Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Endurance exercise training promotes medullary hematopoiesis

Endurance exercise is a poorly defined yet powerful mediator of hematopoiesis. The purpose of this study was to directly investigate the effects of endurance exercise training on hematopoiesis and to identify potential mechanisms responsible for any observed changes. Four‐week‐old male C57Bl/6 mice were trained on a treadmill at progressive speeds over a 10‐wk period. Tissues were harvested 2 d following the final training session. Flow cytometry, the cobblestone area‐forming cell assay, and the methycellulose colony‐forming unit assay were used to assess medullary and mobilized hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells. Quantitative real‐time PCR and Western blots were used to measure hematopoietic cytokine production. Histochemistry was also used to assess adaptations to exercise in the bone marrow niche. Depending on the cell type, endurance training increased medullary and mobilized hematopoietic stem and progenitor cell content from 50 to 800%. Training also reduced marrow cavity fat by 78%. Skeletal muscle hematopoietic cytokine expression was also increased at least 60% by training. Sedentary mice served as controls for the above experiments. In conclusion, endurance exercise training greatly promotes hematopoiesis and does so through improvements in medullary niche architecture as well as increased skeletal muscle hematopoietic cytokine production. —Baker, J. M. , De Lisio, M. , Parise, G. Endurance exercise training promotes medullary hematopoiesis. FASEB J. 25, 4348–4357 (2011). www.fasebj. org
Water Resistant Caesium Lead Bromide Crystal Composites

Water-resistant luminescent polymer composites with CsPbBr<inf>3</inf> quantum dots in Cs<inf>4</inf>PbBr<inf>6</inf> crystals (CsPbBr<inf>3</inf>@Cs<inf>4</inf>PbBr<inf>6</inf>) are reported. These color-converting materials enable a narrow-band green emission with fast dynamics and are therefore a potential alternative to phosphors, mainly for applications that require a fast modulation of light.
Passivity Analysis and Pinning Control of Multi-Weighted Complex Dynamical Networks

A multi-weighted network model with different dimensions of output and input vectors is studied in this paper. First, we analyze the passivity of the proposed network model by employing some inequality techniques and Lyapunov functional method, and give a synchronization condition for output-strictly passive complex dynamical network with multi-weights (CDNMWs). Furthermore, by using pinning adaptive strategies to control a small portion of nodes or edges, some sufficient conditions for ensuring passivity of CD-NMWs are presented. In addition, when CDNMWs under the designed pinning adaptive control strategies are output-strictly passive, two synchronization criteria are also established. Finally, two examples are given to show the validity of the obtained results.
An antisense RNA that governs the expression kinetics of a multifunctional virulence gene

Genome‐wide transcriptome analyses of several bacterial species have recently uncovered a hitherto unappreciated amount of antisense transcription. However, the physiological role, regulation and significance of such antisense transcripts are presently unclear. We now report the identification of a cis‐encoded 1.2 kb long antisense RNA – termed AmgR – that is complementary to the mgtC portion of the mgtCBR polycistronic message from Salmonella enterica. The mgtCBR mRNA specifies the MgtC protein, which is necessary for survival within macrophages, virulence in mice and growth in low Mg2+; the Mg2+ transporter MgtB with no apparent role in virulence; and the membrane peptide MgtR mediating MgtC degradation. Expression of AmgR dimished both MgtC and MgtB protein levels in a process requiring RNase E but independent of RNase III, the RNA chaperone Hfq, and the regulatory peptide MgtR. Inactivation of the chromosomal amgR promoter increased MgtC and MgtB protein levels and enhanced Salmonella virulence. Surprisingly, AmgR transcription is governed by the regulatory protein PhoP, which also directs transcription of the sense mgtCBR mRNA. AmgR may function as a timing device that alters MgtC and MgtB levels after the onset of PhoP‐inducing conditions.
Homo-Junction Bottom-Gate Amorphous In–Ga–Zn–O TFTs With Metal-Induced Source/Drain Regions

A fabrication process for homo-junction bottom-gate (HJBG) amorphous In–Ga–Zn–O (a-IGZO) thin-film transistors (TFTs) is proposed, in which the a-IGZO section as source/drain (S/D) regions is induced into a low resistance state by coating a thin metal Al film and then performing a thermal annealing in oxygen, with the channel region protected from back etching by depositing and patterning a protective layer. The experimental results show that with a 5 nm Al film and annealing at 200 °C, the sheet resistance of the S/D a-IGZO is reduced to 803 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula>/□, and keeps stable during a subsequent thermal treatment. In addition, the thin Al<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub> film generated by the annealing contributes to an improved thermal stability and ambient atmosphere immunity for the fabricated HJBG TFTs.
A Compact and Broadband Photonic Crystal Fiber Polarization Filter Based on a Plasmonic Resonant Thin Gold Film

A novel high birefringence gold-coated photonic crystal fiber (PCF) polarization filter based on surface plasmon resonance is proposed. The six elliptical holes arranged in a specific mode surrounding the core are utilized to gain high birefringence, and gold is coated inside the air holes to generate surface plasmons. By improving structural parameters, we achieve one state of polarization to propagate through the filter whereas the other state is severely attenuated. Specially, in the 1550 nm communication band, the confinement loss of y-polarized mode can reach 442 dB/cm while the corresponding loss of x-polarized mode is only 0.0316 dB/cm. The distinction between two losses is more than 10 000 times. In addition, when the length of the designed PCF filter is 1 mm, an extinction ratio of 326 dB/cm is obtained. The applicable bandwidth is up to 300 nm while the fiber length is merely 50 μm, which is better than other reported literatures. Owing to above-mentioned characteristics, the proposed polarization filter can be widely applied in compact and broadband filters in the communication band.
High Performance Single Crystalline Diamond Normally-Off Field Effect Transistors

High performance normally-off hydrogen-terminated diamond (H-diamond) MOSFETs were fabricated on single crystalline diamond grown in our lab. The device with 2-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> gate length shows threshold voltage of −1.0 V, and a drain current of 51.6 mA/mm at <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{\mathrm{ GS}}= {V}_{\mathrm{ DS}} = -4.5$ </tex-math></inline-formula> V and an on-resistance of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$65.39~ \Omega \cdot $ </tex-math></inline-formula>mm. The transconductance keeps increasing when <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{V}_{\mathrm{ GS}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> shifts from <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{V}_{\mathrm{ TH}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> toward more negative direction, and reaches the record high value of 20 mS/mm at <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{V}_{\mathrm{ GS}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of −4.5 V, which benefitted from the almost constant mobility of the holes in the gate voltage range of −4 V <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$< V_{\mathrm{ GS}} < -2$ </tex-math></inline-formula> V. The critical device process to realize these low on-resistance normally-off MOSFETs consists of 2-min UV ozone treatment of the H-diamond surface and thermal oxidation of aluminum film in the air to form an alumina gate dielectric.
MLACA With Modified Grouping Strategy for Efficient Superconducting Circuit Analysis

Electromagnetic analysis of superconducting integrated circuits is routinely required for inductance extraction. FastHenry is a well-known, applicable magnetoquasistatic analysis tool. It is accelerated with the multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA). A multilevel adaptive cross approximation solver with singular value decomposition recompression (MLACA-SVD) was recently proposed for FastHenry, as an alternative to the MLFMA. It was found to be more efficient, with regards to accuracy versus required memory. It uses the same octree grouping as FastHenry's MLFMA. Here, two modified grouping strategies are proposed to further improve MLACA-SVD efficiency by compressing interactions between larger groups, while maintaining scaling performance consistent with valid admissibility of interactions. The strategies are denoted “shell merging” and “wall merging. ” Results show that the MLACA-SVD solver with merging requires about four times less memory than FastHenry's MLFMA, for similar accuracy. Shell merging is found to be slightly superior.
Spatial resolution of two bacterial cell division proteins: ZapA recruits ZapB to the inner face of the Z‐ring

FtsZ, the essential regulator of bacterial cell division, is a dynamic cytoskeletal protein that forms helices that condense into the Z‐ring prior to division. Two small coiled‐coil proteins, ZapA and ZapB, are both recruited early to the Z‐ring. We show here that ZapB is recruited to the Z‐ring by ZapA. A direct interaction between ZapA and ZapB is supported by bacterial two‐hybrid and in vitro interaction assays. Using high‐resolution 3‐D reconstruction microscopy, we find that, surprisingly, ZapB is located inside the Z‐ring in virtually all cells investigated. We propose a molecular model in which ZapA increases lateral interactions between FtsZ proto‐filaments and ZapB mediates further stabilization of this interaction by cross‐linking ZapA molecules bound to adjacent FtsZ proto‐filaments. Gene deletion and complementation assays show that ZapB can mitigate cell division and Z‐ring assembly defects even in the absence of ZapA, raising the possibility that ZapB stimulates Z‐ring assembly by two different mechanisms.
A Reliable Technology for Advanced SiC-MOS Devices Based on Fabrication of High Quality Silicon Oxide Layers by Converting a-Si

An alternative technological approach is proposed to obtain a SiO2 film on SiC using processes that finally reduce the effective fabrication costs. Accordingly, we report achieving of a high-quality oxide on 4H-SiC substrate using a process flow that consists in a preliminary deposition by sputtering, at room temperature, of an amorphous Si thin layer, followed by its oxidation at a relative low temperature (1100 °C) for SiC MOS technology. The X-ray reflectivity measurements demonstrated that the resulted oxide has a comparable roughness with the one thermally grown and presents the advantage of an almost threefold thinner interfacial layer. The improvement of the oxide/semiconductor interface was further validated by the electrical investigation of the fabricated MOS structures, where a significant diminishing of the effective oxide charge density, interface traps density, and near interface oxide traps density was assessed. Thus, we demonstrated that, for a specified thickness of the oxide layer on SiC, the proposed technological flow not only significantly reduces the standard duration of the process necessary and consequently the associated fabrication cost, but, more important, leads to superior oxides and interfaces, in terms of both micro-physical and electrical properties.
Defocus Magnification Using Conditional Adversarial Networks

Defocus magnification is the process of rendering a shallow depth-of-field in an image captured using a camera with a narrow aperture. Defocus magnification is a useful tool in photography for emphasis on the subject and for highlighting background bokeh. Estimating the per-pixel blur kernel or the depth-map of the scene followed by spatially-varying re-blurring is the standard approach to defocus magnification. We propose a single-step approach that directly converts a narrow-aperture image to a wide-aperture image. We use a conditional adversarial network trained on multi-aperture images created from light-fields. We use a novel loss term based on a composite focus measure to improve generalization and show high quality defocus magnification.
Comparison of measures of collaborative filtering recommender systems: rating prediction accuracy versus usage prediction accuracy

Recommender Systems (RSs) help users to find items of their choices. There are many types of RSs that produce good recommendations for the user. Every system designer tries to choose the best RS for their application. There is a basic question after each recommendation computation. Is the recommended item liked by the user? The whole process to compute recommendation is meaningful, if the recommended items suit the choices of the user. The selection of best RS for an application is a bigger challenge for the system designer. RSs are compared on their evaluation matrices. This paper compares the evaluation measures for collaborative filtering RSs. The accuracy measures are Measuring Ratings Predicting Accuracy (MRPA) and Measuring Usage Prediction Accuracy (MUPA). Furthermore, the advantage and disadvantage of both accuracy measures are also examined through an experiment. The machine learning libraries of Mahout is used for the setup of an experiment. The experiment is conducted with the MovieLense dataset.
Persian Rumor Detection on Twitter

Nowadays, one of the common ways of news broadcasting is sharing news through online social media. Some users consider these social media as a platform for news broadcasting. Every day numerous news transfer among users. However, sometimes rumors get around between users, such that they may make some mistakes about what are exactly happened. If rumors has been recognized at the right time, their negative effects can be bounded. In order to differentiate between rumors and non-rumors tweets, various well-known machine learning methods are applied on KNTUPT dataset which is collected all persian tweets from November 24th, 2017 to December 8th, 2017. The results indicate that the Random forest and meta.RandomSubSpace show their superiority than other methods.
The σE stress response is required for stress-induced mutation and amplification in Escherichia coli

Pathways of mutagenesis are induced in microbes under adverse conditions controlled by stress responses. Control of mutagenesis by stress responses may accelerate evolution specifically when cells are maladapted to their environments, i.e. are stressed. Stress‐induced mutagenesis in the Escherichia coli Lac assay occurs either by ‘point’ mutation or gene amplification. Point mutagenesis is associated with DNA double‐strand‐break (DSB) repair and requires DinB error‐prone DNA polymerase and the SOS DNA‐damage‐ and RpoS general‐stress responses. We report that the RpoE envelope‐protein‐stress response is also required. In a screen for mutagenesis‐defective mutants, we isolated a transposon insertion in the rpoE P2 promoter. The insertion prevents rpoE induction during stress, but leaves constitutive expression intact, and allows cell viability. rpoE insertion and suppressed null mutants display reduced point mutagenesis and maintenance of amplified DNA. Furthermore, σE acts independently of stress responses previously implicated: SOS/DinB and RpoS, and of σ32, which was postulated to affect mutagenesis. I‐SceI‐induced DSBs alleviated much of the rpoE phenotype, implying that σE promoted DSB formation. Thus, a third stress response and stress input regulate DSB‐repair‐associated stress‐induced mutagenesis. This provides the first report of mutagenesis promoted by σE, and implies that extracytoplasmic stressors may affect genome integrity and, potentially, the ability to evolve.
Inside the Organization: Why Privacy and Security Engineering Is a Challenge for Engineers

Machine ethics is a key challenge in times when digital systems play an increasing role in people’s lives. At the core of machine ethics is the handling of personal data and the security of machine operations. Yet, privacy and security engineering are a challenge in today’s business world where personal data markets, corporate deadlines, and a lack of perfectionism frame the context in which engineers need to work. Besides these organizational and market challenges, each engineer has his or her specific view on the importance of these values that can foster or inhibit taking them into consideration. We present the results of an empirical study of 124 engineers based on the Theory of Planned Behavior and Jonas’ Principle of Responsibility to understand the drivers and impediments of ethical system development as far as privacy and security engineering are concerned. We find that many engineers find the two values important, but do not enjoy working on them. We also find that many struggle with the organizational environment: They face a lack of time and autonomy that is necessary for building ethical systems, even at this basic level. Organizations’ privacy and security norms are often too weak or even oppose value-based design, putting engineers in conflict with their organizations. Our data indicate that it is largely engineers’ individually perceived responsibility as well as a few character traits that make a positive difference to ethical system development.
A Simple Analysis for Obtaining Cutoff Wavenumbers of an Eccentric Circular Metallic Waveguide in Bipolar Coordinate System

This paper describes a simple analysis of the guided waves in an eccentric circular waveguide based on the bipolar coordinate system (BCS). The separation of the variable technique is used for the solution. The structure under study is an infinite perfect electric conductor (PEC) cylinder in the z-direction, which encloses eccentrically another infinite PEC cylinder. The modal analysis has been conducted using an analytical method, solving the TE and TM modes by the aid of electromagnetic formulation. Despite previous studies which mostly rely on numerical techniques or otherwise considering the dominant TEM mode, in this paper, the analytical solution is proposed for the electromagnetic fields which consequently lead to the characterization of the cutoff wavenumbers of higher order modes and explicit solution to electric and magnetic fields in BCS. The solution of the Helmholtz equation in BCS using the technique of separation of variables exhibits as a one of the contributions of this paper, and the validity range of the answer is discussed. The values of the cutoff wavenumbers for the first few modes are calculated and compared with the benchmark results. The precise correspondence of the obtained values with the proposed method with those of the previous studies and computer simulations, along with the high speed and simplicity in implementation, introduces the present method as an appropriate option for analyzing eccentric circular cylindrical structures.
Performance of the ALOHA-Q MAC Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Networks

ALOHA-Q is a reinforcement learning medium access control protocol which is designed for terrestrial networks. The protocol is simple but is able to increase channel utilization using the learning scheme. Underwater acoustic networks have limited bandwidth which leads to low data rates and the low propagation speed of the networks brings about the significant idle time in the channel use. Therefore, achieving high channel utilization is a major challenge in underwater communications. This paper evaluates performance of the ALOHA-Q protocol for underwater networks and considers asynchronous operation and refining the number of slots to improve channel utilization. Simulation results show that ALOHA-Q can be adapted to achieve 30% better performance than the original protocol in the underwater environment.
Research of Grounding Systems of Electrical Complexes in the Conditions of Permafrost Soils

The article conducted a study of the effectiveness of the grounding systems of industrial electrical systems in permafrost conditions. On the basis of comparison of regulatory documents in the field of protective grounding, the main approaches to the design of protective grounding devices were considered, in relation to the features of the geographical location of the object and the characteristics of the soil. The technologies and possibilities of using classical and electrolytic grounding methods are studied. As a result of modeling, the scheme of rational protective grounding of electrical installations in the conditions of the working enterprise has been proposed.
Image Super-Resolution via Simplified Dense Network With Non-Degenerate Layers

In this paper, we present an efficient method for single image super-resolution based on the dense network. First, considering that the dense architectures reuse all the previous features in each layer and cause a huge memory overhead, we simplify the dense architecture and only reuse the hierarchical features in the reconstruct layer; therefore, the redundancy in dense architecture is reduced. Subsequently, since the information of the degraded low-resolution image is much less than the potential high-resolution image, we propose a non-degenerate layer to address the degeneracy problem caused by the loss of input information. In the non-degenerate layer, we introduce a skip connection to the linear transformation to eliminate the singularity and utilize an invertible nonlinear activation function to avoid the dead zone. In addition, the direct reconstruction scheme is adopted for efficient models, and the structural similarity is utilized for better human perception. The experiments show promising results in terms of quantitative and qualitative results, which indicates that our method is effective and superior.
A Secured Smart Home Switching System based on Wireless Communications and Self-Energy Harvesting

Due to human influence and its negative impacts on the world’s environment, the world is changing into a cleaner and more sustainable energy system. In both private and public buildings, there is a desire to reduce electricity usage, automate appliances, and optimize the electricity usage of a building. This paper presents the design and implementation of a secured smart home switching system based on wireless communications and self-energy harvesting. The proposed secured smart home switching system integrates access control of the building’s electricity, energy harvesting, and storage for the active electronic components and circuitries, and wireless communication for smart switches and sockets. The paper gives two contributions to the design of smart home systems: 1) A practical design and implementation of security (access control system) for a building’s power supply which adds a locking feature such that only authorized personnel are capable of altering the power state of the smart sockets and switches in a building, and; 2) A model of energy harvesting and storage system for the active electronic components of the circuitries and wireless communication for smart switches and sockets. The access control involves four stages (a control unit, a comparator unit, a memory unit, and the switching unit). The access control system provides means of access control by having a security keypad that switches ON or OFF the building’s electricity, provided the user knows the security pin code (8 coded pins). The proposed system also harvests and stores energy for all the active electronic devices using a photovoltaic system with ultracapacitor energy buffer. The designed secured smart home utilized smart power and switches, and message queuing telemetry transport for ease of controlling energy usage. The experimental results obtained from extensive testing of the prototype shows an improvement in security and energy management in a building.