Protein P6.9 Plays an Important Role in the Nucleocapsid Assembly of Autographa californica Multiple Nucleopolyhedrovirus

ABSTRACT Encapsidation of the viral genomes, leading to the assembly of the nucleocapsids to form infectious progeny virions, is a key step in many virus life cycles. Baculovirus nucleocapsid assembly is a complex process that involves many proteins. Our previous studies showed that the deletion of the core gene 38K (ac98) interrupted the nucleocapsid assembly by producing capsid sheaths devoid of viral genomes by an unknown mechanism. All homologs of 38K contain conserved motifs of the haloacid dehalogenase superfamily, which are involved in phosphoryl transfer. The requirements of these motifs for nucleocapsid assembly, confirmed in the present study, suggest that 38K may be a functioning haloacid dehalogenase. P6.9 is also encoded by a core gene (ac100) and is required for viral genome encapsidation. It has been reported that multiple phosphorylated species of P6.9 are present in virus-infected cells, while only an unphosphorylated species is detected in the budded virus. Therefore, whether 38K mediates the dephosphorylation of P6.9 was investigated. An additional phosphorylated species of P6.9 in 38K-deleted or -mutated virus-transfected cells was detected, and the dephosphorylated sites mediated by 38K were determined by mass spectrometry. To assess the effects of dephosphorylation of P6.9 mediated by 38K on virus replication, these sites were mutated to glutamic acids (phosphorylation-mimic mutant) or to alanines (phosphorylation-deficient mutant). Studies showed that the nucleocapsid assembly was interrupted in phosphorylation-mimic mutant virus-transfected cells. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that 38K mediates the dephosphorylation of specific sites at the C terminus of P6.9, which is essential for viral genome encapsidation. IMPORTANCE Genome packaging is a fundamental process in the virus life cycle, and viruses have different strategies to perform this step. For several double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) viruses, the procapsid is formed before genome encapsidation, which may require basic proteins that help to neutralize the nucleic acid charge repulsion to facilitate the compaction of the genome within the confined capsid space. Baculovirus encodes a small basic protein, P6.9, which is required for a variety of processes in the virus infection cycle. The phosphorylation of P6.9 is thought to result in nucleocapsid uncoating, while the dephosphorylation of P6.9 is involved in viral DNA encapsidation during nucleocapsid assembly. Here, we demonstrate that a haloacid dehalogenase homolog encoded by baculovirus core gene 38K is involved in nucleocapsid assembly by mediating the dephosphorylation of 5 specific sites at the C terminus of P6.9. This finding contributes to the understanding of the mechanisms of virus nucleocapsid assembly.
A Gaussian Attractor Network for Memory and Recognition with Experience-Dependent Learning

Attractor networks are widely believed to underlie the memory systems of animals across different species. Existing models have succeeded in qualitatively modeling properties of attractor dynamics, but their computational abilities often suffer from poor representations for realistic complex patterns, spurious attractors, low storage capacity, and difficulty in identifying attractive fields of attractors. We propose a simple two-layer architecture, gaussian attractor network, which has no spurious attractors if patterns to be stored are uncorrelated and can store as many patterns as the number of neurons in the output layer. Meanwhile the attractive fields can be precisely quantified and manipulated. Equipped with experience-dependent unsupervised learning strategies, the network can exhibit both discrete and continuous attractor dynamics. A testable prediction based on numerical simulations is that there exist neurons in the brain that can discriminate two similar stimuli at first but cannot after extensive exposure to physically intermediate stimuli. Inspired by this network, we found that adding some local feedbacks to a well-known hierarchical visual recognition model, HMAX, can enable the model to reproduce some recent experimental results related to high-level visual perception.
Impact of pre-Columbian “geoglyph” builders on Amazonian forests

Significance Amazonian rainforests once thought to be pristine wildernesses are increasingly known to have been inhabited by large populations before European contact. How and to what extent these societies impacted their landscape through deforestation and forest management is still controversial, particularly in the vast interfluvial uplands that have been little studied. In Brazil, the groundbreaking discovery of hundreds of geometric earthworks by modern deforestation would seem to imply that this region was also deforested to a large extent in the past, challenging the apparent vulnerability of Amazonian forests to human land use. We reconstructed environmental evidence from the geoglyph region and found that earthworks were built within man-made forests that had been previously managed for millennia. In contrast, long-term, regional-scale deforestation is strictly a modern phenomenon. Over 450 pre-Columbian (pre-AD 1492) geometric ditched enclosures (“geoglyphs”) occupy ∼13,000 km2 of Acre state, Brazil, representing a key discovery of Amazonian archaeology. These huge earthworks were concealed for centuries under terra firme (upland interfluvial) rainforest, directly challenging the “pristine” status of this ecosystem and its perceived vulnerability to human impacts. We reconstruct the environmental context of geoglyph construction and the nature, extent, and legacy of associated human impacts. We show that bamboo forest dominated the region for ≥6,000 y and that only small, temporary clearings were made to build the geoglyphs; however, construction occurred within anthropogenic forest that had been actively managed for millennia. In the absence of widespread deforestation, exploitation of forest products shaped a largely forested landscape that survived intact until the late 20th century.
Human papillomavirus-associated digital squamous cell carcinoma: literature review and report of 21 new cases.

OBJECTIVE Our aim was to review the clinical behavior of human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated digital squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). Specifically, we examined evidence for the tumor's (1) infectious origin and spread, (2) response to therapy, and (3) prognosis and metastatic risk. DESIGN We reviewed and performed data tabulation of all 51 reported cases in the English-language literature and a case series of 23 cases (21 of them not previously reported). We present 2 of the cases in depth. SETTING We used previously reported cases from MEDLINE and a case series from a single dermatologic operation practice from 1985 to 1999. RESULTS (1) Of all cases, 10% (7/72) had an antecedent genital dysplasia or carcinoma containing the same HPV subtype as the digital SCC. (2) The rate of recurrence after general surgical therapy was 43% (6/14). After Mohs micrographic surgery the recurrence rate was 13% (2/16) for the cases in the literature, and 26% (6/23) for our case series. (3) Of tumors, 3% (2/72) have been observed to metastasize. CONCLUSIONS (1) This suggests the possibility of genital-digital spread as a mechanism of tumor genesis. (2) HPV-associated digital SCC is more likely to recur after surgical treatment than previously reported. This rate of recurrence greatly exceeds that for cutaneous SCCs in general and may be caused by residual postsurgical HPV. (3) The rate of metastasis, however, appears to be low.
Carbonate precipitation in brine – a potential trigger for tropospheric ozone depletion events

Tropospheric ozone depletion events (ODEs) at high latitudes were discovered 20 years ago and are attributed to bromine explosions. However, an unresolved issue is the explanation of how the acid-catalyzed reaction cycle is triggered in atmospheric particles derived from alkaline sea water. By simulating the chemistry occuring in polar regions over recently formed sea ice, we can model successfully the transformation of inert sea-salt bromide to reactive bromine monoxide (BrO) and the subsequent ODE when precipitation of calcium carbonate from freezing sea water is taken into account. In addition, we found the temperature dependence of the equilibrium BrCl+Br − ↔Br 2 Cl − to be important.
Psychological therapies for generalised anxiety disorder.

BACKGROUND Generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) is a highly prevalent condition, characterised by excessive worry or anxiety about everyday events and problems. The effectiveness and effectiveness of psychological therapies as a group has not yet been evaluated in the treatment of GAD. OBJECTIVES To examine the efficacy and acceptability of psychological therapies, categorised as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), psychodynamic therapy and supportive therapy, compared with treatment as usual/waiting list (TAU/WL) and compared with one another, for patients with GAD. SEARCH STRATEGY We searched the Cochrane Depression, Anxiety & Neurosis Group (CCDAN) Controlled Trials Register and conducted supplementary searches of MEDLINE, PsycInfo, EMBASE, LILACS and controlledtrials.com in February 2006. We searched reference lists of retrieved articles, and contacted trial authors and experts in the field for information on ongoing/completed trials. SELECTION CRITERIA Randomised and quasi-randomised controlled trials conducted in non-inpatient settings, involving adults aged 18-75 years with a primary diagnosis of GAD, assigned to a psychological therapy condition compared with TAU/WL or another psychological therapy. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Data on patients, interventions and outcomes were extracted by two review authors independently, and the methodological quality of each study was assessed. The primary outcome was anxiety reduction, based on a dichotomous measure of clinical response, using relative risk (RR), and on a continuous measure of symptom reduction, using the standardised mean difference (SMD), with 95% confidence intervals. MAIN RESULTS Twenty five studies (1305 participants) were included in the review, of which 22 studies (1060 participants) contributed data to meta-analyses. Based on thirteen studies, psychological therapies, all using a CBT approach, were more effective than TAU/WL in achieving clinical response at post-treatment (RR 0.63, 95%CI 0.55 to 0.73), and also in reducing anxiety, worry and depression symptoms. No studies conducted longer-term assessments of CBT against TAU/WL. Six studies compared CBT against supportive therapy (non-directive therapy and attention-placebo conditions). No significant difference in clinical response was indicated between CBT and supportive therapy at post-treatment (RR 0.86, 95%CI 0.70 to 1.06), however significant heterogeneity was indicated, which was partly explained by the number of therapy sessions. AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS Psychological therapy based on CBT principles is effective in reducing anxiety symptoms for short-term treatment of GAD. The body of evidence comparing CBT with other psychological therapies is small and heterogeneous, which precludes drawing conclusions about which psychological therapy is more effective. Further studies examining non-CBT models are required to inform health care policy on the most appropriate forms of psychological therapy in treating GAD.
The Perception of Graph Properties in Graph Layouts

When looking at drawings of graphs, questions about graph density, community structures, local clustering and other graph properties may be of critical importance for analysis. While graph layout algorithms have focused on minimizing edge crossing, symmetry, and other such layout properties, there is not much known about how these algorithms relate to a user's ability to perceive graph properties for a given graph layout. In this study, we apply previously established methodologies for perceptual analysis to identify which graph drawing layout will help the user best perceive a particular graph property. We conduct a large scale (n = 588) crowdsourced experiment to investigate whether the perception of two graph properties (graph density and average local clustering coefficient) can be modeled using Weber's law. We study three graph layout algorithms from three representative classes (Force Directed ‐ FD, Circular, and Multi‐Dimensional Scaling ‐ MDS), and the results of this experiment establish the precision of judgment for these graph layouts and properties. Our findings demonstrate that the perception of graph density can be modeled with Weber's law. Furthermore, the perception of the average clustering coefficient can be modeled as an inverse of Weber's law, and the MDS layout showed a significantly different precision of judgment than the FD layout.
Doppler-derived trigger signals for high-frame-rate mouse cardiovascular imaging

The availability of an electrocardiogram (ECG) waveform in the adult mouse has permitted the measurement of fast, dynamic cardiac events where data acquisition is synchronized to the R-wave of the ECG waveform. These methods can easily attain one thousand frames/s at ultrasound frequencies greater than 20 MHz. With the heart being the first organ to develop, normal cardiovascular function is crucial to the viability of the developing embryo. Thus, translating such methodologies to analyze embryonic cardiovascular development would add crucial information in mouse models of congenital heart disease which are embryonic lethal. Obtaining an ECG signal from mouse embryos is impractical. Therefore, in this study, preliminary results are presented which derive a cardiac-trigger signal from Doppler blood-flow waveforms. A continuous wave 40 MHz Doppler ultrasound system was used to acquire the Doppler waveforms and a real-time algorithm was developed to process the Doppler waveforms and generate a trigger. Validation studies revealed that a heart rate can be reliably measured and that the Doppler trigger algorithm was robust enough to follow changes in the blood flow. Preliminary data showed that Doppler-derived triggers can be used for highframe-rate prospective imaging of the early embryonic mouse heart.
PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Interoceptive Sensitivity and Self-Reports of Emotional Experience

People differ in the extent to which they emphasize feelings of activation or deactivation in their verbal reports of experienced emotion, termed arousal focus (AF). Two multimethod studies indicate that AF is linked to heightened interoceptive sensitivity (as measured by performance on a heartbeat detection task). People who were more sensitive to their heartbeats emphasized feelings of activation and deactivation when reporting their experiences of emotion over time more than did those who were less sensitive. This relationship was not accounted for by several other variables, including simple language effects. Implications for the role of interoception in experienced emotion and the validity of self-reported emotion are discussed.
Density dependence, prey accessibility and prey depletion by fisheries drive Peruvian seabird population dynamics

In marine ecosystems top predator populations are shaped by environmental factors affecting their prey abundance. Coupling top predators’ population studies with independent records of prey abundance suggests that prey fluctuations affect fecundity parameters and abundance of their predators. However, prey may be abundant but inaccessible to their predators and a major challenge is to determine the relative importance of prey accessibility in shaping seabird populations. In addition, disentangling the effects of prey abundance and accessibility from the effects of prey removal by fisheries, while accounting for density dependence, remains challenging for marine top predators. Here, we investigate how climate, population density, and the accessibility and removal of prey (the Peruvian anchovy Engraulis ringens) by fisheries influence the population dynamics of the largest sedentary seabird community (≈ 4 million individuals belonging to guanay cormorant Phalacrocorax bougainvillii, Peruvian booby Sula variegata and Peruvian pelican Pelecanus thagus) of the northern Humboldt Current System over the past half-century. Using Gompertz state–space models we found strong evidence for density dependence in abundance for the three seabird species. After accounting for density dependence, sea surface temperature, prey accessibility (defined by the depth of the upper limit of the subsurface oxygen minimum zone) and prey removal by fisheries were retained as the best predictors of annual population size across species. These factors affected seabird abundance the current year and with year lags, suggesting effects on several demographic parameters including breeding propensity and adult survival. These findings highlight the effects of prey accessibility and fishery removals on seabird populations in marine ecosystems. This will help refine management objectives of marine ecosystems in order to ensure sufficient biomass of forage fish to avoid constraining seabird population dynamics, while taking into account of the effects of environmental variability.