Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Preservation of neutralizing antibody function in COVID‐19 convalescent plasma treated using a riboflavin and ultraviolet light‐based pathogen reduction technology

Convalescent plasma (CP) has been embraced as a safe therapeutic option for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19), while other treatments are developed. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) is not transmissible by transfusion, but bloodborne pathogens remain a risk in regions with high endemic prevalence of disease. Pathogen reduction can mitigate this risk; thus, the objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of riboflavin and ultraviolet light (R + UV) pathogen reduction technology on the functional properties of COVID‐19 CP (CCP).
Essential oil constituents of Trachyspermum copticum (L.) Link fruits

ABSTRACT The essential oil, which was obtained by steam distillation of fruits of Trachyspermum copticum (L.) Link harvested in Turkey, was analyzed direcdy by GC and GC/MS. Twenty-seven compounds were identified of which thymol (61%) was present in greatest quantity. Other major components were p-cymene (15.6%) and γ-terpinene (11.9%)
A molecular dynamics study of orientational disordering in crystalline sodium nitrate

Molecular dynamics computer simulations have been made of the ordered low-temperature and orientationally disordered high-temperature phases of crystalline sodium nitrate. The interionic force model used in the simulations is based on a rigid-ion representation of the electrostatic interactions, supplemented by a set of atom-atom potentials of the Buckingham type. Five simulations have been carried out, covering the temperature range from 293 to 570 K. Where possible, detailed comparison is made with experiment, and generally satisfactory agreement is found. Anion disorder is shown to consist primarily in reorientation about an axis parallel to the crystallographic c direction, but only at the highest temperature studied can the motion be described as that of a free, quasi-two-dimensional rotor. The spectra of translational and librational lattice modes have been compared and the way in which these change with temperature is discussed in terms of translational-rotation coupling. Numerical estimates are presented of the degree of correlation between translations and rotations at different points in the Brillouin zone, and possible ordering processes are identified. The diffuse scattering predicted by the model is analysed in detail and related to the results of X-ray and neutron scattering experiments. It is suggested that in the high-temperature phase there exist two major ordering processes and that the competition between the two results in the experimentally observed critical exponent for the macroscopic order parameter being significantly less than its classical value. The same argument is formulated on the basis of a Landau-type expression for the free energy. Although the simulation have been limited to the specific case of sodium nitrate, the results should also be helpful in understanding the nature of the corresponding phase transition in calcite.
Changes in soil properties under high‐ and low‐input cropping systems in Lithuania

Abstract. To determine the effects of low‐input agriculture on soil properties, we compared several forms of arable land management in a rotation experiment lasting 8 years on a Cambisol in Lithuania. Conventional arable cropping with applications of inorganic fertilizers increased the potassium (K) status of the soil, but resulted in losses of nitrogen (N) from the soil by mineralization and leaching. With ley–arable integrated cropping, a similar fertilizer regime based on farmyard manure (FYM) augmented with inorganic fertilizers increased the phosphorus (P), K, organic matter and N in the soil, as well as increasing N loss by leaching. These two high‐input regimes were compared to three systems with less or no input. A reference treatment with no input, which produced small crop yields, maintained its nutrient status and organic matter. An organic regime receiving FYM and green manure lost only P, but maintained its K and N status, while a second organic regime in which the FYM was replaced by composted sewage maintained its fertility. The microbial activity varied somewhat from treatment to treatment, with the largest numbers of almost all groups of microorganisms in the reference treatment. All treatments led to decreases in fulvic acid, and the soil managed conventionally lost humic acid, too. The content of humic acid increased in the treatments where FYM was applied and in the reference soil, and the fraction bound to calcium increased in the integrated and the first organic treatments. The soil structures under the integrated cropping and second organic regime were the most stable. Of the low‐input systems, the second organic regime seemed the most sustainable.
Androgenic morality? Associations of sex, oral contraceptive use and basal testosterone levels with moral decision making

Aside from cultural, psychological, or situational factors, differences in moral judgements might also be influenced by biological variables. Since previous studies have reported stronger utilitarian tendencies in men, the relationship between testosterone and moral judgments has gained interest. Utilitarian judgements focus on the consequences of an action in terms of a cost-benefit analysis while deontological judgements are based on rules that are independent of an action's outcome or of situational features. We investigated decisions in moral dilemma situations in N = 157 young adults using a process dissociation approach to allow an independent estimate of underlying utilitarianism and deontology. Significant effects of sex (p = .009) and endocrine status (p = .011) on utilitarianism were found with the highest levels in men and the lowest in free cycling women while oral contraceptive users fell in between. Furthermore, there were correlations of salivary testosterone with utilitarianism in free cycling women (r = .303) and with deontology in men (r = -.263) while no significant associations between testosterone and moral choices were found in oral contraceptive users. However, the duration of contraceptive use correlated negatively with deontology (r = -.316). The findings underscore the role of sex, endocrine status as well as testosterone in moral judgements but also point to specific associations depending on sex and oral contraceptive use.
NOTES ON POPULATION STATUS AND FEEDING BEHAVIOUR OF ASIAN SMALL-CLAWED OTTER (Aonyx cinereus) IN THE SUNDARBANS MANGROVE FOREST OF BANGLADESH

Very little information is available on population status, distribution and ecology of Asian Small-clawed Otter, Aonyx cinereus in Bangladesh. By surveying approximately 351 km of water courses in the Bangladesh Sundarbans, 53 individuals of this otter were recorded in 13 groups, with a mean group size of 4.08± SE 1.13. Mean encounter rate of combined sighting, footprint, and spraint was 0.06/km of rivers surveyed, with higher abundance along the eastern regions of the Sundarbans. Otters were found predominantly feeding on mudskippers (Periophthalmus sp.) on the exposed river mudflats, particularly during ebb tide. The chemical pollution in watercourses by several recent cargo incidents within the Bangladesh Sundarbans might have adversely affected otter populations. Systematic otter surveys are needed for a rigorous population assessment to guide conservation effort, and to monitor ecosystem health of the Sundarbans.
Polymorph screening using near-infrared spectroscopy

Near-infrared spectroscopy was utilized as a polymorph screening method. A model compound (sulfathiazole) was recrystallized from various solvents, and the crystals were milled using a planetary ball mill and compressed using a hydraulic press. The polymorphism of recrystallized and processed samples and the effect of processing on the polymorphism of sulfathiazole was studied by near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and verified by X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD) and thermal analysis. Polymorphism and the degree of crystallinity of the processed samples were studied, and NIR spectroscopy proved to be a fast tool for polymorph screening and monitoring the processing-induced transformations. After clustering of the NIR spectra of various samples, XRPD and complementary methods can be applied to a more thorough analysis of different clusters. This approach provides a timesaving improvement for the polymorph analysis in the case of large number of samples.
Radiation Pattern Agile Antenna using PIN Diodes and SPDT Switches

In this paper, a new design of a reconfigurable antenna is proposed. The antenna structure is using two PIN diodes for switching between two radiation patterns (directional and bidirectional) and a SPDT switch to achieve good impedance matching. The simulated results show a good impedance matching, with $S_{11}$ below −10 dB using the SPDT switch configuration. In addition, the far-field directivity for both configurations is around 5 dB.
Inferring the Relationship between Users' Personality and their image on Flicker using deep learning and clustering

Most of the social media such as Instagram/Facebook/Flicker/Twitter allow users to express themselves through the post content, like content and profile information. Each of these activities is a reflection of a user’s personality. Images are currently present in a significant fraction of data in social media. Therefore, these days personality trait prediction by image-based content analysis attract more attention than text-based analysis among researchers. However, investigating of large amount of unstructured data of presented images is complicated. Therefore, proposing models that can prepare this knowledge briefly and structured is crucial. In this paper has been attempted to detect personality by combined deep learning and clustering approach that accurately inferring relationship between users’ images content and their personality in Flicker. We considered different modalities of interaction including: posts, likes and their profile images in this platform. The results of this paper will be useful in different areas such as marketing advertisement, psychology and sociology.
An Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for Secure Communication in Smart Grid

Rapid development of wireless technologies has driven the evolution of smart grid application. In smart grid, authentication plays an important role for secure communication between smart meter and service provider. Hence, the design of secure authenticated key agreement schemes has received significant attention from researchers. In these schemes, a trusted third party directly participates in key agreement process. Although, this third party is assumed as trusted, however we cannot reject the possibility that being a third party, it can also be malicious. In the existing works, either the established session key is revealed to the agents of a trusted third party, or a trusted third party agent can impersonate the smart meter and establish a valid session key with the service provider, which is likely to cause security vulnerabilities. Therefore, there is a need to design a secure authentication scheme so that only the deserving entities involved in the communication can establish and know the session key. This paper proposes a new secure authenticated key agreement scheme for smart grid considering the fact that the third party can also be malicious. The security of the proposed scheme has been thoroughly evaluated using an adversary model. Correctness of the scheme has been analyzed using the broadly accepted Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) Logic. In addition, the formal security verification of the proposed scheme has been performed using the widely accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation tool. Results of this simulation confirm that the proposed scheme is safe. Detailed security analysis shows the robustness of the scheme against various known attacks. Moreover, the comparative performance study of the proposed scheme with other relevant schemes is presented to demonstrate its practicality.
Cellulose Thermal Decomposition Kinetics: Global Mass Loss Kinetics

The kinetics of cellulose pyrolysis have received considerable attention during the past few decades. Despite intensive study, there remains controversy in the literature even on a topic as basic as the global kinetics of pyrolysis. The reported kinetics have been reconsidered in light of new experimental results that suggest a simple resolution to that part of the controversy concerning the activation energy of pyrolysis. It appears that the reported kinetics are sensitive to the heating rate employed in the experiments used to deduce them. Experiments in which the cellulose is rapidly heated to above 600 K give apparently ``low`` activation energies, mainly between about 140 and 155 kJ/mol, in the case of the material studied here. This applies to both ``isothermal`` and high heating rate temperature-ramp experiments. Alternatively, cellulose heated more slowly to temperatures below 600 K appears to lose mass with an activation energy that is about 218 kJ/mol, The mathematical modeling of processes involving pyrolysis of cellulosic materials (e.g., biomass conversion processes, fire phenomena) can be strongly influenced by which kinetics are assumed, since the kinetic constants from one regime will not accurately predict mass loss in the other.
MEET: A Method for Embeddings Evaluation for Taxonomic Data

Taxonomies are the mainstay of a wide range of applications in the semantic web and provide formal support for syntactic and semantic exchanges. Hence, they are pivotal for machine understanding in natural language processing and business-oriented tasks. However, keeping such hierarchies updated and able to represent the domain from which they have been drawn, is still a time-consuming and error-prone activity. Here, word embeddings have proven to be effective in catching lexicon and semantic similarities to enrich taxonomies from text data. This, in turn, would require to evaluate the generated embeddings to estimate the extent to which they encode the semantic similarity derived from the hierarchy itself. In this paper, we propose and implement MEET a methodology that aims at generating and evaluating embeddings from a text corpus preserving the semantic similarity relations synthesised from a taxonomy. To this aim, we develop a new measure - namely Hierarchical Semantic Similarity (HSS) - to compute the semantic similarity between taxonomic elements. Experimental results show that (i) HSS outperforms state-of-the-art measures for measuring semantic similarity in taxonomy and (ii) the embedding selected through MEET obtains a clear victory against embeddings selected by the literature on benchmark tasks. We made available an open-source repository11gitlab anonymised project with all the material employed in this research, including the HSS for 35,000 word pairs.
Strong Secrecy for Relay Wiretap Channels with Polar Codes and Double-Chaining

Secure communication for the primitive relay wiretap channel under the decode-and-forward protocol, is considered. A polar coding-based technique is proposed and we show that is suitable to provide reliability and a level of information-theoretic security. We focus on the strong secrecy criterion where in order to satisfy it we implement a double-chaining construction to overcome the obstacle of misaligned bits.
Effect of 1-methylcyclopropene on Ripening and Superficial Scald of Japanese Pear (Pyrus pyrifolia Nakai, cv. Akemizu) Fruit at Two Temperatures

In this paper, effect of 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP) on ‘Akemizu’ pear fruit was investigated to evaluate fruit quality, respiration rate, ethylene release rate, membrane lipid peroxidation and superficial scald at room temperature (25±2°C) for 20 d and at low temperature (4±1°C) for 72 d. The results showed that at two temperatures, 1-MCP treatment inhibited obviously the declines of fruit quality during storage, suppressed strongly respiration rates and delayed the ethylene peaks. Furthermore, compared with the control, lipoxidase (LOX) activities and malondialdehyde (MDA) contents of 1-MCP-treated fruits appeared lower at two temperatures. The development of fruit superficial scald was alleviated to a great extent by 1-MCP or low temperature, and superficial scald could be completely inhibited under 1-MCP plus cold condition. The contents of α-farnesene and conjugated trienols in 1-MCP-treated or cold-treated fruits were significantly lower than in untreated fruits.
Incrementally Approaching an Inquiry Lab Curriculum: Can Changing a Single Laboratory Experiment Improve Student Performance in General Chemistry?.

Many institutions are responding to current research about how students learn science by transforming their general chemistry laboratory curricula to be inquiry-oriented. We present a comparison study of student performance after completing either a traditional or an inquiry stoichiometry experiment. This single laboratory experience was the only difference between two comparison groups enrolled in the same general chemistry course with otherwise traditional labs. Measures used to assess student performance included an open-response question, and ACS multiple-choice test items at various points in the course, as well as observations of students in the laboratory, and interviews. Statistical analysis of data used an ANOVA model, including a covariate to control for students' prior knowledge and skills. Students who completed the inquiry experiment significantly outperformed students who did the traditional experiment on stoichiometry content problems and experimental design tasks. No difference in performa.
Learning Algorithms for Minimizing Queue Length Regret

We consider a system consisting of a single transmitter/receiver pair and <italic>N</italic> channels over which they may communicate. Packets randomly arrive to the transmitter’s queue and wait to be successfully sent to the receiver. The transmitter may attempt a frame transmission on one channel at a time, where each frame includes a packet if one is in the queue. For each channel, an attempted transmission is successful with an unknown probability. The transmitter’s objective is to quickly identify the best channel to minimize the number of packets in the queue over <italic>T</italic> time slots. To analyze system performance, we introduce queue length regret, which is the expected difference between the total queue length of a learning policy and a controller that knows the rates, a priori. One approach to designing a transmission policy would be to apply algorithms from the literature that solve the closely-related stochastic multi-armed bandit problem. These policies would focus on maximizing the number of successful frame transmissions over time. However, we show that these methods have <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\Omega (\log {{T}})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> queue length regret. On the other hand, we show that there exists a set of queue-length based policies that can obtain order optimal <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${O}(1)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> queue length regret. We use our theoretical analysis to devise heuristic methods that are shown to perform well in simulation.
Assessing the impact of phosphorus cycling on river water P concentration in Hokkaido

Abstract We estimated the phosphorus (P) budgets for all 212 cities, towns and villages of Hokkaido, Japan. We also carried out water sampling from all major rivers flowing in the respective areas during the snowmelt season and measured total P (TP) concentration. Surplus P in the agricultural land was estimated by subtracting the amount of crop uptake from the input sources, such as the amount of chemical and compost fertilizers, crop residues, rainfall and irrigation. The livestock excreta P not utilized on farmland was assumed to be disposed P. Total P concentrations in most of the river water ranged from undetectable to 1 mg L−1, rarely reaching up to 2.32 mg L−1, and the areas surrounding the Funka Bay had comparatively higher concentrations. More than two-thirds of the areas had surplus P in farmland ranging from negative values to 30 kg ha−1 of farmland, and areas with mixed farmland and livestock husbandry had higher surplus values ranging from 31 to 72 kg ha−1, indicating that the source of the residual P was applied chemical and manure fertilizers. Total P concentration in river water was not correlated with the proportion of upland field and urban area or with the farmland surplus P resulting from the P cycling and the municipal waste P that mixes into the river water. However, TP concentration was positively correlated with the proportion of Andisol area occupied by farmlands (r = 0.25, P < 0.01). The TP concentration was also correlated with the topographic factors in areas (r = 0.49, P < 0.01) that possess more than 50% Andisols in farmlands. Multiple regression analysis showed that TP concentration was best explained by a combination of disposed excreta, the Andisol area occupied by farmland, the application rate of chemical fertilizers and topographic factors (r 2 = 0.21, P < 0.001). Thus, P losses from farmlands to river water during the snowmelt season could mainly be attributed to fertilizer management and soil type along with the topographic condition of the area.