Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A comparison between grid and particle methods on the statistics of driven, supersonic, isothermal turbulence

We compare the statistics of driven, supersonic turbulence at a high Mach number using FLASH, a widely used Eulerian grid-based code, and PHANTOM, a Lagrangian smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code at resolutions of up to 512 3 in both grid cells and SPH particles. We find excellent agreement between codes on the basic statistical properties: a slope of k −1.95 in the velocity power spectrum for hydrodynamic, Mach 10 turbulence, evidence in both codes for a Kolmogorov-like slope of k −5/3 in the variable ρ 1/3 v as suggested by Kritsuk et al. and a lognormal probability distribution function (PDF) with a width that scales with the Mach number and proportionality constant b = 0.33–0.5 in the density variance–Mach number relation. The measured structure function slopes are not converged in either code at 512 3 elements. We find that for measuring volumetric statistics such as the power spectrum slope and structure function scaling, SPH and grid codes give roughly comparable results when the number of SPH particles is approximately equal to the number of grid cells. In particular, to accurately measure the power spectrum slope in the inertial range, in the absence of sub-grid turbulence models, requires at least 512 3 computational elements in either code. On the other hand the SPH code was found to be better at resolving dense structures, giving maximum densities at a resolution of 128 3 particles that were similar to the maximum densities resolved in the grid code at 512 3 cells, reflected also in the high density tail of the PDF. We find SPH to be more dissipative at comparable numbers of computational elements in statistics of the velocity field, but correspondingly less dissipative than the grid code in the statistics of density-weighted quantities such as ρ 1/3 v. For SPH simulations of high Mach number turbulence, we find it important to use sufficient non-linear β-viscosity in order to prevent particle interpenetration in shocks (we require βvisc = 4 instead of the widely used default value, βvisc = 2).
Socioeconomic Barriers to Rhegmatogenous Detachment Surgery in Brazil

Purpose. To verify access barriers patients with retinal detachment face to arrive at a reference center and to evaluate patients' knowledge about the disease. Methods. Transversal study that applied a questioner to 65 patients of the Clinical Hospital of the University of Sao Paulo with retinal detachment between February and August of 2010. Results. Reasons for not performing the surgery in other services were as follows: 47% were referred because there was not vitreoretinal surgeon at original service; 27% could not afford the surgery, had no health insurance, or had no coverage at health insurance plan for the procedure. Time between the first symptom and the arrival at our service was as follows: 18 patients arrived in up to 7 days; 35 between 8 and 30 days; 8 between 31 and 90 days; 5 in more than 90 days. Reasons for delay were as follows: 70% did not know how serious the pathology was; 56% thought that it had spontaneous cure; 16% did not have money to pay for ophthalmic evaluation, 10% did not know where to go and 24% for other reasons. Conclusion. Educational programs about disease and measures to optimize the referral to specialized services are needed to accelerate the treatment of patients with rhegmatogenous retinal detachment.
Sexual dichroism and pigment localization in the wing scales of Pieris rapae butterflies

The beads in the wing scales of pierid butterflies play a crucially important role in wing coloration as shown by spectrophotometry and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The beads contain pterin pigments, which in Pieris rapae absorb predominantly in the ultraviolet (UV). SEM demonstrates that in the European subspecies Pieris rapae rapae, both males and females have dorsal wing scales with a high concentration of beads. In the Japanese subspecies Pieris rapae crucivora, however, only the males have dorsal wing scales studded with beads, and the dorsal scales of females lack beads. Microspectrophotometry of single scales without beads yields reflectance spectra that increase slightly and monotonically with wavelength. With beads, the reflectance is strongly reduced in the UV and enhanced at the longer wavelengths. By stacking several layers of beaded scales, pierid butterflies achieve strong colour contrasts, which are not realized in the dorsal wings of female P. r. crucivora. Consequently, P. r. crucivora exhibits a strong sexual dichroism that is absent in P. r. rapae.
Bioflotation and bioflocculation review: microorganisms relevant for mineral beneficiation

In a world of diminishing resources, current research efforts are often directed to extending the life of existing resources and developing technology to treat resources deemed uneconomic. To this end, biotechnology has been explored as a potential low cost, environmentally benign alternative to many of the current mineral processing techniques. Microorganisms and their metabolites have been successfully applied in the leaching of metals from medium and low grade sulphide minerals for many years. Recent fundamental studies have shown that selected bacteria may also assist in the beneficiation of these minerals through bioflotation and bioflocculation. The current published research demonstrates that several bacteria and their excreted proteins and polysaccharides have a significant effect on the surface chemical properties of some minerals. As such, the bacterial cells and their metabolites can be utilised as flotation collectors and modifiers enabling selective separation. To date, these studies have primarily focused on the sulphide minerals; however, there is considerable scope to expand this research for the beneficiation of oxide minerals such as those contained in iron ores. This paper provides a comprehensive review of current research on the use of microorganisms for mineral beneficiation and the potential use of genetically modified bacteria and, further, discusses the applicability of bioflotation and bioflocculation for the beneficiation of Australian iron ores.
A New Algorithm for Fitting a Gaussian Function Riding on the Polynomial Background

In this letter, an efficient algorithm is presented for fitting a Gaussian signal riding on a polynomial background. It is shown that the nonlinear least-squares fitting can be transformed into a standard linear least-squares fitting. The proposed method has the advantage of not requiring the initial estimates of the parameters, and it significantly reduces the computational cost. Various applications of this method have been successfully applied to real world problems; including the problem of estimating the parameters of characteristic waveforms on the modeling of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals and the problem of robust ECG RS-amplitude estimation.
IP Covert Channel Detection

A covert channel can occur when an attacker finds and exploits a shared resource that is not designed to be a communication mechanism. A network covert channel operates by altering the timing of otherwise legitimate network traffic so that the arrival times of packets encode confidential data that an attacker wants to exfiltrate from a secure area from which she has no other means of communication. In this article, we present the first public implementation of an IP covert channel, discuss the subtle issues that arose in its design, and present a discussion on its efficacy. We then show that an IP covert channel can be differentiated from legitimate channels and present new detection measures that provide detection rates over 95%. We next take the simple step an attacker would of adding noise to the channel to attempt to conceal the covert communication. For these noisy IP covert timing channels, we show that our online detection measures can fail to identify the covert channel for noise levels higher than 10%. We then provide effective offline search mechanisms that identify the noisy channels.
Effect of Impurities on the Microstructure of HPT Deformed Nickel

Basic research considering the minimum achievable grain size of severe plastic deformation (SPD) materials is often performed with high purity metals. However, a literature study reveals large discrepancies in the microstructural size of high purity nickel processed by SPD. The focus of this work is the influence of small impurity concentrations on the resulting saturation microstructure. The microstructure of SPD nickel was systematically investigated using different purities ranging from 99.79 wt% up to 99.99 wt%. The materials were deformed by high pressure torsion (HPT) at different temperatures from liquid nitrogen temperature (-196°C) up to 400°C. It was found that carbon concentration is the governing element in achieving the finest microstructures and the highest strength. Therefore, further experiments with well defined carbon doped samples were performed. By changing the carbon content from 0.008 wt% up to 0.06 wt% tensile strength in the saturation regime increases by more than 700 MPa. It will be shown that even small variations (<0.01 wt%) lead to significant changes in ductility and tensile strength values.
Intake of Lactobacillus plantarum Reduces Certain Gastrointestinal Symptoms During Treatment With Antibiotics

Goals To examine if intake of Lactobacillus plantarum can prevent gastrointestinal side effects in antibiotic-treated patients. Background Diarrhea is a common side effect of treatment with antibiotics. Some studies indicate that the risk of antibiotic-associated diarrhea can be reduced by administration of certain probiotic microorganisms. Study Patients treated for infections at a university hospital infectious diseases clinic were randomized to daily intake of either a fruit drink with L. plantarum 299v (1010 colony forming units/d) or a placebo drink, until a week after termination of antibiotic treatment. Subjects recorded the number and consistency of stools as well as gastrointestinal symptoms until up to 3 weeks after last intake of test drink. Fecal samples were collected before the first intake of test drink and after termination of antibiotic therapy and analyzed for Clostridium difficile toxin. Results Clinical characteristics on admission were similar in the 2 groups. The overall risk of developing loose or watery stools was significantly lower among those receiving L. plantarum [odds ratio (OR), 0.69; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.52-0.92; P=0.012], as was development of nausea (OR, 0.51; 95% CI, 0.30-0.85; P=0.0097). Diarrhea defined as ≥3 loose stools/24 h for ≥2 consecutive days was unaffected by the treatment (OR, 1.4; 95% CI, 0.33-6.0; P=0.86). No significant differences regarding carriage of toxin producing C. difficile were observed between the groups. Conclusions Our results indicate that intake of L. plantarum could have a preventive effect on milder gastrointestinal symptoms during treatment with antibiotics.
Crucial design issues for special access technology; a Delphi study

Abstract Purpose: To develop and demonstrate a method to involve professional users of assistive technology (AT) in the development process of customisable products. Employing the ideas of user participation and mass customisation, this research addresses the need for reduced product costs and optimised product flexibility. Method: An adaptable six-question Delphi study was developed to establish consensus among AT professionals on design issues relating to a specified AT domain requiring innovation. The study is demonstrated for the special access technology (SAT) domain. A modified morphological matrix structures the application of the study results to the product design process. Results: Fourteen professionals from the Republic of Ireland and the UK participated. Consensus was reached on prevalent parts of SAT that malfunction, primary reasons for SAT malfunction, characteristics of clients associated with SAT selection, client needs regarding SAT use and training, desirable traits of SAT and clinicians’ frustrations with SAT. Conclusion: The study revealed a range of problems related to SAT, highlighting the complexities of successful SAT adoption. The questions led to differentiated insights and enabled design solution conceptualisation from various perspectives. The approach was found to help facilitate efficient generation and application of professional users’ knowledge during the design process of customisable AT. Implications for Rehabilitation High product costs and device abandonment negatively affect many people who use assistive technology (AT). Poor device design is a root cause of these two problems. To address this issue, a method for the practical concept generation of customisable AT is proposed and demonstrated. The method aims to support the development of new, low-cost products which satisfy a broad range of consumers‘ needs. The literature requests suitable methods to facilitate the involvement of different types of AT users in the product design process. This paper presents a method to first establish consensus on important design issues for a specified AT domain, and subsequently to apply these issues to the product design process. This paper describes the method's application for a customisable special access technology (SAT) device. Crucial design issues for SAT devices are presented to assist future SAT development work in research and industry. This research supports and provides validation for a number of past studies about desirable criteria for AT. These studies declared that further research was required to confirm their results.
Virtual Circle Based Geometric Modeling of Holes for Geographic Routing

Void areas (holes) are hardly avoided in wireless sensor networks because of various actual geographical environments, e.g., puddles, buildings or obstacles, or uneven energy consumption. To bypass holes, most existing geographic routing protocols tend to route data packets along the boundaries of holes by perimeter routing scheme. Such a scheme depletes the energy of nodes on the boundary of holes faster than others and is likely to result in earlier deaths, thus enlarging the hole sizes, a phenomenon we call the hole diffusion problem. Routing along the hole boundary may also lead to increased collisions especially if multiple data streams try to bypass a hole simultaneously. In this paper, we propose virtual circle based geometric modeling of holes for geographic routing to address these problems in wireless sensor networks. Our proposed algorithm avoids routing on the hole perimeter by selecting appropriate intermediate anchor nodes (close to the hole boundary) and routing via this anchor node. We show by simulation that our proposed algorithm provides significant savings in energy consumption, shorter routing delays, higher packet delivery ratio, all with comparable control overhead as compared with state-of-the-art techniques.
Intracoronary administration of autologous mesenchymal stem cells in a critically ill patient with dilated cardiomyopathy

Zeinaloo AA, Zanjani KS. , Bagheri MM. , Mohyeddin‐Bonab M, Monajemzadeh M, Arjmandnia MH. Intracoronary administration of autologous mesenchymal stem cells in a critically ill patient with dilated cardiomyopathy. Pediatr Transplantation 2011: 15: E183–E186. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons A/S.
Mass spectrometry as a novel approach to probe cooperativity in multimeric enzymatic systems.

Investigating cooperativity in multimeric enzymes is of utmost interest to improve our understanding of the mechanism of enzymatic regulation. In the present article, we propose a novel approach based on mass spectrometry to probe cooperativity in the binding of a ligand to a multisubunit enzyme. This approach presents the selective advantage of giving a direct insight into all the subsequent ligation states that are formed in solution as the ligand is added to the enzyme. A quantitative interpretation of the electrospray ionization (ESI) mass spectra gives the relative abundance of all the distinct enzymatic species, which allows one to directly deduce the cooperativity of the system. The overall method is described for the addition of the oxidized cofactor nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD(+)) to a dimeric mutant of Bacillus stearothermophilus glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GPDH). It is then applied to four tetrameric enzymes: sturgeon muscle GPDH, wild type and S48G mutant of GPDH from B. stearothermophilus, and alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) from Bakers yeast. The results illustrate the possibilities offered by this new technique. First, mass spectrometry allows a control of the enzymes before the addition of NAD(+). Second, the cooperative behavior can be drawn from one single ESI mass spectrum, which makes the method highly attractive in terms of the amount of biological material required. Above all, the major benefit lies in the direct visualization of all the enzymatic species that are in equilibrium in solution. The direct measurement of cooperativity readily resolve the inconvenience of the classical approaches employed in this field, which all need to model the experimental data in order to get the cooperative behavior of the system.
Coronal heating in coupled photosphere-chromosphere-coronal systems: turbulence and leakage

Context. Coronal loops act as resonant cavities for low-frequency fluctuations that are transmitted from the deeper layers of the solar atmosphere. These fluctuations are amplified in the corona and lead to the development of turbulence that in turn is able to dissipate the accumulated energy, thus heating the corona. However, trapping is not perfect, because some energy leaks down to the chromosphere on a long timescale, limiting the turbulent heating. Aims. We consider the combined effects of turbulence and energy leakage from the corona to the photosphere in determining the turbulent energy level and associated heating rate in models of coronal loops, which include the chromosphere and transition region. Methods. We use a piece-wise constant model for the Alfven speed in loops and a reduced MHD-shell model to describe the interplay between turbulent dynamics in the direction perpendicular to the mean field and propagation along the field. Turbulence is sustained by incoming fluctuations that are equivalent, in the line-tied case, to forcing by the photospheric shear flows. While varying the turbulence strength, we systematically compare the average coronal energy level and dissipation in three models with increasing complexity: the classical closed model, the open corona, and the open corona including chromosphere (or three-layer model), with the last two models allowing energy leakage. Results. We find that (i) leakage always plays a role. Even for strong turbulence, the dissipation time never becomes much lower than the leakage time, at least in the three-layer model; therefore, both the energy and the dissipation levels are systematically lower than in the line-tied model; (ii) in all models, the energy level is close to the resonant prediction, i.e., assuming an effective turbulent correlation time longer than the Alfven coronal crossing time; (iii) the heating rate is close to the value given by the ratio of photospheric energy divided by the Alfven crossing time; (iv) the coronal spectral range is divided in two: an inertial range with 5/3 spectral slope, and a large-scale peak where nonlinear couplings are inhibited by trapped resonant modes; (v) in the realistic three-layer model, the two-component spectrum leads to a global decrease in damping equal to Kolmogorov damping reduced by a factor u_(rms)/V_a^c where V_a^c is the coronal Alfven speed.
Effect of DISC1 on the P300 waveform in psychosis.

INTRODUCTION Abnormalities in the neurophysiological measures P300 amplitude and latency constitute endophenotypes for psychosis. Disrupted-in-Schizophrenia-1 (DISC1) has been proposed as a promising susceptibility gene for schizophrenia, and a previous study has suggested that it is associated with P300 deficits in schizophrenia. METHODS We examined the role of variation in DISC1 polymorphisms on the P300 endophenotype in a large sample of patients with schizophrenia or psychotic bipolar disorder (n = 149), their unaffected relatives (n = 130), and unrelated healthy controls (n = 208) using linear regression and haplotype analysis. RESULTS Significant associations between P300 amplitude and latency and DISC1 polymorphisms/haplotypes were found. Those homozygous for the A allele of single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs821597 displayed significantly reduced P300 amplitudes in comparison with homozygous for the G allele (P = .009) and the heterozygous group (P = .018). Haplotype analysis showed a significant association for DISC1 haplotypes (rs3738401|rs6675281|rs821597|rs821616|rs967244|rs980989) and P300 latency. Haplotype GCGTCG and ACGTTT were associated with shorter latencies. DISCUSSION The P300 waveform appears to be modulated by variation in individual SNPs and haplotypes of DISC1. Because DISC1 is involved in neurodevelopment, one hypothesis is that disruption in neural connectivity impairs cognitive processes illustrated by P300 deficits observed in this sample.
A selective ATP-competitive sphingosine kinase inhibitor demonstrates anti-cancer properties

The dynamic balance of cellular sphingolipids, the sphingolipid rheostat, is an important determinant of cell fate, and is commonly deregulated in cancer. Sphingosine 1-phosphate is a signaling molecule with anti-apoptotic, pro-proliferative and pro-angiogenic effects, while conversely, ceramide and sphingosine are pro-apoptotic. The sphingosine kinases (SKs) are key regulators of this sphingolipid rheostat, and are attractive targets for anti-cancer therapy. Here we report a first-in-class ATP-binding site-directed small molecule SK inhibitor, MP-A08, discovered using an approach of structural homology modelling of the ATP-binding site of SK1 and in silico docking with small molecule libraries. MP-A08 is a highly selective ATP competitive SK inhibitor that targets both SK1 and SK2. MP-A08 blocks pro-proliferative signalling pathways, induces mitochondrial-associated apoptosis in a SK-dependent manner, and reduces the growth of human lung adenocarcinoma tumours in a mouse xenograft model by both inducing tumour cell apoptosis and inhibiting tumour angiogenesis. Thus, this selective ATP competitive SK inhibitor provides a promising candidate for potential development as an anti-cancer therapy, and also, due to its different mode of inhibition to other known SK inhibitors, both validates the SKs as targets for anti-cancer therapy, and represents an important experimental tool to study these enzymes.
Broadband Balanced Frequency Doublers With Fundamental Rejection Enhancement Using a Novel Compensated Marchand Balun

<? Pub Dtl? >In this paper, a novel compensation technique is proposed to improve the imbalance of a Marchand balun due to the unequal odd- and even-mode phase velocities of the coupled lines. Using this method, the fundamental rejection of the balanced doubler with the Marchand balun can be effectively enhanced. Two single-balanced doublers using the improved Marchand balun are designed, fabricated, and measured to verify the concept in CMOS processes. One doubler for 15–36-GHz possesses <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$-$</tex></formula>10-dB conversion gain with the 3-dB bandwidth of 82.4% and the fundamental rejection of 33 dB. The other doubler for 95–150 GHz achieves <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$-$</tex></formula>7.9-dB conversion gain with the 3-dB bandwidth of 45% and the fundamental rejection of 30 dB. With the proposed compensation technique, these frequency doublers feature wide bandwidths and high fundamental rejections.