Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fertilizer micro-dosing and harvesting time of indigenous leafy vegetables affect in vitro antioxidant activities

Plant nutrient management can influence the type and level of polyphenolic compounds within leafy vegetables. Therefore, we investigated the effects of fertilizer micro-dosing and harvest time on antioxidant activities of aqueous polyphenolic extracts from Amaranthus cruentus, Ocimum gratissimum and Solanum macrocarpon. Plants were cultivated using urea alone or combined with cattle manure for three staggered harvest periods. Polyphenolics profile (RP-HPLC), DPPH, hydroxyl and superoxide radical scavenging activities, ferric ion reducing power, ferrous ion chelation and inhibition of linoleic acid oxidation were determined. Polyphenolic contents of A. cruentus (caffeic acid, myricetin, quercetin and rutin) and O. gratissimum (catechin and gallic acid) as well as antioxidant activities of the vegetables extracts (except hydroxyl radical scavenging by A. cruentus) were fertilizer micro-dose and harvest timedependent. Thus, combination of both factors highlighted the screening of optimal farming conditions for these vegetables in order to get leaf extracts possessing higher polyphenolic contents and antioxidant activities.
The effects of physical exercise, caloric diet restriction and antioxidant supplementation on the aging process in rats

The objective of the present study was to assess the effects of age, physical exercise, caloric diet restriction (CR), and vitamin E supplementation on some markers of oxidative stress, DNA damage, apoptosis and liver function in different age groups of rats. The present study included 120 male “Wistar rats”, divided into 3 age groups; 12, 18 and 24 months old. Each group was further subdivided into 4 subgroups; 10 rats each. The first subgroup as a control, the second underwent exercise training, the third was kept on CR and the last was supplemented with vitamin E. The measured biochemical parameters included; serum malondialdehyde (MDA), as well as % DNA fragmentation levels, the active caspase-3 concentration and the monoamine oxidaseβ (MAO-β) enzyme activity in the brain of all studied rats. In addition, hepatic superoxide dismutase (SOD) and NADPHcytochrome c reductase enzyme activities were assessed. The results of this study showed that; the aging process was associated with significantly increased serum MDA, decreased hepatic SOD activity, increased brain DNA fragmentation and caspase-3 activation as well as decreased cytochrome c reductase activity of liver. However, exercise, CR, and vitamin E supplementation caused a significant decrease in serum MDA and increase in hepatic cytochrome c reductase activity in old group. In addition, exercise could increase SOD and lower caspase-3 in old rats, while CR had no significant effect on both of them. Neither age nor any of the used intervention trials had an effect on brain MAOβ activity. It is suggested that the age-induced oxidative stress, DNA damage and improper hepatic metabolism could be partially attenuated by exercise, CR, and/or vitamin E supplementation. All these beneficial effects might be mostly effective in older age.
R2SPIN: Re-Recording the Revised Speech Perception in Noise Test

Speech in noise tests are an important clinical and research toolfor understanding speech perception in realistic, adverse listen-ing conditions. Though relatively simple to implement, theirdevelopment is time and resource intensive. As a result, manytests still in use (and their corresponding recordings) are out-dated and no longer fit for purpose. This work takes the popu-lar Revised Speech Perception In Noise (RSPIN) Test and up-dates it with improved recordings and the addition of a femalespeaker. It outlines and evaluates a methodology which otherscan apply to legacy recordings of speech in noise tests to updatethem and ensure their ongoing usability. This paper describesthe original test along with its use over the last four decades andthe rationale for re-recording. The new speakers, new accent(Received Pronunciation) and recording methodology are thenoutlined. Subjective and objective analysis of the new record-ings for normal hearing listeners are then given. The paper concludes with recommendations for using the R2SPIN.
Carwash wastewater treatment by the application of an environmentally friendly hybrid system: an experimental design approach

Treatment of the car wash wastewater (CWW) is crucial important when it is considered as a potential source of environmental health hazard due to the significant concentrations of contaminants such as detergents, oils-greases, phenol, organic materials. In the current study, chemical oxygen demand (COD), methylene blue active substances (MBAS), and turbidity removal efficiencies were conducted from manual CWW using the novel hybrid system including electrocoagulation/flotation (ECF), sedimentation and filtration processes. Experimental design for response surface methodology (RSM), was employed to create two series of 20 experimental runs using monopolar aluminum electrodes. It was optimized using the critical operational parameters such as applied current (1–2 A), electrolysis time (30–90 min) and pH (5–9). The removal efficiencies of COD, turbidity and MBAS were found to be 94.5%, 95% and 95.2% in the optimal condition, respectively. 4.2 kWh/m 3 and 0.23 US$/m 3 were determined for energy consumption and costs, respectively. Overall, this hybrid treat-ment system is proven as an economic and environmentally friendly technique to remove high contaminants from CWW.
Interchangeability of position tracking technologies; can we merge the data?

ABSTRACT Purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess the interchangeability of position tracking metrics obtained using global positioning systems (GPS) versus those obtained by a semi-automatic high definition (HD) optical camera system. Methods: Data was collected from a cohort of 29 elite football players (age: 23.1 ± 5.1 years, height: 180.4 ± 5.8 cm, mass: 74.6 ± 6.7 kg) in four matches played in four different stadiums. In two matches 10 Hz GPS (GPS-1, StatSports, Belfast, UK) were used, while in the other two matches augmented 10 Hz GPS (GPS-2, StatSports, Belfast, UK) were used. All four matches were analysed concomitantly using six semi-automated HD motion cameras sampling at 25 Hz (TRACAB, Chyronhego, New York, USA). Results: Mean bias was between 6% and 10% for GPS-1 and 1–4% for GPS-2, respectively. No proportional bias was found (p > 0.184). The SEE within calibration functions (expressed in % to mean) was between 5% and 22% for GPS-1 and 4–14% for GPS-2. While some significant differences existed between GPS-1 and TRACAB (total distance and high-speed), positional tracking variables were highly correlated between GPS-1, GPS-2 and TRACAB (r2> 0.92) with GPS-2 displaying stronger correlations (> r2 = 0.96). Conclusion: In the present study augmented GPS technology (GPS-2) and the TRACAB camera system provided interchangeable measures of positional tracking metrics to allow concurrent assessment and monitoring of training and competition in football players. However, we recommend practitioners evaluate their own systems to identify where errors exist, calculate and apply the regression equations to confidently interchange data.
Association of hypertension and dyslipidaemia with increasing obesity in patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

1Department of Clinical Pharmacy, University College of Pharmacy, University of the Punjab, Allama Iqbal Campus, 54000, Lahore, Pakistan, 2Department of Pharmacology, University College of Pharmacy, University of the Punjab, Allama Iqbal Campus, 54000, Lahore, Pakistan, 3Diabetes, Endocrine and Metabolic Centre (DEMC), Lahore General Hospital, Lahore, Pakistan, 4King Edward Medical University (KEMU), Lahore, Pakistan, 5Institute of Pharmacy, Lahore College for Women University, Jail Road, Lahore, Pakistan
Does Generalized Linear Model Support Functional Default Mode Network Studies.

Introduction A growing body of research has emerged on the resting state and the default mode of the brain. Functional connectivity studies, which lately dominate this research area, have confirmed that regions such as the cortical mid-line structures, as well as parietal-temporal regions are tightly interconnected within the default mode network (DMN). However, little is known about the activity patterns of resting state related brain regions detected in fMRI studies using the generalized linear model (GLM) in a whole brain analysis. The aim of the current study was to investigate the activity changes among brain regions identified through GLM during the transition from task to rest and the prolongation of rest. Methods A picture imagination task, as a controlled thought content task, was used in order to minimize confounding factors such as a visual stimulus or a motor response. Results The present study revealed a consistent fluctuating activation pattern of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), thalamus, primer motor area (PMA), insula, brain stem and bilateral putamen during the transition from task to the early phase of the resting state and the prolongation of the resting state. All regions showed increased activation during the detachment from task. However, this increased activation was not sustained during the extension of rest, replaced with a decreased activation at the late phase of rest. The increased activation of resting state regions might help with the detachment from the current task. Among these regions dACC, insula and putamen were correlated in all conditions. Conclusion These findings underline the importance of the activation increase of the cortical mid-line regions and insula in the transition from task to the resting state.
Cooperative Communication and Energy-Harvesting-Enabled Energy-Efficient Design of MI-Based Clustered Nonconventional WSNs

The communication based on electromagnetic waves in nonconventional media (underground and underwater environment) is not desirable because of high path loss, large antenna size, and dynamic channel behavior of the media. Magnetic induction (MI) based communication is recently explored technique for such type of media, which exhibits several promising characteristics, such as constant channel behavior, less propagation delay, and stealth underwater operations. In every wireless sensor network (WSNs), energy is a main constraint. The overall energy consumption of the network can be significantly reduced by clustering technique. The efficacy of clustering technique can be further improved by the incorporation of cooperative communication and energy harvesting (EH) techniques. This paper proposes cooperative communication over Rayleigh fading channels, EH-enabled energy-efficient design, and EH-enabled tree-based waveguide topology in MI-based clustered nonconventional WSNs. Furthermore, we perform an analytical modeling to find the total energy consumption and throughput of the network in three different media (dry soil, wet soil, and sea water).
On‐the‐go assessment of vineyard canopy porosity, bunch and leaf exposure by image analysis

Background and Aims Canopy assessment of the fruiting zone can lead to more informed vineyard management decisions. A non‐destructive, image‐based system capable of operating on‐the‐go was developed to assess canopy porosity, and leaf and bunch exposure of red grape cultivars in the vineyard. Methods and Results On‐the‐go (7 km/h) night time images of a vertically shoot positioned commercial vineyard canopy were acquired with an automated red green blue imaging system, coupled to a GPS and controlled artificial lighting. The reference method was point quadrat analysis. Sound correlations between the image analysis and point quadrat analysis results for the proportion of gaps (R2 > 0.85; P 0.57; P < 0.001) were obtained for both sides of the canopy. For the bunch to canopy area ratio the best relationship was found on the western side of the canopy (R2 = 0.79; P < 0.001). Also maps of the three canopy variables were built in a commercial vineyard to compare their spatial variability on the east and west sides across the whole vineyard plot. Conclusions The developed imaging system, capable of operating on‐the‐go, can yield quantitative, objective and reliable knowledge of what a grapegrower would assess by subjective, qualitative visual inspection of the grapevine canopy. The information can be used to help make better informed decisions about leaf removal, and if mapped may help to delineate zones amenable to homogeneous management. Significance of the Study The new developed computer vision system can be mounted on any vehicle, such as a tractor, all terrain vehicle and robot, for a rapid and objective monitoring of the vineyard canopy around the fruiting zone in red cultivars and vertically shoot positioned trained vines. Moreover, the maps generated could be used by a new generation of variable rate viticultural machinery to spatially optimise vineyard cultural practices.
Dissecting lipid accumulation of microalgae Nannochloropsis oculata using fluorescent image analysis

Cell suspension of Nannochloropsis oculata was cultured in a modified f/2 medium to study the changes of lipid content during phases of growth. The growth of cell suspension was determined by measuring the cell density and diameter under light microscope. To observe and evaluate the accumulation of lipid droplets in microalgae cells, lipid droplets were stained with Nile Red fluorescent dye then examined under fluorescence microscope and the obtained images were analyzed using Fiji ImageJ, an image processing program. The cell density increased quickly at the first 6 days of culture while cell diameter reached the highest value at the 8th day and 20th day of culture. The presence of lipid droplets in the cells could be observed from the 20th day of culture. The size of lipid droplets was gradually increased after 60 days. Treatment of depleted nitrogen for 4 days resulted an increase in the accumulation of lipid. The intracellular lipid accumulation during phases of growth of the cell suspension under nitrogen-depleted conditions was also discussed.
PMsec: Physical Unclonable Function-Based Robust and Lightweight Authentication in the Internet of Medical Things

Various commercial off-the-shelf components are available for the development of communication-enabled consumer electronics devices. This opens new doors to attackers who can take advantage of various vulnerabilities to attack the entire network and compromise the integrity of the system and the environment. If a malicious device enters the environment and the attacker gains access to the server or transmits malicious data to the server or cloud, the entire network can be jeopardized. To avoid such cases, this paper presents a device authentication scheme which uses physical unclonable functions (PUFs) and is suitable for the Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT). The main advantage of this authentication scheme is that no data related to the IoMT devices are stored in server memory. The time taken to authenticate the devices completely was 1.2 s to 1.5 s. A hybrid oscillator arbiter physical unclonable function was used for validation of the proposed authentication scheme. From the PUF module used during experimental validation, the number of keys that could be potentially used for the authentication protocol from each design is approximately 240. The proposed authentication scheme increases the robustness of the design while being lightweight to be deployed in various designs and supports scalability.
Impact of Isolated Atmospheric Aging processes on the Cloud Condensation 
Nuclei-activation of Soot Particles

Abstract. The largest contributors to the uncertainty in assessing the anthropogenic contribution in radiative forcing are the direct and indirect effects of aerosol particles on the Earth's radiative budget. Soot particles are of special interest since their properties can change significantly due to aging processes once they are emitted to the atmosphere. Probably the largest obstacle for the investigation of these processes in the laboratory is the long atmospheric lifetime of one week, demanding tailored experiments that cover this time span. This work presents results on the ability of two types of soot to act as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) after exposure to atmospherically relevant levels of ozone and humidity. Aging times of up to 12 h were achieved by successful application of the continuous-flow stirred tank reactor (CSTR) concept while allowing for size-selection of particles prior to the aging step. 100 nm particles rich in organic carbon (OC) that were initially CCN-inactive showed significant CCN-activity at supersaturations (SS) down to 0.3 % after 10 h of exposure to 200 ppb of ozone. While this process was not affected by different levels of relative humidity in the range 5–75 %, a high sensitivity towards the ambient/reaction temperature was observed. Soot particles with a lower OC-content demanded an approximately four-fold longer aging duration to show CCN-activity for the same SS. Prior to the slow change in the CCN-activity, a rapid increase in the particle diameter was detected which occurred within several minutes. This study highlights the applicability of the CSTR-approach for the simulation of atmospheric aging processes, as aging durations beyond 12 h can be achieved in comparably small aerosol chamber volumes (
Effects of the group leadership promotion approach on students’ higher order thinking awareness and online interactive behavioral patterns in a blended learning environment

ABSTRACT The present study aims to incorporate a group leadership promotion approach into collaborative learning tasks in the hope of developing students’ creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we recruited 59 cross-professional students from a university in northern Taiwan, and divided them into an experimental group (6 sub-groups) and a control group (6 sub-groups). The experimental group students learned with the group leadership promotion approach, while the control group learned with conventional blended learning approach. The results show that the students could better develop their creativity, problem-solving, critical thinking, and learning achievement via the group leadership promotion approach. Lastly, sequential analysis of their behaviors indicated that students’ interaction with group leadership in online collaborative learning can promote many more creative ideas and comments, enhance reaching a consensus and making conclusions, and finally, facilitate completion of the group learning tasks.
Cu(II) and Ni(II) Complexes with New Tridentate NNS Thiosemicarbazones: Synthesis, Characterisation, DNA Interaction, and Antibacterial Activity

This paper reports the synthesis and detailed characterisation of copper(II) and nickel(II) complexes with tridentate thiosemicarbazone ligands H 2 L1 and H 2 L2 derived from 2-acetylpyrazine. The ligands and their metal complexes were characterised by different physicochemical techniques, including elemental and thermogravimetric analysis; UV-Vis, IR, 1H-NMR, and 13C-NMR spectroscopy; molar conductance measurements; and mass spectrometry. The crystal structure of the H 2 L1 ligand was determined by single crystal X-ray diffraction studies. The spectral data showed that the thiosemicarbazone behaves as an NNS tridentate ligand through the nitrogen atoms of the azomethine group and pyrazine ring and the sulphur atom of the thioamide group. Elemental and thermal analyses indicated that the obtained metal complexes had a 1 : 1 stoichiometry (metal-ligand). The interactions between these complexes and calf thymus DNA (CT-DNA) were studied by electronic absorption and viscosity measurements. The activities of these compounds against oxidative DNA cleavage were examined by agarose gel electrophoresis. Cu(II) and Ni(II) complexes can wind DNA strands through groove interactions and promote strand breakage of the plasmid pmCherry under oxidative stress conditions. Moreover, all the complexes could interact more strongly with DNA than could with the free ligands. Finally, the antibacterial activities of the ligands and their complexes were determined by in vitro tests against Gram-positive bacterial strains (S. aureus ATCC 25923, L. monocytogenes ATCC 19115, and B. cereus ATCC 10876) and Gram-negative bacterial strains (E. coli ATCC 25922, S. typhimurium ATCC 14028, and K. pneumoniae ATCC BAA-2146) using the broth microdilution method. The metal complexes showed greater antimicrobial activities than the precursor ligands against some of the microorganisms.
Semantic Feature Extraction Using Multi-Sense Embeddings and Lexical Chains

The relationship between words in a sentence often tell us more about the underlying semantic content of a document than its actual words individually. Natural language understanding has seen an increasing effort in the formation of techniques that try to produce non-trivial features, in the last few years, especially after robust word embeddings models became prominent, when they proved themselves able to capture and represent semantic relationships from massive amounts of data. These new dense vector representations indeed leverage the baseline in natural language processing, but they still fall short in dealing with intrinsic issues in linguistics, such as polysemy and homonymy. Systems that make use of natural language at its core, can be affected by a weak semantic representation of human language, resulting in inaccurate outcomes based on poor decisions. In this subject, word sense disambiguation and lexical chains have been exploring alternatives to alleviate several problems in linguistics, such as semantic representation, definitions, differentiation, polysemy, and homonymy. However, little effort is seen in combining recent advances in token embeddings (e.g. words, documents) with word sense disambiguation and lexical chains. To collaborate in building a bridge between these areas, this work proposes a collection of algorithms to extract semantic features from large corpora as its main contributions, named MSSA, MSSA-D, MSSA-NR, FLLC II, and FXLC II. The MSSA techniques focus on disambiguating and annotating each word by its specific sense, considering the semantic effects of its context. The lexical chains group derive the semantic relations between consecutive words in a document in a dynamic and pre-defined manner. These original techniques' target is to uncover the implicit semantic links between words using their lexical structure, incorporating multi-sense embeddings, word sense disambiguation, lexical chains, and lexical databases. A few natural language problems are selected to validate the contributions of this work, in which our techniques outperform state-of-the-art systems. All the proposed algorithms can be used separately as independent components or combined in one single system to improve the semantic representation of words, sentences, and documents. Additionally, they can also work in a recurrent form, refining even more their results.
Faith in the ‘Digital Native’ during online search in Australian home-schools

Students today can access unlimited information online, and can do so, according to ‘generational digital divide’ rhetoric, without assistance. This paper explores the extent to which ‘generational digital divide’ rhetoric is supported by the discourse accompanying online search in five Australian home-schools. Observations and interviews were analysed using Critical Discourse Analysis. During search, discourse assumed greater student skill. In interview, however, parents and students reported doubt in the students’ search proficiency. Growing reliance upon search by increasing numbers of home-schoolers warrants greater understanding of such technology and its role in learning.