Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ontogeny of macroscopic morphology of limb bones in modern aquatic birds and their implications for ontogenetic ageing

Although the assessment of ontogenetic stage of fossil and skeletal specimens (ontogenetic ageing) plays fundamental roles in avian paleontology, detailed information of postnatal ontogeny of macroscopic morphology, which is essential for ontogenetic ageing, has been lacking for the avian skeleton. In this study, the postnatal skeletal development was described for six major limb bones (humerus, ulna, carpometacarpus, femur, tibiotarsus, and tarsometatarsus) in four species of modern aquatic birds (Calonectris leucomelas, Phalacrocorax capillatus, Larus crassirostris, and Cerorhinca monocerata) from 14–28 individuals of known ontogenetic stages for each species, with emphasis on the macroscopic morphology and timing of skeletal maturity. The presence of the epiphysial ossification center at the proximal tibiotarsus was confirmed in the all species except Larus crassirostris where old chicks were poorly sampled. Epiphysial ossification centers may be variably observed in other limb bones. A distinct ossification center is observed in crista fibularis of the tibiotarsus in Phalacrocorax capillatus. Foramen nutriens is generally larger in non-adults than in adults, and in some cases there may even be multiple foramina. Longitudinal growth of bones generally ceases around the time of fledging, by which epiphyses are ossified in most cases. Limb bones of fledglings/juveniles were generally as large as those of adults, but tend to be more slender, indicating that circumferential bone growth is still in progress in these stages. Although the overall pattern of morphological variation is consistent among the species examined, one should be aware of interspecific variation in the timing of skeletal maturity, as well as inter-elemental variation in the timing of ossification of epiphyses.
Development of Instant Ox Tail Soup Supplemented with Mushroom and Moringa Leaves

Background: Food consumption has been changing during the past decade and need for instant formulation is being increased. The potential of growth of convenience foods in Kenya is vastly untapped. Objective: This study was to develop a dehydrated instant ox tail soup mix supplemented with mushroom and Moringa leaves and other vegetables to enhance its protein quality and reduce the difficulty in preparation of the soup inorder to minimize the problem of protein-energy malnutrition in Kenya. Methods: After destalking, washing was done. The whole leaves were boiled with 0.1% (v/v) sodium metabi-sulphite for 10 minutes. The leaves were then spread out on the racks for 15 min. The leaves were then spread thinly on mesh and allowed to dry in the oven dryer for four 4 hours. The dried leaves were ground into powder and packaged in a plastic container and stored at room temperature. Fresh oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostearus (Jacq.) P. Kumm. were cleaned, chopped into small pieces of about 5-7 mm thickness, then pretreated by blanching in water at 60ºC for about 2 minutes, cooked and dried to a moisture content of 5-7%, then dried, sieved and stored in airtight containers. The oxtail was cut into small pieces and soaked in vinegar for 10 minutes this is because vinegar tends to kill salmonella, E coli and other gram-negative bacteria. It was then taken to an oven to dry it further at 70ºC for 48 hours, then ground and packed in airtight container at room temperatures. Tomatoes were cut into slices, cooked, cooled, and the pulp was dried in an oven drier for 3 hours at 60ºC. The dried pulp was ground and packaged in airtight glass containers. Proximate analysis was done according to AOAC methods (2005). Results: Proximate analysis were as follows: Oyster mushroom powder the fat, ash, protein, , moisture and total carbohydrates were as follows 2.5%, 8.1%, 31.5% 3, 73% and 40.8% respectively on dry weight basis. In the case of Moringa powder the fat, ash, protein, and total carbohydrate results were as follows: 6.3%, 9.5%, 33.4%, and 57.63%. Ox tail powder the results were as follows fat was 14.6%, ash 5.1%, protein 23.7%, total carbohydrates 36.2% and moisture content 4.72%. Conclusion: Instant oxtail soup supplemented with mushroom and Moringa Leaves can be developed using Oyster mushroom.
Chemical-bromatological quality and productivity of peanut genotypes (Arachis hipogaea L.)

Peanuts (Arachis hipogaea L.) have a great potential for grain production for feed and forage production, being an alternative for producers, as it grows a double product. Grains have excellent quality and contain a greater amount of protein with which to feed the herd. The present study is a cut-off effect study with an application of Stimulate® phytostimulant to determine grain quality and peanut fodder genotype. In the first planting, the peanuts were cultivated under field conditions in a randomized block design in a 4 × 2 × 2 subplot scheme, with four cultivars and two cutting periods, with or without phytostimulant. The cultivars were IAC Tatu ST and Caiana (vertical growth), as well as non-flowering and harvesting seeds. For the second planting, a randomized block design was used with a subplot scheme of 3 × 2 × 2, with three cultivars and 2 cutting periods, with or without phytostimulant. The cultivars were IAC Tatu ST and Caiana (vertical growth) and IAC 503 (prostrate growth). All cultivars contained a high percentage of hay protein in the two plantings. The cultivar IAC 503 was efficient in the production of protein and fiber in the grains in both plantings, demonstrated the potential of protein for animal supplementation, and also presented high grain yield in the summer planting.
zydhjh4593@SMM4H’22: A Generic Pre-trained BERT-based Framework for Social Media Health Text Classification

This paper describes our proposed framework for the 10 text classification tasks of Task 1a, 2a, 2b, 3a, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, in the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2022. According to the pre-trained BERT-based models, various techniques, including regularized dropout, focal loss, exponential moving average, 5-fold cross-validation, ensemble prediction, and pseudo-labeling, are applied for further formulating and improving the generalization performance of our framework. In the evaluation, the proposed framework achieves the 1st place in Task 3a with a 7% higher F1-score than the median, and obtains a 4% higher averaged F1-score than the median in all participating tasks except Task 1a.
Diversity of Cystoseira sensu lato (Fucales, Phaeophyceae) in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean based on morphological and DNA evidence, including Carpodesmia gen. emend. and Treptacantha gen. emend.

ABSTRACT The diversity and phylogenetic relationships of specimens in the brown algal genus Cystoseira sensu lato from the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean were examined using DNA sequences for four genetic markers (psbA, mt23S, cox1 and nad1). Our results provide evidence to resolve most of the species documented in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean as Cystoseira in three clades that are interpreted here as representing three genera. Morphological studies confirmed the distinctness of the genera and identified characters that distinguish species. One clade corresponds to Cystoseira sensu stricto, including the type species C. foeniculacea, together with C. compressa, C. humilis and the resurrected species C. aurantia. Species in Cystoseira are characterized by a caespitose habit and receptacles with grouped conceptacles lacking spiny appendages. The second clade corresponds to Treptacantha gen. emend. , with T. abies-marina as the type species. A further 11 Atlantic and/or Mediterranean species were transferred to this genus. The concept of Treptacantha was better redefined, using the following morphological characters: smooth primary branches at least in the basal region, cortical cells with thickened walls and square meristoderm cells in cross section. The third clade corresponds to Carpodesmia gen. emend. , with C. zosteroides as the type species. Another six Mediterranean species and the Atlantic/Mediterranean C. tamariscifolia were transferred to this genus. The concept of Carpodesmia was better defined to include new morphological features: all branches having spines, cortical cells with thin walls and rectangular meristoderm cells in cross section.
Original Content Is All You Need! an Empirical Study on Leveraging Answer Summary for WikiHowQA Answer Selection Task

Answer selection task requires finding appropriate answers to questions from informative but crowdsourced candidates. A key factor impeding its solution by current answer selection approaches is the redundancy and lengthiness issues of crowdsourced answers. Recently, Deng et al. (2020) constructed a new dataset, WikiHowQA, which contains a corresponding reference summary for each original lengthy answer. And their experiments show that leveraging the answer summaries helps to attend the essential information in original lengthy answers and improve the answer selection performance under certain circumstances. However, when given a question and a set of long candidate answers, human beings could effortlessly identify the correct answer without the aid of additional answer summaries since the original answers contain all the information volume that answer summaries contain. In addition, pretrained language models have been shown superior or comparable to human beings on many natural language processing tasks. Motivated by those, we design a series of neural models, either pretraining-based or non-pretraining-based, to check wether the additional answer summaries are helpful for ranking the relevancy degrees of question-answer pairs on WikiHowQA dataset. Extensive automated experiments and hand analysis show that the additional answer summaries are not useful for achieving the best performance.
CryoFold: determining protein structures and ensembles from cryo-EM data

Cryo-EM is a powerful method for determining protein structures. But it requires computational assistance. Physics-based computations have the power to give low-free-energy structures and ensembles of populations, but have been computationally limited to only small soluble proteins. Here, we introduce CryoFold. By integrating data of varying sparsity from electron density maps of 3–5 Å resolution with coarse-grained physical knowledge of secondary and tertiary interactions, CryoFold determines ensembles of protein structures directly from sequence. We give six examples showing its broad capabilities, over proteins ranging from 72 to 2000 residues, including membrane and multi-domain proteins, and including results from two EMDB competitions. The ensembles CryoFold predicts starting from the density data of a single known protein conformation encompass multiple low-energy conformations, all of which are experimentally validated and biologically relevant.
Sardine (Sardina pilchardus) spawning in the light of fat content analysis

Sardine samples from commercial catches obtained by purse seiners operating in Croatian fishing grounds (eastern Adriatic Sea) were collected monthly from March 2017 to February 2018 (excluding January due to a fishing ban). A total of 1085 sardines were analysed. Their total body length and mass ranged from 11.5 to 16.9 cm (mean±SD: 13.9±0.03 cm) and from 11.30 to 54.03 g (mean±SD: 20.31±0.161 g), respectively. Analysis of the length-mass relationship showed positive allometric growth (b=3.3573, r=0.948). Female specimens were predominant (m/f=0.404). According to the monthly gonadosomatic index values, spawning occurred from November to February, which was consistent with previous investigations. The monthly analysis of fat content in the gonads, liver and muscles indicated that the fat content in each studied tissue oscillated seasonally regardless of sex. These alternations were linked to the sardine’s reproductive cycle.
Expression Profiles of Long Noncoding RNA and mRNA in Epicardial Adipose Tissue in Patients with Heart Failure

The expression profile of long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) in human epicardial adipose tissue (EAT) has not been widely studied. In the present study, we performed RNA sequencing to analyze the expression profiles of lncRNA and mRNA in EAT in coronary artery disease (CAD) patients with and without heart failure (HF). Our results showed RNA sequencing disclosed 35673 mRNA and 11087 lncRNA corresponding to 15554 genes in EAT in total, while 30 differentially expressed lncRNAs (17 upregulated and 13 downregulated) and 278 differentially expressed mRNAs (129 upregulated and 149 downregulated) were discriminated between CAD patients with and without HF (P<0.05; fold change>2); lncRNA ENST00000610659 drew specific attention for it was the top upregulated lncRNA with highest fold change and corresponded to UNC93B1 gene, which was proved to be related to HF and encoded UNC93B1 protein regulating toll-like receptor signaling, and both of them significantly increased in HF patients in qRT-PCR validation; the top significant upregulated enriched GO terms and KEGG pathway analysis were regulation of lymphocyte activation (GO:0051249) and T cell receptor signaling pathway (hsa04660), respectively. The current findings support the fact that EAT lncRNAs are involved in the inflammatory response leading to the development of HF.
Precision of auditory responses deteriorates on the way to frontal cortical areas

Frontal areas of the mammalian cortex are thought to be important for cognitive control and complex behaviour. These areas have been studied mostly in humans, non-human primates and rodents. In this article, we present a quantitative characterization of response properties of a frontal auditory area responsive to sound in the bat brain, the frontal auditory field (FAF). Bats are highly vocal animals and they constitute an important experimental model for studying the auditory system. At present, little is known about neuronal sound processing in the bat FAF. We combined electrophysiology experiments and computational simulations to compare the response properties of auditory neurons found in the bat FAF and auditory cortex (AC) to simple sounds (pure tones). Anatomical studies have shown that the latter provide feedforward inputs to the former. Our results show that bat FAF neurons are responsive to sounds, however, when compared to AC neurons, they presented sparser, less precise spiking and longer-lasting responses. Based on the results of an integrate-and-fire neuronal model, we speculate that slow, low-threshold, synaptic dynamics could contribute to the changes in activity pattern that occur as information travels through cortico-cortical projections from the AC to the FAF.
Oral Administration of Watermelon Rind Extract to Induce Hypothermia in Chicks

Oral administration of l-citrulline (l-Cit) caused hypothermia, but l-Cit is not recommended in poultry diets in Japan. Watermelon is a natural source of l-Cit. The objective of this study is to examine the effect of watermelon waste, i.e., watermelon rind (WR) on the body temperature and plasma free amino acids of chicks. In Experiment 1, 14-day-old chicks were subjected to acute oral administration of WR extract (WRE) (2 ml) under control thermoneutral temperature (CT). In Experiment 2, 15-day-old chicks were orally administered 1.6 ml of either WRE, lowdose l-Cit (7.5 mmol/10 ml), or high-dose l-Cit (15 mmol/10 ml) under CT. In both experiments, rectal temperature (RT) and plasma free amino acids were analyzed. In Experiment 3, after dual oral administration of (1.6 ml) WRE or l-Cit (15 mmol/10 ml), 15-day-old chicks were exposed to high ambient temperature (HT; 35±1°C, 2 h) to monitor changes in RT. Acute oral administration of WRE significantly reduced RT under CT. The degree of RT reduction by WRE was similar to that by high l-Cit. Moreover, RT was significantly low at HT owing to the oral administration of WRE. However, the reduced RT was difficult to explain by the content of Cit in WRE alone. In conclusion, WRE could be used as a dietary ingredient to reduce body temperature for imparting thermotolerance in chicks.
Extreme Stochastic Variational Inference: Distributed and Asynchronous

Stochastic variational inference (SVI), the state-of-the-art algorithm for scaling variational inference to large-datasets, is inherently serial. Moreover, it requires the parameters to fit in the memory of a single processor; this is problematic when the number of parameters is in billions. In this paper, we propose extreme stochastic variational inference (ESVI), an asynchronous and lock-free algorithm to perform variational inference for mixture models on massive real world datasets. ESVI overcomes the limitations of SVI by requiring that each processor only access a subset of the data and a subset of the parameters, thus providing data and model parallelism simultaneously. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ESVI by running Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) on UMBC-3B, a dataset that has a vocabulary of 3 million and a token size of 3 billion. In our experiments, we found that ESVI not only outperforms VI and SVI in wallclock-time, but also achieves a better quality solution. In addition, we propose a strategy to speed up computation and save memory when fitting large number of topics.
Note sur l’abattage des brebis gestantes et les pertes d’agneaux au Cameroun

Les pertes d’agneaux liées à l’abattage de brebis gestantes ont été évaluées entre 1984 et 1986 à l’abattoir de Yaoundé. Sur les 1 289 brebis examinées après l’abattage, 718 soit 55,7 % étaient en état de gravidité plus ou moins avancée. Les pertes sont de l’ordre de 1,3 agneau potentiel par brebis abattue, soit environ 20 000 agneaux sacrifiés annuellement en même temps que leur mère pour l’ensemble du pays.
Machine Translation for a Very Low-Resource Language - Layer Freezing Approach on Transfer Learning

This paper presents the implementation of Machine Translation (MT) between Lambani, a low-resource Indian tribal language, and English, a high-resource universal language. Lambani is spoken by nomadic tribes of the Indian state of Karnataka and there are similarities between Lambani and various other Indian languages. To implement the English-Lambani MT system, we followed the transfer learning approach with English-Kannada as the parent MT model. The implementation and performance of the English-Lambani MT system are discussed in this paper. Since Lambani has been influenced by various other languages, we explored the possibility of getting better MT performance by using parent models associated with related Indian languages. Specifically, we experimented with English-Gujarati and English-Marathi as additional parent models. We compare the performance of three different English-Lambani MT systems derived from three parent language models, and the observations are presented in the paper. Additionally, we will also explore the effect of freezing the encoder layer and decoder layer and the change in performance from both of them.
Lightweight Contextual Logical Structure Recovery

Logical structure recovery in scientific articles associates text with a semantic section of the article. Although previous work has disregarded the surrounding context of a line, we model this important information by employing line-level attention on top of a transformer-based scientific document processing pipeline. With the addition of loss function engineering and data augmentation techniques with semi-supervised learning, our method improves classification performance by 10% compared to a recent state-of-the-art model. Our parsimonious, text-only method achieves a performance comparable to that of other works that use rich document features such as font and spatial position, using less data without sacrificing performance, resulting in a lightweight training pipeline.
Population codes of prior knowledge learned through environmental regularities

How the brain makes correct inferences about its environment based on noisy and ambiguous observations is one of the fundamental questions in Neuroscience. Prior knowledge about the probability with which certain events occur in the environment plays an important role in this process. Humans are able to incorporate such prior knowledge in an efficient, Bayes optimal, way in many situations, but it remains an open question how the brain acquires and represents this prior knowledge. The long time spans over which prior knowledge is acquired make it a challenging question to investigate experimentally. In order to guide future experiments with clear empirical predictions, we used a neural network model to learn two commonly used tasks in the experimental literature (i.e. orientation classification and orientation estimation) where the prior probability of observing a certain stimulus is manipulated. We show that a population of neurons learns to correctly represent and incorporate prior knowledge, by only receiving feedback about the accuracy of their inference from trial-to-trial and without any probabilistic feedback. We identify different factors that can influence the neural responses to unexpected or expected stimuli, and find a novel mechanism that changes the activation threshold of neurons, depending on the prior probability of the encoded stimulus. In a task where estimating the exact stimulus value is important, more likely stimuli also led to denser tuning curve distributions and narrower tuning curves, allocating computational resources such that information processing is enhanced for more likely stimuli. These results can explain several different experimental findings, clarify why some contradicting observations concerning the neural responses to expected versus unexpected stimuli have been reported and pose some clear and testable predictions about the neural representation of prior knowledge that can guide future experiments.
The Bric-à-Brac transcription factors are necessary for formation of functional germline stem cell niches through control of dpp expression in the Drosophila melanogaster ovary

Many studies have focused on the mechanisms of stem cell maintenance via their interaction with a particular niche or microenvironment in adult tissues, but how formation of a functional niche is initiated, including how stem cells within a niche are established, is less well understood. Adult Drosophila melanogaster ovary Germline Stem Cell (GSC) niches are comprised of somatic cells forming a stack called a Terminal Filament (TF) and underlying Cap Cells (CCs) and Escort Cells (ECs), which are in direct contact with GSCs. In the adult, the Engrailed (En) transcription factor is specifically expressed in niche cells where it directly controls expression of the decapentaplegic gene (dpp) encoding a member of the Bone Morphogenetic Protein (BMP) family of secreted signaling molecules, which are key factors for GSC maintenance. In late third instar larval ovaries, in response to BMP signaling from newly-formed niches, adjacent primordial germ cells become GSCs. The bric-à-brac paralogs (bab1 and bab2) encode BTB/POZ-domain containing transcription factors, that are also expressed in developing GSCs niches where they are required for TF formation. Here, we demonstrate that Bab1 and Bab2 display redundant cell autonomous function for TF morphogenesis and we identify a new function for these genes in GSC establishment. Moreover, we show that Bab proteins control dpp expression in otherwise correctly specified CCs, independently of En and its paralog Invected (Inv). In fact, our results also indicate that en/inv function in larval stages are neither essential for TF formation, nor GSC establishment. Finally, when bab2 was overexpressed in ovarian somatic cells outside of the niche, where en/inv were not expressed, ectopic BMP signaling activation was induced in adjacent germ cells of adult ovaries, which formed GSC-like tumors. Together, these results indicate that Bab transcription factors are positive regulators of BMP signaling for acquisition of GSC status.