Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Design Optimization of a Novel Scale-Down Hybrid-Excited Dual Permanent Magnet Generator for Direct-Drive Wind Power Application

This paper presents a novel scale-down hybrid-excited dual permanent magnet (PM) generator for direct-drive wind power application. Two sets of consequent-pole PMs are used in the proposed design, with one on the outer stator and the other on the middle rotor. PMs are separated by iron poles one by one, to form the magnet-iron sequences, which can provide PM excitation and flux modulating simultaneously. Since both the outer stator and middle rotor have flux modulating effect, bi-directional flux modulating can be achieved. Besides the fundamental field components, some other major field harmonics are also synchronous due to the bi-directional flux modulating effect, and these harmonics can contribute to the electromagnetic generation. Therefore, the proposed machine can achieve high torque density and suitable for direct-drive applications. Field windings are employed on the outer stator, so the air-gap field can be easily regulated by controlling the dc current. Hence, the proposed generator can maintain constant output voltage when the wind speed varies. Finite-element method coupled with genetic algorithm is used to optimize a scale-down design of the proposed generator, and its electromagnetic performances are studied in detail.
On time granularity and event granularity in simulation service composition (WIP)

There is an increasing need for systematic composition of simulation services in the emerging service-oriented computing environment. An important issue that hinders simulation service composition is the mismatch of granularity when coupling two services together. In this paper, we focus on time granularity and event granularity in composing simulation services at the pragmatic level. We identify and develop four types of granularity handling agents to be associated with the couplings between services. The developed method is illustrated by a coupled weather-wildfire simulation example.
Investigation of Acetylcholine Receptor Diversity in a Nematode Parasite Leads to Characterization of Tribendimidine- and Derquantel-Sensitive nAChRs

Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) of parasitic nematodes are required for body movement and are targets of important “classical” anthelmintics like levamisole and pyrantel, as well as “novel” anthelmintics like tribendimidine and derquantel. Four biophysical subtypes of nAChR have been observed electrophysiologically in body muscle of the nematode parasite Oesophagostomum dentatum, but their molecular basis was not understood. Additionally, loss of one of these subtypes (G 35 pS) was found to be associated with levamisole resistance. In the present study, we identified and expressed in Xenopus oocytes, four O. dentatum nAChR subunit genes, Ode-unc-38, Ode-unc-63, Ode-unc-29 and Ode-acr-8, to explore the origin of the receptor diversity. When different combinations of subunits were injected in Xenopus oocytes, we reconstituted and characterized four pharmacologically different types of nAChRs with different sensitivities to the cholinergic anthelmintics. Moreover, we demonstrate that the receptor diversity may be affected by the stoichiometric arrangement of the subunits. We show, for the first time, different combinations of subunits from a parasitic nematode that make up receptors sensitive to tribendimidine and derquantel. In addition, we report that the recombinant levamisole-sensitive receptor made up of Ode-UNC-29, Ode-UNC-63, Ode-UNC-38 and Ode-ACR-8 subunits has the same single-channel conductance, 35 pS and 2.4 ms mean open-time properties, as the levamisole-AChR (G35) subtype previously identified in vivo. These data highlight the flexible arrangements of the receptor subunits and their effects on sensitivity and resistance to the cholinergic anthelmintics; pyrantel, tribendimidine and/or derquantel may still be effective on levamisole-resistant worms.
Overcoming the bootstrap problem in evolutionary robotics using behavioral diversity

The bootstrap problem is often recognized as one of the main challenges of evolutionary robotics: if all individuals from the first randomly generated population perform equally poorly, the evolutionary process won't generate any interesting solution. To overcome this lack of fitness gradient, we propose to efficiently explore behaviors until the evolutionary process finds an individual with a non-minimal fitness. To that aim, we introduce an original diversity-preservation mechanism, called behavioral diversity, that relies on a distance between behaviors (instead of genotypes or phenotypes) and multi-objective evolutionary optimization. This approach has been successfully tested and compared to a recently published incremental evolution method (multi-subgoal evolution) on the evolution of a neuro-controller for a light-seeking mobile robot. Results obtained with these two approaches are qualitatively similar although the introduced one is less directed than multi-subgoal evolution.
Discussion on the Cause of Print-through Phenomenon of FRP and Several Improvement Methods

A print-through phenomenon (PTP) often occurs on the surface of the gelcoat layer of fiber-reinforced plastic (FRP). The fiber prints are visible with the naked eye. According to the scanning profile measured by instruments, the wrinkles indeed exist at the microlevel on the surface. In our previous works, it was concluded that PTP is induced by the nonuniform residual stress that is yielded while the resin hardens. This study further developed this argument regarding the cause of PTP and proved it by experiments. Moreover, several improvement methods to PTP were also tested by changing the configurations of core-mat, gelcoat, and resins to mitigate the tiny-scale deformations on the gelcoat surface. The simulation and experimental results showed that the increase in the thickness of core-mat and gelcoat layers is an effective way of reducing PTP. In addition, from simulation, it was found that searching for a substitution for core-mat, may possibly be another effective way of improving PTP.
Discovering personalized driver mutation profiles of single samples in cancer by network control strategy

Motivation It is a challenging task to discover personalized driver genes that provide crucial information on disease risk and drug sensitivity for individual patients. However, few methods have been proposed to identify the personalized-sample driver genes from the cancer omics data due to the lack of samples for each individual. To circumvent this problem, here we present a novel single-sample controller strategy (SCS) to identify personalized driver mutation profiles from network controllability perspective. Results SCS integrates mutation data and expression data into a reference molecular network for each patient to obtain the driver mutation profiles in a personalized-sample manner. This is the first such a computational framework, to bridge the personalized driver mutation discovery problem and the structural network controllability problem. The key idea of SCS is to detect those mutated genes which can achieve the transition from the normal state to the disease state based on each individual omics data from network controllability perspective. We widely validate the driver mutation profiles of our SCS from three aspects: (i) the improved precision for the predicted driver genes in the population compared with other driver-focus methods; (ii) the effectiveness for discovering the personalized driver genes and (iii) the application to the risk assessment through the integration of the driver mutation signature and expression data, respectively, across the five distinct benchmarks from The Cancer Genome Atlas. In conclusion, our SCS makes efficient and robust personalized driver mutation profiles predictions, opening new avenues in personalized medicine and targeted cancer therapy. Availability and implementation The MATLAB-package for our SCS is freely available from http://sysbio.sibcb. ac.cn/cb/chenlab/software.htm. Contact zhangsw@nwpu.edu. cn or zengtao@sibs.ac.cn or lnchen@sibs.ac.cn. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Genetically Modified, Insect Resistant Maize: Implications for Management of Ear and Stalk Diseases

Because the fungi that produce mycotoxins in maize are frequently associated with insect damage, insect control has the potential to reduce mycotoxin concentrations in grain. Our research indicates that Bt transformation of maize hybrids enhances the safety of grain for livestock and human food products by reducing the plants' vulnerability to mycotoxin-producing Fusarium fungi.
E-SC: Collusion-Resistant Secure Outsourcing of Sequence Comparison Algorithm

The sequence comparison of large-scale string-typed data is fundamental in computer science and other computational disciplines. Its development has been promoted into an emerging outsourcing service by the almost unlimited powerful computing and storage capabilities from public clouds. The privacy preservation and effective utility of the outsourced sensitive information are key requirements now facing this service. All of the secure two-party computation protocols in existing solutions, however, cannot be free from the assumption of non-colluding servers under multi-server models, and thus fail to defend against some attacks from cloud service providers. For this reason, we present encrypted sequence comparison (E-SC), the first security system that works by executing encrypted sequence comparison under a single-server model. Two character sequences are encrypted by end users before outsourcing, while the encrypted character sequences are compared directly by a single cloud server to return their similarity results. To accomplish this goal, novel computable encryption algorithms are designed in this paper. Then, a collusion-resistant outsourcing is achieved using non-interactive padding, partition, and expansion mechanisms. Results of simulation experiments demonstrate that the client-side overhead is quadratic in the input number of salt values, along with an optimal server-side performance. Also, the overall runtime of our E-SC system is positively correlated with its security level, which is more practical in realistic applications.
On the intrinsic constraint of bacterial growth rate: M. tuberculosis’s view of the protein translation capacity

Abstract In nature, the maximal growth rates vary widely among different bacteria species. Fast-growing bacteria species such as Escherichia coli can have a shortest generation time of 20 min. Slow-growing bacteria species are perhaps best known for Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a human pathogen with a generation time being no less than 16 h. Despite of the significant progress made on understanding the pathogenesis of M. tuberculosis, we know little on the origin of its intriguingly slow growth. From a global view, the intrinsic constraint of the maximal growth rate of bacteria remains to be a fundamental question in microbiology. In this review, we analyze and discuss this issue from the angle of protein translation capacity, which is the major demand for cell growth. Based on quantitative analysis, we propose four parameters: rRNA chain elongation rate, abundance of RNA polymerase engaged in rRNA synthesis, polypeptide chain elongation rate, and active ribosome fraction, which potentially limit the maximal growth rate of bacteria. We further discuss the relation of these parameters with the growth rate for M. tuberculosis as well as other bacterial species. We highlight future comprehensive investigation of these parameters for different bacteria species to understand how bacteria set their own specific growth rates.
Efficient improvement method for separation of reflection components based on an energy function

In this paper, we propose a novel and effective method for improving the accuracy of separating reflection components in a single image based on the dichromatic reflection model after calculating the diffuse reflection component by any existing method. Separating reflection components accurately is very important and useful in computer vision to detect highlight areas, which are often regarded as outliers, and to enhance image quality, especially texture, because we can control the intensity and apply a filter independently to each reflection component. Our proposed method is based on unsharp masking and an energy function. The method does not require any information in advance, and is applicable to many products, such as TVs. Experimental results show that our method can improve the separation of reflection components by a maximum of 13.06 dB in the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR).
Proteomic Selection of Immunodiagnostic Antigens for Trypanosoma congolense

Animal African Trypanosomosis (AAT) presents a severe problem for agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa. It is caused by several trypanosome species and current means of diagnosis are expensive and impractical for field use. Our aim was to discover antigens for the detection of antibodies to Trypanosoma congolense, one of the main causative agents of AAT. We took a proteomic approach to identify potential immunodiagnostic parasite protein antigens. One hundred and thirteen proteins were identified which were selectively recognized by infected cattle sera. These were assessed for likelihood of recombinant protein expression in E. coli and fifteen were successfully expressed and assessed for their immunodiagnostic potential by ELISA using pooled pre- and post-infection cattle sera. Three proteins, members of the invariant surface glycoprotein (ISG) family, performed favorably and were then assessed using individual cattle sera. One antigen, Tc38630, evaluated blind with 77 randomized cattle sera in an ELISA assay gave sensitivity and specificity performances of 87.2% and 97.4%, respectively. Cattle immunoreactivity to this antigen diminished significantly following drug-cure, a feature helpful for monitoring the efficacy of drug treatment.
Daily Bisphenol A Excretion and Associations with Sex Hormone Concentrations: Results from the InCHIANTI Adult Population Study

Background Bisphenol A (BPA) is a high production volume chemical widely used in packaging for food and beverages. Numerous studies have demonstrated that BPA can alter endocrine function in animals, yet human studies remain limited. Objective We estimated daily excretion of BPA among adults and examined hypothesized associations with serum estrogen and testosterone concentrations. Methods We conducted cross-sectional analyses using data from the InCHIANTI Study, a prospective population-based study of Italian adults. Our study included 715 adults between 20 and 74 years old. BPA concentrations were measured by liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry in 24-hr urine samples. The main outcome measures were serum concentrations of total testosterone and 17β-estradiol. Results Geometric mean urinary BPA concentration was 3.59 ng/mL [95% confidence interval (CI), 3.42–3.77 ng/mL], and mean excretion was 5.63 μg/day (5th population percentile, 2.1 μg/day; 95th percentile, 16.4 μg/day). We found higher excretion rates among men, younger respondents, and those with increasing waist circumference (p = 0.013) and weight (p = 0.003). Higher daily BPA excretion was associated with higher total testosterone concentrations in men, in models adjusted for age and study site (p = 0.044), and in models additionally adjusted for smoking, measures of obesity, and urinary creatinine concentrations (β = 0.046; 95% CI, 0.015–0.076; p = 0.004). We found no associations with the other serum measures. We also found no associations with the primary outcomes among women, but we did find an association between BPA and SHBG concentrations in the 60 premenopausal women. Conclusion Higher BPA exposure may be associated with endocrine changes in men. The mechanisms involved in the observed cross-sectional association with total testosterone concentrations need to be clarified.
Crowdsourcing for Language Resource Development: Critical Analysis of Amazon Mechanical Turk Overpowering Use

This article is a position paper about crowdsourced microworking systems and especially Amazon Mechanical Turk, the use of which has been steadily growing in language processing in the past few years. According to the mainstream opinion expressed in the articles of the domain, this type of on-line working platforms allows to develop very quickly all sorts of quality language resources, for a very low price, by people doing that as a hobby or wanting some extra cash. We shall demonstrate here that the situation is far from being that ideal, be it from the point of view of quality, price, workers' status or ethics and bring back to mind already existing or proposed alternatives. Our goal here is threefold: 1 - to inform researchers, so that they can make their own choices with all the elements of the reflection in mind, 2- to ask for help from funding agencies and scientific associations, and develop alternatives, 3- to propose practical and organizational solutions in order to improve new language resources development, while limiting the risks of ethical and legal issues without letting go price or quality.
The role of estrogen receptors in the auditory system

Both laboratory and clinical studies have previously demonstrated estrogenic effects on the auditory function. The overall scope of this study was to investigate the physiological and molecular involvement of estrogens and estrogen receptors alpha (ERα) and beta (ERβ) in hearing physiology. ERα and ERβ were localized in a number of central auditory structures in mice, and their differential localization suggested distinct roles in auditory processing. ER expression was assessed in young, prepubertal and aged mice with diverging levels of estrogens. Changes in the expression patterns were not uniform between groups, suggesting that region-specific mechanisms regulate ERs expression. Neither age group showed sex differences in ER expression. Chronic 17β-estradiol treatment in ovariectomized mice resulted in molecular changes in the central (inferior colliculus) and peripheral (cochlea) auditory structures. Down-regulation of ERα mRNA in the cochlea and inferior colliculus may be a direct effect of estrogen-induced feedback inhibition of ERα transcription. No changes were noted for ERβ mRNA levels, suggesting that ERβ is constitutively expressed, rather than directly regulated by circulating hormones. Concurrent with these molecular changes, auditory-related behavioral parameters were altered by 17βestradiol treatment. Improved prepulse inhibition of the acoustic startle response after 17β-estradiol treatment, suggested an estrogenic modulation of sensorimotor gating. Investigation of mice deficient in ERα (ERKO mice), ERβ (BERKO mice) and aromatase (ARKO mice) suggested a protective role for ERβ in the auditory system against acoustic trauma. Brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which is a neuroprotective peptide that can be induced by estrogens, increased in the cochlea after treatment with an ERβ-selective agonist, whereas it was decreased in the cochlea of BERKO and ARKO mice. ERβ-mediated neuroprotective mechanisms against noise exposure involving neurotrophic factor BDNF, were suggestive of estrogens’ supportive contributions to the auditory function. Analysis of ERα, ERβ and BDNF levels in the cochlea during the reproductive cycle, revealed regulation of ERα but not ERβ or BDNF by endocrine activity. ERα levels were lower in high-estrogen conditions, suggesting that ERα expression in the peripheral auditory system is regulated by circulating sex hormones and acts as an interface between endocrine activity and the auditory system. Taken together, these results suggest an involvement of estrogens and their receptors along with neurotrophic factors in the physiology of the mammalian auditory system. Unraveling the distinct roles of estrogen receptors in the auditory system may provide novel treatment strategies and pharmacological targets for the support of hearing. ISBN: 978-91-7457-606-1
Using the Surface Free Energy Method to Evaluate the Effects of Nanomaterial on the Fatigue Life of Hot Mix Asphalt

AbstractFatigue cracking is the main form of structural damage in hot mix asphalt (HMA) at moderate temperatures. The one of ways to reduce this type of distress is use of nanomaterials as additives in asphalt mixtures. In this study, the effects of using nano-TiO2 as an asphalt binder modifier on the fatigue life of asphalt mixtures are assessed by surface free energy (SFE) method and indirect tensile fatigue (ITF) test. The HMA mixtures containing 0, 3, and 6% of nano-TiO2 are plant prepared with two sources of aggregate (granite and limestone), and one type of asphalt binder with 85/100-penetration grade. The results showed that fatigue lives of mixtures containing nano-TiO2 were higher than the control mixtures. This is attributed to the fact that adding nano-TiO2 leads to decrease of the acid component of SFE and increase of the basic component in SFE of the asphalt binder that enhances the adhesion between asphalt binder and aggregate. Furthermore, the asphalt mixtures made with the modified asphalt.
Inhibition of oxidative phosphorylation suppresses the development of osimertinib resistance in a preclinical model of EGFR-driven lung adenocarcinoma

Metabolic plasticity is an emerging hallmark of cancer, and increased glycolysis is often observed in transformed cells. Small molecule inhibitors that target driver oncogenes can potentially inhibit the glycolytic pathway. Osimertinib (AZD9291) is a novel EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) that is potent and selective for sensitising (EGFRm) and T790M resistance mutations. Clinical studies have shown osimertinib to be efficacious in patients with EGFRm/ T790M advanced NSCLC who have progressed after EGFR-TKI treatment. However experience with targeted therapies suggests that acquired resistance may emerge. Thus there is a need to characterize resistance mechanisms and to devise ways to prevent, delay or overcome osimertinib resistance. We show here that osimertinib suppresses glycolysis in parental EGFR-mutant lung adenocarcinoma lines, but has not in osimertinib-resistant cell lines. Critically, we show osimertinib treatment induces a strict dependence on mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation (OxPhos), as OxPhos inhibitors significantly delay the long-term development of osimertinib resistance in osimertinib-sensitive lines. Accordingly, growth conditions which promote a less glycolytic phenotype confer a degree of osimertinib resistance. Our data support a model in which the combination of osimertinib and OxPhos inhibitors can delay or prevent resistance in osimertinib-naïve tumour cells, and represents a novel strategy that warrants further pre-clinical investigation.