Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Predator-Prey Interactions between Halobacteriovorax and Pathogenic Vibrio parahaemolyticus Strains: Geographical Considerations and Influence of Vibrio Hemolysins

Vibrio parahaemolyticus is a formidable obstacle to seafood safety. Strains pathogenic to humans are numerous and difficult to control, especially within molluscan shellfish. ABSTRACT Halobacteriovorax is a genus of naturally occurring marine predatory bacteria that attack, replicate within, and lyse vibrios and other bacteria. This study evaluated the specificity of four Halobacteriovorax strains against important sequence types (STs) of clinically relevant Vibrio parahaemolyticus, including pandemic strains ST3 and ST36. The Halobacteriovorax bacteria were previously isolated from seawater from the Mid-Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Hawaiian coasts of the United States. Specificity screening was performed using a double agar plaque assay technique on 23 well-characterized and genomically sequenced V. parahaemolyticus strains isolated from infected individuals from widely varying geographic locations within the United States. With few exceptions, results showed that Halobacteriovorax bacteria were excellent predators of the V. parahaemolyticus strains regardless of the origins of the predator or prey. Sequence types and serotypes of V. parahaemolyticus did not influence host specificity, nor did the presence or absence of genes for the thermostable direct hemolysin (TDH) or the TDH-related hemolysin, although faint (cloudy) plaques were present when one or both hemolysins were absent in three of the Vibrio strains. Plaque sizes varied depending on both the Halobacteriovorax and Vibrio strains evaluated, suggesting differences in Halobacteriovorax replication and/or growth rates. The very broad infectivity of Halobacteriovorax toward pathogenic strains of V. parahaemolyticus makes Halobacteriovorax a strong candidate for use in commercial processing applications to enhance the safety of seafoods. IMPORTANCE Vibrio parahaemolyticus is a formidable obstacle to seafood safety. Strains pathogenic to humans are numerous and difficult to control, especially within molluscan shellfish. The pandemic spread of ST3 and ST36 has caused considerable concern, but many other STs are also problematic. The present study demonstrates broad predatory activity of Halobacteriovorax strains obtained along U.S. coastal waters from the Mid-Atlantic, Gulf Coast, and Hawaii toward strains of pathogenic V. parahaemolyticus. This broad activity against clinically relevant V. parahaemolyticus strains suggests a role for Halobacteriovorax in mediating pathogenic V. parahaemolyticus levels in seafoods and their environment as well as the potential application of these predators in the development of new disinfection technologies to reduce pathogenic vibrios in molluscan shellfish and other seafoods.
Metagenomic Profiles of Yak and Cattle Manure Resistomes in Different Feeding Patterns before and after Composting

The recent increase in the prevalence of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), biocide resistance genes (BRGs), and metal resistance genes (MRGs) in livestock manure poses risks to human health. Composting is known to be a promising technology for reducing the abundance of resistance genes. ABSTRACT Antibiotic resistance is a global threat to public health, with antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) being one of the emerging contaminants; furthermore, animal manure is an important reservoir of biocide resistance genes (BRGs) and metal resistance genes (MRGs). However, few studies have reported differences in the abundance and diversity of BRGs and MRGs between different types of animal manure and the changes in BRGs and MRGs before and after composting. This study employed a metagenomics-based approach to investigate ARGs, BRGs, MRGs, and mobile genetic elements (MGEs) of yak and cattle manure before and after composting under grazing and intensive feeding patterns. The total abundances of ARGs, clinical ARGs, BRGs, MRGs, and MGEs were lower in the manure of grazing livestock than in the manure of the intensively fed group. After composting, the total abundances of ARGs, clinical ARGs, and MGEs in intensively fed livestock manure decreased, whereas those of ARGs, clinical ARGs, MRGs, and MGEs increased in grazing livestock manure. The synergy between MGEs mediated horizontal gene transfer and vertical gene transmission via host bacteria proliferation, which was the main driver that altered the abundance and diversity of ARGs, BRGs, and MRGs in livestock manure and compost. Additionally, tetQ, IS91, mdtF, and fabK were potential indicators for estimating the total abundance of clinical ARGs, BRGs, MRGs, and MGEs in livestock manure and compost. These findings suggest that grazing livestock manure can be directly discharged into the fields, whereas intensively fed livestock manure should be composted before returning to the field. IMPORTANCE The recent increase in the prevalence of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), biocide resistance genes (BRGs), and metal resistance genes (MRGs) in livestock manure poses risks to human health. Composting is known to be a promising technology for reducing the abundance of resistance genes. This study investigated the differences and changes in the abundances of ARGs, BRGs, and MRGs between yak and cattle manure under grazing and intensive feeding patterns before and after composting. The results indicate that the feeding pattern significantly affected the abundances of resistance genes in livestock manure. Manure in intensive farming should be composted before being discharged into the field, while grazing livestock manure is not suitable for composting due to an increased number of resistance genes.
The universal instability in optimised stellarators

In tokamaks and neoclassically optimised stellarators, like Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) and the Helically Symmetric Experiment, turbulent transport is expected to be the dominant transport mechanism. Among the electrostatic instabilities that drive turbulence, the trapped-electron mode (TEM) has been shown both analytically and in simulations to be absent over large ranges of parameter space in quasi-isodynamic stellarator configurations with the maximum-$J$ property. It has been proposed that the reduction of the linear TEM growth rate in such configurations may lead to the passing-electron-driven universal instability, which is often subdominant to the TEM, becoming the fastest-growing instability over some range of parameter space. Here, we show through gyrokinetic simulations using the Gene code, that the universal instability is dominant in a variety of stellarator geometries over a range of parameter space typically occupied by the TEM, but most consequentially in devices which possess beneficial TEM stability properties like W7-X, which locally satisfies the maximum-$J$ property for deeply trapped particles in the regions of worst curvature. We find that the universal instability exists at long perpendicular wavelengths and, as a result, dominates the potential fluctuation amplitude in nonlinear simulations. In W7-X, universal modes are found to differ in parallel mode structure from trapped-particle modes, which may impact turbulence localisation in experiments.
Distribution and Numbers of Arboreal Birds between the Hyper-Arid Sahara and the Hyper-Humid Guinea Forests

This study quantifies the spatial variation in the density of 50 arboreal bird species (17 insectivorous Afro-Palearctic migrants and 33 Afro-tropical residents: 20 insectivores, 7 frugivores and 6 sunbirds) in the transition zone between the arid Sahara and the humid Guinea zone, measured during the dry season in 2011–2019. The distribution of bird species was related to annual rainfall, with Afro-Palearctic migrants found mainly in the relatively dry zone and Afro-tropical residents in the more humid zone. As woody cover increases with rainfall, bird species from the dry zone are by default found in more open habitats than species from the humid zone. This effect of woody cover largely dissolves when corrected for rainfall. The data – pertaining to absolute bird counts in stratified random sites – were used to estimate the total number of birds in this region. To assess the reliability of these estimations, population sizes were calculated separately per species on half-split data. The two estimates deviated about 10% from the averages calculated for the full data set. Among arboreal birds (1322 million), insectivorous residents were most abundant (547 million), followed by insectivorous migrants (326 million), nectarivorous residents (272 million) and frugivorous residents (177 million). The two most numerous arboreal bird species were insectivorous residents: Tawny-flanked Prinia Prinia subflava (128 million) and Green-backed Camaroptera Camaroptera brachyura (103 million). Among the migrants, the three most abundant were Subalpine Warbler Curruca iberiae + subalpina + cantillans (62 million), Lesser Whitethroat Curruca curruca (48 million) and Western Bonelli's Warbler Phylloscopus bonelli (30 million).
Fueling the Creative Spark: How Authentic Leadership and LMX Foster Employees’ Proactive Orientation and Creativity

Creativity is a critical determinant of organizations’ abilities to compete and perform in rapidly changing and complex contexts. Though scholars have identified several contextual factors, such as leadership, that motivate employees’ creative performance, the psychological mechanisms and boundary conditions underpinning this relationship are relatively unknown. Drawing on social exchange theory, we propose that a proactive orientation, a psychological state rooted in the cognitive and behavioral process of setting a proactive goal and striving to achieve it, is a critical mechanism linking authentic leadership to employees’ creativity. Across two field studies of working professionals in Central Europe and the U.S., we show how authentic leadership fuels employees’ creative performance through a proactive orientation and introduce leader–member exchange (LMX) as an important moderator of this mediated relationship. In Study 1, using a sample of European manufacturing employees, we find support for the mediating role of a proactive orientation linking authentic leadership to creative performance, above, and beyond the effects of ethical leadership. In Study 2, using a sample of university staff, we replicate this finding and extend it by highlighting the moderating role of LMX on the authentic leadership-proactive orientation relationship.
The Now, New, and Next of Digital Leadership: How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Will Take Over and Change Leadership as We Know It

There is an emerging consensus that traditional management roles could—and maybe should—be performed by machines infused with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Yet, “true” leadership—that is, motivating and enabling people so that they can and will contribute to the collective goals of an organization—is still predominantly viewed as the prerogative of humans. With our opinion piece, we challenge this perspective. Our essay aims to be a wake-up call for large parts of academia and practice that romanticize human leadership and think that this bastion can never be overtaken by AI. We delineate why algorithms will not (need to) come to a halt before core characteristics of leadership and potentially cater better to employees’ psychological needs than human leaders. Against this background, conscious choices need to be made about what role humans are to play in the future of leadership. These considerations hold significant implications for the future of not only leadership research but also leadership education and development.
Response of a laminar separation bubble to impulsive forcing

The spatial and temporal response characteristics of a laminar separation bubble to impulsive forcing are investigated by means of time-resolved particle image velocimetry and linear stability theory. A two-dimensional impulsive disturbance is introduced with an alternating current dielectric barrier discharge plasma actuator, exciting pertinent instability modes and ensuring flow development under environmental disturbances. Phase-averaged velocity measurements are employed to analyse the effect of imposed disturbances at different amplitudes on the laminar separation bubble. The impulsive disturbance develops into a wave packet that causes rapid shrinkage of the bubble in both upstream and downstream directions. This is followed by bubble bursting, during which the bubble elongates significantly, while vortex shedding in the aft part ceases. Duration of recovery of the bubble to its unforced state is independent of the forcing amplitude. Quasi-steady linear stability analysis is performed at each individual phase, demonstrating reduction of growth rate and frequency of the most unstable modes with increasing forcing amplitude. Throughout the recovery, amplification rates are directly proportional to the shape factor. This indicates that bursting and flapping mechanisms are driven by altered stability characteristics due to variations in incoming disturbances. The emerging wave packet is characterised in terms of frequency, convective speed and growth rate, with remarkable agreement between linear stability theory predictions and measurements. The wave packet assumes a frequency close to the natural shedding frequency, while its convective speed remains invariant for all forcing amplitudes. The stability of the flow changes only when disturbances interact with the shear layer breakdown and reattachment processes, supporting the notion of a closed feedback loop. The results of this study shed light on the response of laminar separation bubbles to impulsive forcing, providing insight into the attendant changes of flow dynamics and the underlying stability mechanisms.
Burden of ocular abnormalities in patients with beta thalassaemia: a cross-sectional study

Introduction In Pakistan, the reported carrier rate of thalassaemia is estimated to be 5%–8% with 5000 new patients diagnosed every year. Several known systemic complications of beta thalassaemia major have been studied, but no studies are conducted to assess ocular complications among these patients from our population. Methods It was a cross-sectional study design conducted at three private and public sector centres in Pakistan. We recruited 203, 11–17 years old children with beta thalassaemia major in our study. Frequency of overall ocular complications such as retinal pigment epithelium degeneration, visual field defects, increased retinal vascular tortuosity, lenticular opacities, anterior segment abnormality, etc among beta thalassaemia patients were verified by an ophthalmologist. Results On univariate analysis male gender (prevalence ratio (PR): 1.023 (0.903 to 1.160), OGTT levels (PR: 0.99 (0.978 to 1.003) and serum calcium levels (PR: 0.716 (0.616 to 0.936)) were significantly associated with ocular complications. However, on multivariable analysis after adjusting for covariates we observed that the prevalence of ocular complications was 88% higher in males as compared with females. Moreover, with every one unit increase in serum calcium levels the prevalence of ocular complications were decreased by 24%. Conclusion Our study results showed that the frequency of ocular complications in beta thalassaemia children was 22.7%. Male gender was a risk factor for ocular complications among children with beta thalassaemia. However, high calcium levels among these patients were found to be protective for ocular complications.
Facilitating person‐centred care: integrating an electronic client feedback tool into continuous quality improvement processes to deliver client‐responsive HIV services in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Engaging communities in the design, implementation and monitoring of health services is critical for delivering high‐quality, person‐centred services that keep people living with HIV engaged in care. The USAID‐funded Integrated HIV/AIDS Project in Haut‐Katanga (IHAP‐HK) integrated an electronic client feedback tool into continuous quality improvement (CQI) processes. We aimed to demonstrate this system's impact on identifying and improving critical quality‐of‐care gaps.
The Tropical Nullstellensatz and Positivstellensatz for Sparse Polynomial Systems

Grigoriev and Podolskii (2018) have established a tropical analog of the effective Nullstellensatz, showing that a system of tropical polynomial equations is solvable if and only if a linearized system obtained from a truncated Macaulay matrix is solvable. They provided an upper bound of the minimal admissible truncation degree, as a function of the degrees of the tropical polynomials. We establish a tropical nullstellensatz adapted to sparse tropical polynomial systems. Our approach is inspired by a construction of Canny-Emiris (1993), refined by Sturmfels (1994). This leads to an improved bound of the truncation degree, which coincides with the classical Macaulay degree in the case of n + 1 equations in n unknowns. We also establish a tropical positivstellensatz, allowing one to decide the inclusion of tropical basic semialgebraic sets. This allows one to reduce decision problems for tropical semi-algebraic sets to the solution of systems of tropical linear equalities and inequalities. The later systems are known to be reducible to mean payoff games, which can be solved in practice, in a scalable way, by value iteration methods. We illustrate this approach by examples.
Deciding first-order formulas involving univariate mixed trigonometric-polynomials

A decision algorithm for the first-order theory of univariate mixed trigonometric-polynomials over the reals is proposed in this paper. In the development of the decision algorithm, the concept "contraction mapping associated with an algebraic function" is introduced and a new real root isolation algorithm for univariate mixed trigonometric-polynomials is presented. The decision algorithm is implemented with Mathematica and its effectiveness is shown by some experimental results.
Using monodromy to recover symmetries of polynomial systems

Galois/monodromy groups attached to parametric systems of polynomial equations provide a method for detecting the existence of symmetries in solution sets. Beyond the question of existence, one would like to compute formulas for these symmetries, towards the eventual goal of solving the systems more efficiently. We describe and implement one possible approach to this task using numerical homotopy continuation and multivariate rational function interpolation. We illustrate our methods on several examples, including two cases with nonlinear symmetries which appear in applications from computer vision and robotics.
Invariants: Computation and Applications

Invariants withstand transformations and, therefore, represent the essence of objects or phenomena. In mathematics, transformations often constitute a group action. Since the 19th century, studying the structure of various types of invariants and designing methods and algorithms to compute them remains an active area of ongoing research with an abundance of applications. In this incredibly vast topic, we focus on two particular themes displaying a fruitful interplay between the differential and algebraic invariant theories. First, we show how an algebraic adaptation of the moving frame method from differential geometry leads to a practical algorithm for computing a generating set of rational invariants. Then we discuss the notion of differential invariant signature, its role in solving equivalence problems in geometry and algebra, and some successes and challenges in designing algorithms based on this notion.
Using STEAM and Bio-Inspired Design to Teach the Entrepreneurial Mindset to Engineers

Abstract The need for addressing global and societal problems is stronger than ever, as demonstrated by the UN Sustainable Development Goals and National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges. However, engineering undergraduate students rarely get to experience engaging with the associated real-world projects and challenges. This has the potential to result in attenuation from engineering education and career pathways. This study aimed to overcome this issue by reaching the United States’ untapped future engineering workforce via an engineering educator professional development “train-the-trainer” program. This train-the-trainer program guided engineering educators to apply evidence-based pedagogical methods (e.g., backward course design) to couple entrepreneurial mindset (EM) development with STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, math) and bio-inspired design in an effort to improve the retention of underrepresented engineering students via a transdisciplinary, humanistic approach. This study employed a mixed methods approach including retrospective post-then-pre items based on perceived learning gains, rating the overall satisfaction with the program, and open-ended questions to better understand what went well, what did not go so well, and what can be improved. From a practical perspective, this study shows that integrating STEAM (with a specific focus on the arts) into the engineering classroom promotes problem-solving and critical thinking across disciplines. Here, applying STEAM principles encourages diverse perspective taking and making by bridging paradigms and theoretical frameworks across a variety of humanities and technical disciplines. As a result, combining STEAM with bio-inspired design and the EM has the capacity to increase engagement and broaden participation among students traditionally underrepresented in engineering, including females and minoritized populations.
Kraft cooking of birch wood chips: differences between the dissolved organic material in pore and bulk liquor

Abstract The delignification of birch chips during kraft pulping was investigated, targeting both the impregnation and cooking steps. Wood chips were impregnated using white liquor, white liquor + NaCl, water or NaCl aqueous solution. Then, the chips were cooked in batch autoclaves applying the same constant composition cooking conditions for all samples. Pulp and two fractions of black liquor (bulk liquor and centrifuged liquor representing the liquor inside the wood chips and fibers) were collected after different pulping times and analyzed for lignin and carbohydrate content. The dissolved wood components were precipitated from selected samples and characterized with respect to composition, molecular weight distribution and structural motifs. Cooking chemicals in the impregnation liquors led to faster delignification and xylan removal during cooking. Higher contents of lignin and xylan were measured in the lumen than in the bulk. The concentration profiles also showed accumulation of dissolved material in the lumen over time, suggesting significant mass transport limitation from lumen to bulk. Further analysis revealed higher fragmentation/degradation of dissolved material with increasing pulping time and in the bulk when compared to the lumen liquor, as demonstrated by the lower molecular weights and the changes in chemical shifts in the NMR spectra.