Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pastoralists in the northeastern Mara Plains, Kenya: archaeological investigations of the Pastoral Neolithic and the Pastoral Iron Age

During the 1980s, a fairly detailed picture was constructed of the prehistory of the Loita-Mara region, Narok District, southwestern Kenya, up to Elmenteitan times. However, the archaeological sequence after the Elmenteitan period remained poorly understood. Researchers from the University of Helsinki therefore undertook an initial examination of this post-Elmenteitan period in 1984 and 1986. This paper presents results of the work thus undertaken and of the oral histories collected. Field survey in the northeastern Mara Plains identified a host of Pastoral Iron Age (PIA) sites and many late or post-Elmenteitan sites, provisionally named ‘Oldorotua’ and thought likely to date, based on currently available evidence, to the transition between the Pastoral Neolithic and the Pastoral Iron Age. Two PIA sites were excavated, an iron-smelting/working furnace (GuJe 32) and a few hundred years old boma (GuJf 70). In addition, oral histories were also collected from local informants. Based on these field studies a preliminary culture-historical base sequence for the area is proposed, ranging from Pastoral Neolithic times to the twentieth century. This can be used as a working hypothesis for future research in the area.
Anaemia Prevalence among Under-five Children in Imo State, Nigeria

A cross-sectional study of children aged 6-60 months was carried out in nine Local Government Areas (LGAs). A total of four hundred (400) under-five children were selected by purposive sampling method. Two hundred were from the urban and another two hundred from the rural locations. Height, weight, and mid-upper arm circumferences of the children were measured. Weighed 3-day food record for 20% of the sub sample was analyzed for proximate composition. Blood samples for determination of haemoglobin (Hb), packed cell volume (PCV), and vitamin C levels were obtained by vein puncture. Stool samples were collected to determine parasitic infestations. Structured and validated questionnaire was administered to elicit information related to socio-economic status of the parents and health status of the children. Statistical analysis was done using SPSS/PC (version 13), level of significance taken as P<0.05. The results showed that70.5% of under-fives were anaemic and 48.1% were iron deficient. Vitamin C necessary for iron absorption was below recommended allowances. Anaemia was prevalent in both rural and urban locations; however it was more in rural settings. Educational levels of parents, mosquito bites, child's size and appearance ratings, and vitamin/mineral drops consumption were the socio-economic factors associated with prevalence of anaemia. Based on these findings high premium for nutrition of mothers is advocated.
The endocannabinoid system in the regulation of emotions throughout lifespan: a discussion on therapeutic perspectives

Alterations in emotion regulation processes may form the basis of psychopathologies. The endocannabinoid (eCB) system, composed of endogenous ligands, the enzymatic machinery in charge of their metabolism and the specific metabotropic receptors, has emerged as a major neuromodulatory system critically involved in the control of emotional homeostasis and stress responsiveness. Data from animal models indicate that the eCB system plays a key role in brain development, and is probably involved in the control of emotional states from early developmental stages. The present review summarizes the latest information on the role of the eCB system in emotionality and anxiety-related disorders throughout the lifespan. Putative therapeutic strategies based on the pharmacological modulation of this system will be discussed. Given the fact that the pharmacological modulation of the eCB system has recently arisen as a promising strategy in the management of anxiety and mood disorders, the potential efficacy of this pharmacological approach (i.e. blockers of the catabolic pathway) will be discussed, as well as pharmacological alternatives such as modulators of cannabinoid receptors other than the classical CB1 receptor, or administration of other plant-derived compounds (e.g. cannabidiol).
Adolescents’ responses to cigarette advertisements: links between exposure, liking, and the appeal of smoking

OBJECTIVE To evaluate adolescents’ responses to cigarette advertisements for different brands. DESIGN Adolescents were shown one print advertisement for each of five cigarette brands (Camel, Marlboro, Kool, Benson & Hedges, and Lucky Strike). They indicated on a structured questionnaire how many times they had seen the advertisement (or one almost like it), how much they liked it, whether or not they thought it made smoking more appealing, and whether or not it made them want to smoke cigarettes of that brand. SETTING Middle school and high school classrooms, seven schools in four states in the United States (New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas). The classrooms were selected randomly within each school. PARTICIPANTS 534 adolescents in grades 6–12 (ages 11–18 years) from seven schools in four states, 54% female, 76% white. RESULTS The advertisements for Camel and Marlboro were more likely than the advertisements for the other brands to be seen, to be liked, to be viewed as making smoking appealing, and to influence adolescents to want to smoke cigarettes of that brand. More than 95% of the adolescents had seen an advertisement featuring Joe Camel or the Marlboro Man at least once, and more than 50% had seen these advertisements six or more times. Nearly half believed that the Joe Camel advertisement makes smoking more appealing, and 40% believed that the Marlboro Man advertisement makes smoking more appealing. Adolescent smokers were more likely than non-smokers to believe that the advertisements for Camel and Marlboro make smoking more appealing. CONCLUSIONS The advertisements most popular among adolescents are for two of the brands they are most likely to smoke—Marlboro and Camel. The results of the study are consistent with the view that certain cigarette advertisements enhance the appeal of smoking to many adolescents.
Two main ways to model the self-organization of cortical microtubules

Cortical microtubules are components of the cytoskeleton of eukaryotic cells. They perform a very important role for the shape of plant cells controlling the synthesis of cellulose by guiding the trajectory of the plant cellulose synthase [1, 2]••. Indeed, microtubules form a parallel pattern at the cellular scale, thus cellulose is well organized, giving to the cell its shape, its strength, and allowing its growth to be anisotropic [3]•. Microtubules are helped in these roles by microtubule associated proteins (MAPs), which can have many different properties, stabilizing or not microtubules, helping them to grow or to nucleate, walking on them carrying cargos [4]. Because it allows cells and organs to have a correct shape, the process that synthesize cellulose is important: it must be adaptive and dynamic. As microtubules are dynamic polymeric structures, that continuously grow and shrink, they allow the cell to respond to its environment. In particular, they continuously grow by an end, the plus end and, shrink by the minus end if it is not anymore bound to its nucleation site. As the growth speed is higher than the shrinkage speed, most of the time the microtubule grows. This particular property allows the polymers to move forward even if none of the monomers moves itself. This motion is called treadmilling [5, 6]•. As cortical microtubules are bound to the membrane [6], they evolve on a surface, and can encounter each other. When they meet, the growing microtubule can have three different behavior. If the angle between the two microtubules is acute, the growing microtubule will zip up with the one it meets (zippering). If the angle is wide (larger than 40◦), in some cases the growing microtubule crosses over the other one (crossover), or it will rapidly depolymerize (induced catastrophe) (Figure 1) [7]•.
THROUGH THICK AND THIN: EARLY POTTERY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

Conventional wisdom has it that ceramic technology reached southernmost Africa with or just ahead of the so-called Iron Age, Bantu migrations of ca 2000 years ago. A review of the evidence suggests that the earliest ceramics in the subcontinent are thin-walled and smooth surfaced vessels, technologically quite distinct from the first thick-walled, coarse surfaced “Iron Age” ware of the subcontinent, and predating the latter by two to four centuries. There is no published evidence of a thin-walled ware to the north of the Zambezi, although undated examples are known from coastal Angola. It seems unlikely that the thin-walled wares in southernmost Africa represent a residue of some mass human migration in the distant past. It is more likely that the art of making fired clay pots reached the subcontinent through archaeologically invisible infiltrations by small groups, perhaps peripatetic artisans; or it may have been invented locally.
A Lightweight GAN Network for Large Scale Fingerprint Generation

Generating fingerprint images for biometric purposes is both necessary and challenging. In this study, we presented a fingerprint generation approach based on generative adversarial network. To ensure GAN training stability, we have introduced conditional loss doping that allows a continuous flow of gradients. Our study utilizes a careful combination of a residual network and spectral normalization to generate fingerprints. The proposed average residual connection shows more immunity against vanishing gradients than a simple residual connection. Spectral normalization allows our network to enjoy reduced variance in weight generation, which further stabilizes the training. Proposed scheme uses spectral bounding only in the input and the fully connected layers. Our network synthesized fingerprints up to 256 by 256 in size. We used the multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) metric for measuring the diversity of the generated samples. Our model has achieved 0.23 MS-SSIM scores for the generated fingerprints. The MS-SSIM score indicates that the proposed scheme is more likely to produce more diverse images and less likely to face mode collapse.
Microalbuminuria—A Biomarker of Renal Microvascular Disease

Microalbuminuria (amount greater than 30–300 mg/day) reflects an abnormal glomerular capillary permeability to protein. It is usually dependent upon three mechanisms. First, loss of negatively charged surface of the glomerular capillary wall secondary to circulating toxic substances injury—namely, oxidative stress and proinflammatory cytokines—allows the albumin with negatively charged surface to freely escape into the urine. Second, intraglomerular hypertension and hemodynamic maladjustment secondary to glomerular endothelial dysfunction increases filtration pressure and enhances sized selective proteinuria leakage. Third, podocyte injury leads to a vicious cycle of hemodynamic maladjustment and endothelial and podocyte injuries. All three of these mechanisms induce glomerular endothelial injury and microalbuminuria, which reflects renal microvascular disease.
New Mechanism of Rosiglitazone to Reduce Neointimal Hyperplasia: Activation of Glycogen Synthase Kinase-3&bgr; Followed by Inhibition of MMP-9

Objective—Mechanism of neointimal hyperplasia after vascular injury includes activation of signaling pathways and matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) that are involved in cell proliferation and migration. Rosiglitazone, a synthetic peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-&ggr; (PPAR-&ggr;) agonist, was reported to inhibit neointimal hyperplasia in diabetic animals and humans. But the underlying mechanism has not been clarified. In this study, we examined how rosiglitazone inhibited neointimal hyperplasia. Methods and Results—The proliferation and survival of cultured rat VSMCs were reduced by rosiglitazone, which was mediated by inhibition of ERK and activation GSK-3&bgr;, without change of Akt. The antiproliferative effect of rosiglitazone was reversed by GSK-3&bgr; inactivation. The migration of VSMCs was also suppressed by rosiglitazone that inhibited the expression and activity MMP-9 through GSK-3&bgr; activation. Thus migration of MMP-9(−/−) VSMCs from MMP-9 knockout mice was not affected by rosiglitazone. The underlying mechanism of MMP-9 suppression by rosiglitazone was that it inhibited NF-&kgr;B DNA binding activity, which was also dependent on GSK-3&bgr;. In rat carotid artery, balloon injury significantly inactivated GSK-3&bgr; with induction of MMP-9, which was effectively prevented by rosiglitazone. Thus, rosiglitazone significantly decreased the ratio of intima to media by reducing proliferation and inducing apoptosis of VSMCs at neointima, which was reversed by inactivation of GSK-3&bgr; with adenoviral transfer of catalytically-inactive GSK-KM gene. Conclusions—Rosiglitazone activates GSK-3&bgr;, which inhibits not only proliferation of VSMCs but also migration of VSMCs through blocking NF-&kgr;B–dependent MMP-9 activation.
Ultralow thermal conductivity in all-inorganic halide perovskites

Significance Discovery of materials with low thermal conductivity in simple, fully dense, and single-crystalline solids has proven extremely challenging. This paper reports the discovery of ultralow thermal conductivity (∼0.4 W⋅m−1⋅K−1) in single-crystalline, all-inorganic halide perovskite nanowires, which is comparable to their amorphous limit value. We attribute ultralow thermal conductivity to a cluster rattling mechanism, based on strong phonon–phonon scattering via the coexistence of collective motions involving various atom groups. These results call attention to the vital thermal transport processes and thermal management strategies for applications with all-inorganic halide perovskites. Further, CsSnI3 shows a rare combination of ultralow thermal conductivity and high electrical conductivity, so it can be a promising material for unique applications as an electrically conductive thermal insulator. Controlling the flow of thermal energy is crucial to numerous applications ranging from microelectronic devices to energy storage and energy conversion devices. Here, we report ultralow lattice thermal conductivities of solution-synthesized, single-crystalline all-inorganic halide perovskite nanowires composed of CsPbI3 (0.45 ± 0.05 W·m−1·K−1), CsPbBr3 (0.42 ± 0.04 W·m−1·K−1), and CsSnI3 (0.38 ± 0.04 W·m−1·K−1). We attribute this ultralow thermal conductivity to the cluster rattling mechanism, wherein strong optical–acoustic phonon scatterings are driven by a mixture of 0D/1D/2D collective motions. Remarkably, CsSnI3 possesses a rare combination of ultralow thermal conductivity, high electrical conductivity (282 S·cm−1), and high hole mobility (394 cm2·V−1·s−1). The unique thermal transport properties in all-inorganic halide perovskites hold promise for diverse applications such as phononic and thermoelectric devices. Furthermore, the insights obtained from this work suggest an opportunity to discover low thermal conductivity materials among unexplored inorganic crystals beyond caged and layered structures.
Androgen and Prostate Cancer: Is the Hypothesis Dead?

Data from animal, clinical, and prevention studies support the role of androgen in prostate cancer growth, proliferation, and progression. However, results serum-based epidemiologic studies in humans have been inconclusive. Part of the inconsistency in these findings stems from differences in study population, assay accuracy, intraperson variation, and limited sample size. Recently, data from a large pooled analysis of 18 prospective studies (3,886 cases and 6,438 healthy controls) showed no association between serum androgen and prostate cancer risk. It is not surprising that the pooled analysis did not find a positive link between circulating levels of total testosterone and prostate cancer risk because, individually, few of the 18 studies included in the pooled analysis reported a substantial positive association. The null result, however, does not pronounce a death sentence for the androgen hypothesis; rather, it underscores the importance of a better understanding of androgen action within the prostate, including the relationship between tissue and serum levels of androgen. In this commentary, we explain why circulating levels of testosterone may not reflect androgen action in the prostate and why tissue levels of androgen, in particular dihydrotestosterone, and the androgen receptor and its coregulators are critical to androgen action in the prostate and should be incorporated in future studies. It is timely to integrate system thinking into our research and use an interdisciplinary approach that involves different disciplines, including epidemiology, endocrinology, pathology, and molecular biology, to help dissect the complex interplay between sex steroids and genetic and lifestyle factors in prostate cancer etiology. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2008;17(10):2525–30)
Antibacterial activity of two adhesive systems using various microbiological methods.

PURPOSE To compare the antibacterial activities of two dentin bonding systems (DBS), Clearfil Protect Bond and Xeno III, by agar well, paper and dentin disks, and a cavity tooth model. MATERIALS AND METHODS For the well technique, the test materials were filled in the agar wells inoculated with Streptococcus mutans (ATCC 25175). The paper disks were embedded in adhesives and placed on the seeded agar plates for the second technique. The adhesives were applied on the dentin disks and placed in holes in the plates for the third technique. After 48 h, the zones of inhibition were measured. In the cavity tooth model test, 3 cavities were prepared in the flat occlusal dentin of extracted human molars. The teeth were left in S. mutans for 72 h to allow bacterial invasion. The DBS were applied in the same manner as in clinical application on each of the two infected cavities and the third was left unapplied for control. The teeth were kept in saline for 72 h. Standard amounts of dentin chips were obtained from the cavity walls and the number of bacteria recovered was counted. RESULTS The results were analyzed by factorial ANOVA and Dunnett C test. Clearfil Protect Bond primer exhibited the greatest inhibition zones followed by Consepsis and unpolymerized Xeno III in all the techniques tested (p < or = 0.05). Clearfil Protect Bond resulted in significantly less bacterial recovery than Xeno III by the tooth cavity method (p < or = 0.05). CONCLUSION Clearfil Protect Bond was found to be the most antibacterial material with all the techniques used. Furthermore, Clearfil Protect Bond was able to inactivate the bacteria in the cavity more effectively than Xeno III.
Gas desorption induced discharge in vacuum and its polarity effect

The objective of this paper is to propose mechanisms of gas desorption induced discharge and their polarity effect. Three electrode pair types were combined in the in-situ experimental apparatus with high vacuum; air-exposed cathode and anode, airexposed cathode and conditioned anode, conditioned cathode and air-exposed anode. Electrode pairs were subjected to repetitive impulse voltage breakdowns till conditioning saturation. The results showed two gas desorption induced discharge mechanisms; namely, pulsed current discharge (PCD) and pulsed current induced breakdown (PB). Many gas desorption induced discharge (PCD and PB) occurred in air-exposed cathode and anode pair and air-exposed cathode and conditioned anode pairs. While only a few discharges occurred in the conditioned cathode and air-exposed anode pair. The gas desorption induced discharge in vacuum showed a polarity effect; Only when the cathode electrode of the pair was the original air-exposed electrode, no matter the anode electrode was or not, gas desorption induced discharge (PCD and PB) could occur in the beginning stage of the conditioning. The physical evolution of gas desorption induced discharge is explained.
NOMA-Aided UAV Communications over Correlated Rician Shadowed Fading Channels

In this paper, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is investigated as a viable solution to address spectrum scarcity in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications. Specifically, the performance analysis of a NOMA-aided UAV communication system (UCS) with dual-diversity receivers on UAVs is conducted over bivariate Rician shadowed fading channels. Using newly obtained closed-form expressions for the joint probability density function (PDF) and joint cumulative distribution function (CDF), the outage probability and finite signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) diversity gain of NOMA-aided UCS are investigated within a stochastic geometry framework. A comprehensive analysis reveals that NOMA-aided UCSs can support more UAVs on the same spectrum than OMA-based systems, with similar outage probability. It is also shown that the cross correlation affects the diversity gain of NOMA-aided and OMA-based UCSs only at low SNR regimes. Therefore, NOMA-aided UCSs can be an attractive alternative over OMA-based UCSs in future wireless systems.
A Study on Piezoelectric Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks Deployed in a Weak Vibration Environment

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is an interestingly promising technology with many applications in intelligent environment-monitoring. Its energy consumption is, however, essentially challenged after it is deployed. In this paper, we developed a low-resonant-frequency piezoelectric energy harvesting device as an alternative to power WSN deployed in a weak vibration environment. An energy management module, equipped with a full-bridge rectifier (FBR), a fully self-powered voltage controller, and a logic-level protection circuit was designed to enable a regulated voltage to intermittently drive WSN for temperature monitoring. The power transfer efficiency of FBR reached 42%, presenting a good performance/cost ratio in the case of a relatively high open-circuit voltage of 8 V and a low rectified voltage of 3.3 V. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed WSN was successfully driven at an interval time of less than 1 min, and fully self-powered by the scavenged energy from the environmental vibration source of a 0.15-g acceleration and a 40-Hz vibration frequency.
Diagnosing Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in College Students

Objective: Formal criteria for the use informant-ratings of adult ADHD symptoms have not been established yet they are commonplace in standard assessment batteries. Method: The current study explores the relationship between self- and informant-ratings and the impact of requiring interrater agreement in a sample comprised of 190 self-referred college students. Results: Participants self-reported higher childhood and current symptoms scores and current impairment scores than informants. Similarities were evident between diagnostic groups who met ADHD criteria by self-report only and by both sources when considering the number of self-reported settings of impairment. Diagnostic groups who met criteria by informant-report only and by both sources were similar when considering informant-reported settings of impairment. Conclusion: Participants who meet criteria for ADHD based on one source endorse a similar number of settings of impairment as participants who meet criteria for ADHD by both sources. The implications for the use of informant-ratings are presented. (J. of Att. Dis. 2009; 13(3) 277-283)