Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Microstructure and Electromagnetic Properties of Microwave Sintered NiCuZn+CCTO Composites Materials for Application in LTCC Devices

In this paper, microwave sintering (MS) technology has been applied in the preparation of ferromagnetic-ferroelectric composites. The Ni0.3Zn0. 6Cu0.1Fe2O4(NiCuZn) + 15%(wt.)CaCu3Ti4O12(CCTO) composites have been fabricated by both MS technology and conventional sintering (CS) technology, respectively. We found that the fabricating time and sintering temperature were 22 h and 1100 for the CS process and 2 hand 900 for the MS process. Experiments show that MS treated NiCuZn-CCTO composites possess both excellent ferromagnetic and ferroelectric properties. For the composites of NiCuZn+15% CCTO, the real part of permittivity is larger than 360 when the frequency is lower than 1.2 MHz, and the real part of dielectric constant is larger than 2000 when the frequency is lower than 1.0 MHz. Our results indicate that the MS method is a potential important technique in LTCC technology.
Oleaginous yeast: a value-added platform for renewable oils

Abstract Yeast single cell oil (SCO) is a non-crop-based, renewable oil source that can be used for the production of bio-based oleochemicals. Stand-alone production of SCO for oleochemicals is currently not cost-competitive because lower-cost alternatives from petroleum and crop-based resources are available. Utilizing low-valued nutrient sources, implementing cost-efficient downstream processes and adopting biotechnological advancements such as systems biology and metabolic engineering could prove valuable in making an SCO platform a reality in the emerging bio-based economy. This review aims to consider key biochemical pathways for storage lipid synthesis, possible pathways for SCO yield improvement, previously used bioprocessing techniques for SCO production, challenges in SCO commercialization and advantages of adopting a renewable SCO platform.
Molecular dynamics simulation of solvated azurin: Correlation between surface solvent accessibility and water residence times

A system containing the globular protein azurin and 3,658 water molecules has been simulated to investigate the influence on water dynamics exerted by a protein surface. Evaluation of water mean residence time for elements having different secondary structure did not show any correlation. Identically, comparison of solvent residence time for atoms having different charge and polarity did not show any clear trend. The main factor influencing water residence time in proximity to a specific site was found to be its solvent accessibility. In detail for atoms belonging to lateral chains and having solvent‐accessible surface lower than ∼16 Å2a relation is found for which charged and polar atoms are surrounded by water molecules characterized by residence times longer than the non polar ones. The involvement of the low accessible protein atom in an intraprotein hydrogen bond further modulates the length of the water residence time. On the other hand for surfaces having high solvent accessibility, all atoms, independently of their character, are surrounded by water molecules which rapidly exchange with the bulk solvent. Proteins 2000;39:56–67. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Acute appendicitis presenting as priapism in an 8 year old.

Priapism is uncommon in children. When it does occur the etiology is usually leukemia, sickle cell disease, or trauma. (1) We present a case of priapism in a child in whom the underlying etiology was acute appendicitis. To our knowledge, this has never been reported in the literature.
Rates of and Risk Factors for Trabecular and Cortical BMD Loss in Middle‐Aged and Elderly African‐Ancestry Men

Low trabecular (Tb) and cortical (Ct) volumetric BMD (vBMD) are related to increased fracture risk, but little is known about the patterns and correlates of Tb and Ct vBMD loss with aging. We examined the rates of change in total, Tb.vBMD, and Ct.vBMD at the radius and tibia, and identified factors associated with vBMD loss among 1569 men of African descent aged 40 years and older. Quantitative computed tomography was used to measure vBMD 6 years apart. The annualized rate of loss in Tb.vBMD was significant at the radius (–0.047%/yr, p = 0.016) but not at the tibia. At the radius, a significant loss of Tb.vBMD was observed in men aged 40 to 49 years that appeared to be attenuated and not statistically significant among older age men. In contrast, the decline in Ct.vBMD was similar at both skeletal sites (–0.254 to –0.264%/yr, p < 0.0001) and was consistent across all age groups. Positive associations were found for vBMD changes with body weight (all but radius Ct.vBMD) and diabetes (Ct.vBMD only), whereas negative associations were found with hypertension (all but radius Tb.vBMD), smoking (Ct.vBMD only), and androgen deprivation therapy (cortical vBMD only). Trabecular and cortical vBMD loss appears to follow different patterns among middle‐ and older‐aged men of African ancestry. Factors associated with the decline in vBMD also varied by compartment and anatomical site. Additional studies are needed to better understand the physiological mechanisms underlying early BMD loss among African‐ancestry men. © 2014 American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.
EFICIÊNCIA SANITÁRIA DE FILTROS ANAERÓBIOS AVALIADA EM FUNÇÃO DA REMOÇÃO DE OVOS DE VERMES E COLIFORMES FECAIS

The technology of anaerobic reactors for sanitary wastewater treatment has been extensively developed in Brazil.They present several advantages, such as low construction and operating costs, and low sludge production, the anaerobic reactors are an attractive alternative to minimize problematic lack of basic sanitation in urban areas, and also of the rural areas. The anaerobic filters have been widely used in Brazil. It produces an effluent with low concentration of organic matter and solids suspended, besides conserving the nutrients, therefore, it is good for use in irrigation, but the practice must be associated with knowledge of the pathogens presence. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the efficiency of anaerobic filters in removal faecal coliforms and helminth eggs, about to that, three different systems of sewer treatment composed by anaerobic filters were analyzed. The protocol used to enumerate helminths eggs was the modified Bailenger method, (Ayres and Mara, 1996) recommended by WHO for evaluation of raw effluent and treated effluent.The membrane filtration method was utilized to determine the concentrations of faecal coliforms. The results, in a general analysis, showed that all the researched systems reached a larger removal than 93% to helminth eggs, resulting in an effluent with smaller average than 1 egg/L. One of these systems, Sistema RN, reached a larger removal than 99%, confirming the good performance of the anaerobic filters in removal helminths eggs. Even with low concentrations of eggs in the influent, the filters were able to effectively remove this parameter, ensuring a satisfactory result because it is a cheap and simple reactor of the viewpoint operational and maintenance, and has a significant health response. About faecal coliforms, it was observed for all the researched systems an effluent with 106 CFU/100mL . Even the filters not having made a good efficiency on removal of faecal coliform, the effluent of them showed low concentrations of suspended solids which is to facilitate the processes of disinfection by chlorine or UV. Key-Words: anaerobic filters, faecal coliforms, helminth eggs, wastewater treatment.
Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, cholesterol gallstones, and cholecystectomy: new insights on a complex relationship

Purpose of review Gallstone disease (GSD) and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD often coexist in a given patient and both conditions are associated to obesity and insulin resistance. The relationship between GSD and NAFLD is complex and bidirectional. In the present review, we summarize the existing information on the complex link between GSD and NAFLD and the potential implications for patient care. Recent findings Several clinical studies and systematic reviews have addressed the association between NAFLD and GSD underscoring that NAFLD is an independent risk factor for GSD. Conversely, GSD has been found also to be an independent risk factor for NAFLD with GSD potentially being linked to greater disease severity. In addition to the data showing association of NAFLD and GSD, recent evidence has also showed that cholecystectomy may itself be a risk factor for NAFLD development. The complex and bidirectional relationship between these diseases is partially explained by a number of common pathogenic links but the precise underlying mechanisms of the association of GSD and NAFLD need to be better delineated. Also, although the mechanisms of the promotional effect of cholecystectomy on NAFLD development are unknown, recent findings unveiling new aspects of gallbladder physiology and endocrine actions of bile acids provide a framework to advance research in this field. Summary In this review, we address the different aspects of the complex association between NAFLD and GSD. The potential underlying mechanisms and recent information on endocrine actions of bile acids and the gallbladder are reviewed.
Dimensional analysis of the concept of obesity.

AIM The aim of this paper is to explore the evolution of the concept of obesity and to identify variations in its meaning and use from the perspectives of healthcare professionals and Black Americans, Caucasian Americans, and Latino Americans. BACKGROUND Obesity constitutes an emerging global healthcare epidemic. Little convergence is found between the meaning and use of the concept of obesity by healthcare professionals and those they are trying to serve. This lack of convergence points to the need for exploration of the assumptions, use and various meanings associated with this important concept. METHOD The analysis included 20 papers from 18 research studies from the fields of nursing, psychology, epidemiology, medicine, and sociology. Caron and Bowers' dimensional analysis method guided the analysis. RESULTS Eight dimensions were identified: objective measure, attractiveness, sexual desirability, health, body image, strength or goodness, self-esteem, and social acceptability. Substantial differences in assumptions, use, and meanings of this concept were found within and between the perspectives studied. However, there were insufficient data to fully assess use and meaning of the concept of obesity from the Latino American perspective. CONCLUSION This analysis contributes to the development of an understanding of the meaning and use of the concept of obesity within varied socio-cultural contexts as well as from a healthcare perspective. Culture was found to play a significant role in how obesity is understood by the individual.
Acute Viral Hepatitis in Pediatric Age Groups.

INTRODUCTION Our clinical experience showed that there has been no decrease in pediatric cases of acute viral hepatitis in Kathmandu. The objective of the study was to analyze the etiology, clinical features, laboratory parameters, sonological findings and other to determine the probable prognostic factors of Acute Viral Hepatitis in pediatric population. METHODS Consecutive patients of suspected Acute Viral Hepatitis, below the age of 15 years, attending the liver clinic between January 2006 and December 2010 were studied. After clinical examination they were subjected to blood tests and ultrasound examination of abdomen. The patients were divided in 3 age groups; 0-5, 5-10 and 5-15 years. Clinical features, laboratory parameters, ultrasound findings were compared in three age groups. RESULTS Etiology of Acute Viral Hepatitis was Hepatitis A virus 266 (85%), Hepatitis E virus in 24 (8%), Hepatitis B virus in 15 (5%). In 7(2%) patients etiology was unknown. Three patients went to acute liver failure but improved with conservative treatment. There was no statistical difference in most of the parameters studied in different age groups. Ascites was more common in 5-10 years age group. Patients with secondary bacterial infection, ultrasound evidence of prominent biliary tree and ascites were associated with increased duration of illness. Patients with history of herbal medications had prolonged cholestasis. CONCLUSIONS Hepatitis A is most common cause of Acute Viral Hepatitis in pediatric population. Improper use of herbal medications, secondary bacterial infection and faulty dietary intake was associated with prolonged illness. Patients with prominent biliary radicals should be treated with antibiotics even with normal blood counts for earlier recovery.
Compact Optical Polarization Rotators Based on an Asymmetric Silicon Waveguide

We design and compare two kinds of polarization rotators based on a partially etched waveguide: 1) the quadrate pattern and 2) the tapered pattern in the partially etched area. The devices are fabricated on a commercially available 200-mm silicon on insulator wafer with a 340 nm-thick top silicon and a 2 μm-thick buried dioxide. The tapered design realizes a polarization extinction ratio of ~ 13.3 dB for transverse-electric (TE)-transverse-magnetic (TM) rotation and 14.8 dB for TM-TE rotation, respectively. Compared with the quadrate structure, the tapered structure has an insertion loss reduction of ~ 2 dB for the TE-polarized input light and 1 dB for the TM-polarized input light without affecting the rotation efficiency in the wavelength range of 1525-1610 nm. Furthermore, the effects of the fabrication errors are analyzed and the results explain well the disagreement between the simulation and experimental results.
Spatial distribution of debris thickness and melting from remote-sensing and meteorological data, at debris-covered Baltoro glacier, Karakoram, Pakistan

Abstract A distributed surface energy-balance study was performed to determine sub-debris ablation across a large part of Baltoro glacier, a wide debris-covered glacier in the Karakoram range, Pakistan. The study area is ~124km2. The study aimed primarily at analyzing the influence of debris thickness on the melt distribution. The spatial distribution of the physical and thermal characteristics of the debris was calculated from remote-sensing (ASTER image) and field data. Meteorological data from an automatic weather station at Urdukas (4022ma.s.l.), located adjacent to Baltoro glacier on a lateral moraine, were used to calculate the spatial distribution of energy available for melting during the period 1–15 July 2004. The model performance was evaluated by comparisons with field measurements for the same period. The model is reliable in predicting ablation over wide debris-covered areas. It underestimates melt rates over highly crevassed areas and water ponds with a high variability of the debris thickness distribution in the vicinity, and over areas with very low debris thickness (<0.03 m). We also examined the spatial distribution of the energy-balance components (global radiation and surface temperature) over the study area. The results allow us to quantify, for the study period, a meltwater production of 0.058 km3.
Changes in Tacrolimus Distribution in Blood and Plasma Protein Binding Following Liver Transplantation

Therapeutic drug monitoring of tacrolimus is complicated by the conflicting evidence of a relationship between trough blood tacrolimus concentration and clinical outcome. This prospective study investigated the blood distribution and protein binding of tacrolimus in liver transplant recipients over the first 60 days after transplantation with a view to identifying possible predictors of clinical outcome. Blood samples were collected from 10 liver transplant recipients on days 1, 7, and 60 after the initiation of tacrolimus therapy, and the distribution of tacrolimus in blood and the plasma protein binding were investigated. The unbound concentration of tacrolimus in plasma was estimated. Graft status was assessed using liver function tests and liver biopsies. The association of tacrolimus with erythrocytes varied significantly (74.4 ± 5.0% vs 80.4 ± 3.4%; P = 0.034) from day 1 to day 60. In plasma, tacrolimus mainly associated with lipoprotein-deficient plasma (60.1 ± 6.5%), followed by high-density lipoproteins (27.2 ± 6.6%), low-density lipoproteins (10.0 ± 4.2%), and very low-density lipoproteins (2.8 ± 1.8%). The percentage of tacrolimus associated with leukocytes (1.10 ± 0.40% vs 0.40 ± 0.09%; P = 0.0003) and the unbound concentration of tacrolimus (0.70 ± 0.19 vs 0.28 ± 0.04 ng/L; P < 0.0001) were observed to be significantly lower during episodes of rejection. In patients experiencing tacrolimus-related side effects, only the unbound concentration of tacrolimus was found to be significantly higher (0.84 ± 0.19 vs 0.53 ± 0.19 ng/L; P < 0.0001), and blood concentrations were not different (9.2 ± 2.2 vs 8.1 ± 1.8 ng/mL; P = 0.1). Blood distribution and protein binding of tacrolimus vary significantly over the posttransplantation period, leading to changes in its unbound concentration. A prospective study in a larger cohort of patients is required to establish the role of blood distribution and protein binding of tacrolimus in its therapeutic drug monitoring.
Detecting Anxiety through Reddit

Previous investigations into detecting mental illnesses through social media have predominately focused on detecting depression through Twitter corpora. In this paper, we study anxiety disorders through personal narratives collected through the popular social media website, Reddit. We build a substantial data set of typical and anxiety-related posts, and we apply N-gram language modeling, vector embeddings, topic analysis, and emotional norms to generate features that accurately classify posts related to binary levels of anxiety. We achieve an accuracy of 91% with vector-space word embeddings, and an accuracy of 98% when combined with lexicon-based features.
Winner-take-all neural network with digital frequency-locked loop

This paper proposes a new winner-take-all neural network (WTANN), in which input vector information is conveyed by frequency-modulated signals, and neuron computation is carried out by digital frequency-locked loops (DFLLs). The DFLL uses direct digital frequency synthesizer (DDS) as its local oscillator. Frequency resolution of signal generated by the DDS is decided by the size of internal register. Winner search operation is implemented by using frequency comparator circuit, and is distributed among all neurons. The proposed WTANN architecture was described in VHDL and its feasibility was verified by VHDL simulations. Preliminary simulation results show that the proposed SOM has good capability in classifying input vectors.
Dual-Mode Filtering Power Divider With High Passband Selectivity and Wide Upper Stopband

A novel microstrip dual-mode filtering power divider (FPD) is presented in this letter. Stemming from the distinctive voltage distribution along an open-ended one-wavelength ( $\lambda$ ) microstrip line, the dual-mode FPD is initially constructed by utilizing proper coupling topologies between the open-ended transmission line and two dual-mode resonators. Meanwhile, its good isolation performance is attained by introducing an isolation resistor between the two dual-mode resonators. Next, the explicit synthesis method is described to design the proposed FPD with prescribed performance. A prototype FPD at 2.4 GHz is in final implemented and measured. As theoretically expected, this proposed FPD exhibits better than 22-dB isolation within the entire operation band along with 17-dB harmonic suppression up to 7.5 GHz (3.1f0).
Transferrin neutralization of amyloid beta 25-35 cytotoxicity.

BACKGROUND Fibrillar aggregates of amyloid beta 25-35 (Abeta(25-35)) form rapidly in vitro able to lyse human red blood cells (RBCs). Human sera, albumin, and apolipoprotein E (ApoE) each limit fibrillation and cytotoxicity. Potentially, these substances protect neurons from Abeta(1-40/42) aggregates. Transferrin (TF) is investigated in this study. METHODS The Mattson red blood cells model was employed to determine whether co-incubation of transferrin and Abeta(25-35) prevented lysis. The formation of fibrillar Abeta(25-35) in the presence of transferrin was investigated using Congo red staining and spectrophotometric studies. RESULTS We found that incubation of 20 muM Abeta(25-35) with physiologic levels of transferrin prevented red blood cells lysis and the formation of macro-aggregates. CONCLUSIONS These in vitro results suggest that transferrin may limit fibrillar beta amyloid formation in vivo and cytotoxicity.
A Coprime Blur Scheme for Data Security in Video Surveillance

This paper presents a novel coprime blurred pair (CBP) model to improve data security in camera surveillance. While most previous approaches have focused on completely encrypting the video stream, we introduce a spatial encryption scheme by strategically blurring the image/video contents. Specifically, we form a public stream and a private stream by blurring the original video data using two different kernels. Each blurred stream will provide the user who has lower clearance less access to personally identifiable details while still allowing behavior to be monitored. If the behavior is recognized as suspicious, a supervisor can use both streams to deblur the contents. Our approach is based on a new CBP theory where the two kernels are coprime when mapped to bivariate polynomials in the z domain. We show that coprimality can be derived in terms of the rank of Bézout matrix formed by sampled polynomials, and we present an efficient algorithm to factor the Bézout matrix for recovering the latent image. To make our solution practical, we implement our decryption scheme on a graphics processing unit (GPU) to achieve real-time performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our new scheme can effectively protect sensitive identity information in surveillance videos and faithfully reconstruct the unblurred video stream when both CBP sequences are available.
Optimal therapy in hepatitis C virus genotypes 2 and 3 patients

Current guidelines recommend that patients with genotype 2 (G2) and 3 (G3) chronic hepatitis C be treated with pegylated interferon (PEG‐IFN) plus low doses of ribavirin (800 mg/day) for 24 weeks, resulting in a sustained virological response (SVR) rate of approximately 80%. Considering these high response rates, several recent randomized trials have assessed whether shorter treatment (12–16 weeks) could be cost‐effective in these patients. The results of these studies vary but suggest better responsiveness in G2 patients, and overall, do not strongly support reducing treatment to <24 weeks in all patients. On the other hand, the presence of a rapid virological response (RVR) (defined as an undetectable hepatitis C virus‐RNA at 4 weeks of treatment) was always reported to be the best positive predictor of achieving SVR in both G2 and G3 patients. These results suggest that in a subgroup of subjects with RVR (G2>G3, viral load <400 000 IU, low fibrosis, no metabolic cofactors), shorter treatment is as effective as standard regimens, and that it can be proposed mainly if problems of poor tolerance or adherence are foreseen. It is possible that the SVR rate in non‐RVR patients and non‐responder patients could also be improved by prolonging therapy, but this must be specifically investigated in other studies along with the role of IL28B polymorphisms.