Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of supplementing probiotics and concentrate on intake, growth performance and blood profile of intensively kept Sahelian does fed a basal diet of Brachiaria decumbens grass

ABSTRACT The study was conducted to determine the effects of supplementing probiotics and concentrates on intake and growth performance of Sahelian does fed Brachiaria decumbens grass. Twenty-four Sahelian does averaging one year and weighing 13.3 ± 1.16 kg were assigned randomly in a 2 × 2 factorial arrangement to four treatments in a Completely Randomized Design with 6 replicates and used to measure intake and live weight changes for 14 weeks. The factors were levels of concentrate and probiotics. Blood samples were taken for the determination of haematological and biochemical parameters. The results revealed differences (P < 0.05) in total dry matter intake, live weight changes and feed conversion ratio attributable to treatment effects. The differences observed in total dry matter intake led to improvements in average daily gain, feed conversion ratio and growth rate. All blood haematological indices with the exception of mean cell volume were impacted positively by treatment effects. White blood cell and total protein contents improved linearly with probiotics and higher level of concentrate supplementation, while total cholesterol content declined (P < 0.05). The results highlighted the positive impact of probiotics and higher level of concentrate supplementation on growth performance and blood profile of growing Sahelian does on a basal diet of Brachiaria decumbens grass.
Exploring Fusion of the Face and Voice Modalities Using CNN Features for a Better Performance

Face recognition and speaker recognition have gained attention in recent times in the large-scale space. Large-scale face databases such as VGG-Face and VGGFace2 have been created using a semi-automated pipeline and used to develop methods for face recognition achieving state-of-the-art performance. This is also true for speaker recognition with large-scale databases such as VoxCeleb and VoxCeleb2. Howbeit, these two modalities have been treated individually. Although some works have explored the fusion of both modalities, they have played in small-scale space. This work aims at creating a large-scale face and corresponding voice database from YouTube under unconstrained conditions with a size comparable to the earlier mentioned and explores the fusion of both face and voice modalities for recognition in the large-scale space. To this end, a face and corresponding voice database of Nigerians available on YouTube was created for 2,656 Nigerians containing 2,055,169 face images and 195 hours of voice recording using a semi-automated curation pipeline. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) were used to perform face recognition and speaker recognition individually. This was followed by the use of CNN for a combination of both modalities achieving an Equal Error Rate (EER) more than 5 times lower than the best result in the individual cases.
GASA Proteins: Review of Their Functions in Plant Environmental Stress Tolerance

Gibberellic acid-stimulated Arabidopsis (GASA) gene family is a class of functional cysteine-rich proteins characterized by an N-terminal signal peptide and a C-terminal-conserved GASA domain with 12 invariant cysteine (Cys) residues. GASA proteins are widely distributed among plant species, and the majority of them are involved in the signal transmission of plant hormones, the regulation of plant development and growth, and the responses to different environmental constraints. To date, their action mechanisms are not completely elucidated. This review reports an overview of the diversity, structure, and subcellular localization of GASA proteins, their involvement in hormone crosstalk and redox regulation during development, and plant responses to abiotic and biotic stresses. Knowledge of this complex regulation can be a contribution to promoting multiple abiotic stress tolerance with potential agricultural applications through the engineering of genes encoding GASA proteins and the production of transgenic plants.
Activation of Cannabinoid Receptor 2 Protects Rat Hippocampal Neurons against Chronic, Oligomeric A_-induced Neuronal Hyperexcitation

There is a significantly elevated incidence of epilepsy in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Burgeoning evidence indicates that soluble beta-amyloid peptides oligomers (oAβ) are vital players in driving neuronal hyperactivity in AD. It is well known that the modulations of the cannabinoid system exhibit neuroprotective effects in various neurological diseases, including AD. However, a consensus is yet to emerge as to the impact of hippocampal cannabinoid receptor 2 (CB2R) in protecting hippocampal neurons against Aβ-induced neuronal hyperexcitation. Here, we report that chronic treatment of primary hippocampal neuronal cultures with 100 nM Aβ1–42 oligomers for 7 days results in a neuronal hyperexcitation. Further, pre-treatments of CB2R agonist (JWH133, 1 μM with Aβ1–42 for 7 days) significantly protect hippocampal neurons against Aβ-increased hyperexcitation, including prolonged action potential (AP) initiation, enhanced after hyperpolarization (AHP), and decreased AP numbers. These effects are eliminated by a selective CB2R antagonist, AM630. Furthermore, when the oAβ-increased neuronal hyperexcitation has already formed (pretreated with oAβ1–42 for 5 days), the addition of JWH133 also abolishes the Aβ’s effects. Collectively, our results suggest that the selective activation of hippocampal CB2Rs not only prevents Aβ-increased neuronal hyperexcitation, but also abolishes the established neuronal hyperexcitation, which underlies our recent findings that CB2Rs play a critical role in protection of hippocampal neurons against the Aβ-induced neuronal toxicity and degeneration. This novel finding suggests a potentially therapeutic strategy for the treatment of AD using CB2R agonists.
The Tailored Material Removal Distribution on Polyimide Membrane Can Be Obtained by Introducing Additional Electrodes

Reactive ion etching (RIE) is a promising material removal method for processing membrane diffractive optical elements and fabrication of meter-scale aperture optical substrates because of its high-efficiency parallel processing and low surface damage. However, the non-uniformity of the etching rate in the existing RIE technology will obviously reduce the machining accuracy of diffractive elements, deteriorate the diffraction efficiency and weaken the surface convergence rate of optical substrates. In the etching process of the polyimide (PI) membrane, additional electrodes were introduced for the first time to achieve the modulation of the plasma sheath properties on the same spatial surface, thus changing the etch rate distribution. Using the additional electrode, a periodic profile structure similar to the additional electrode was successfully processed on the surface of a 200-mm diameter PI membrane substrate by a single etching iteration. By combining etching experiments with plasma discharge simulations, it is demonstrated that additional electrodes can affect the material removal distribution, and the reasons for this are analyzed and discussed. This work demonstrates the feasibility of etching rate distribution modulation based on additional electrodes, and lays a foundation for realizing tailored material removal distribution and improving etching uniformity in the future.
Investigating the tension between persistence and well‐being in engineering doctoral programs

While studies examining graduate engineering student attrition have grown more prevalent, there is an incomplete understanding of the plight faced by persisting students. As mental health and well‐being crises emerge in graduate student populations, it is important to understand how students conceptualize their well‐being in relation to their decisions to persist or depart from their program.
Dirac metal to topological metal transition at a structural phase change in Au 2 Pb and prediction of Z 2 topology for the superconductor

Three-dimensionalDirac semimetals (DSMs) arematerials that have masslessDirac electrons and exhibit exotic physical properties. It has been suggested that structurally distorting a DSM can create a topological insulator but this has not yet been experimentally verified. Furthermore, Majorana fermions have been theoretically proposed to exist inmaterials that exhibit both superconductivity and topological surface states. Herewe showthat the cubic Laves phase Au2Pb has a bulk Dirac cone that is predicted to gap on cooling through a structural phase transition at 100 K. The low temperature phase can be assigned a Z(2) = -1 topological index, and this phase becomes superconducting below 1.2 K. These characteristics make Au2Pb a unique platform for studying the transition between bulk Dirac electrons and topological surface states as well as studying the interaction of superconductivity with topological surface states, combining many different properties of emergent materials-superconductivity, bulk Dirac electrons, and a topologically nontrivial Z(2) invariant.
Paclitaxel Protects against Isoproterenol-Induced Damage in Rat Myocardium: Its Heme-Oxygenase Mediated Role in Cardiovascular Research

(1) Background: In cardiovascular applications, paclitaxel inhibits smooth muscle cell proliferation and migration and significantly reduces the occurrence of restenosis and target lesion revascularization. However, the cellular effects of paclitaxel in the myocardium are not well understood; (2) Methods: Wistar rats were divided into four groups: control (CTRL), isoproterenol (ISO) treated (1 mg/kg) and two groups treated with paclitaxel (PAC), which was administrated (10 mg/kg/day) for 5 days by gavage/per os alone or in combination (ISO + PAC) 3 weeks after ISO treatment. Ventricular tissue was harvested 24 h later for measurements of heme oxygenase (HO-1), reduced glutathione (GSH), oxidized glutathione (GSSG), superoxide dismutase (SOD), NF-κB, TNF-α and myeloperoxidase (MPO); (3) Results: HO-1 protein concentration, HO-1 activity, SOD protein concentration and total glutathione significantly decreased in response to ISO treatment. When PAC was administered in conjunction with ISO, HO-1, SOD concentration and total glutathione were not different from control levels. MPO activity, NF-κB concentration and TNF-α protein concentration were significantly increased in the ISO-only group, while the levels of these molecules were restored when PAC was co-administered; (4) Conclusions: Oral administration of PAC can maintain the expression of important antioxidants, anti-inflammatory molecules, HO-1, SOD and GSH, and suppress the production of TNF-α, MPO and NF-κB, which are involved in myocardial damage. The principal component of this cellular defense seems to be the expression of HO-1.
Optimization and Validation of a Method to Determine Enolones and Vanillin Derivatives in Wines—Occurrence in Spanish Red Wines and Mistelles

Understanding the chemical nature of wine aroma demands accurate quantitative determinations of different odor-active compounds. Quantitative determinations of enolones (maltol, furaneol, homofuraneol, and sotolon) and vanillin derivatives (vanillin, methyl vanillate, ethyl vanillate, and acetovanillone) at low concentrations are complicated due to their high polarity. For this reason, this paper presents an improved and automated version for the accurate measure of these common trace wine polar compounds (enolones and vanillin derivatives). As a result, a faster and more user-friendly method with a reduction of organic solvents and resins was developed and validated. The optimization of some stages of the solid phase extraction (SPE) process, such as washing with an aqueous solution containing 1% NaHCO3 at pH 8, led to cleaner extracts and solved interference problems. Due to the polarity of these type of compounds, an optimization of the large volume injection was also carried out. Finally, a programmable temperature vaporization (PTV) quartz glass inlet liner without wool was used. The injector temperature was raised to 300 °C in addition to applying a pressure pulse of 180 kPa for 4 min. Matrix effects were solved by the use of adequate internal standards, such as ethyl maltol and 3′,4′-(methylenedioxy)acetophenone. Method figures of merit were highly satisfactory: good linearity (r2 > 0.98), precision (relative standard deviation, RSD < 10%), high recovery (RSD > 89%), and low detection limits (<0.7 μg/L). Enolones and vanillin derivatives are associated with wine aging. For this reason, the methodology was successfully applied to the quantification of these compounds in 16 Spanish red wines and 12 mistelles. Odor activity values (OAV) indicate that furaneol should be considered an aroma impact odorant in red wines and mistelles (OAV > 1) while homofuraneol and sotolon could also produce changes in their aroma perceptions (0.1 < OAV < 1).
Gamit! a beat for learning

This paper presents the results from a gamification platform developed by two Latin American universities from Mexico and Peru, with the aim to promote engagement and improve students' attitudes towards the learning process, as well as facilitate the professors' work. The methodological approach to this research was qualitative on the course Modeling of Movement in Engineering where students used the platform named Gamit! for five weeks. The study dimensions are attention, engagement, resilience, and usability to continue the previous research.
Influence of Cutting-Edge Microgeometry on Cutting Forces in High-Speed Milling of 7075 Aluminum Alloy

In the present study, the impact of cutting-edge microgeometry on the cutting forces in the finish milling of a 7075-aluminium alloy was analysed. The influence of selected values of the rounding radius of cutting edge, and the size of the margin width, on the cutting-force parameters was analysed. Experimental tests were carried out for different cross-sectional values of the cutting layer, changing the feed per tooth and radial infeed parameters. An analysis of the various statistical parameters of the force signal was performed. Experimental mathematical models of the relationship of the force parameters to the radius of the rounded cutting edge and the width of the margin were developed. The cutting forces were found to be most strongly influenced by the width of the margin and, to a minor extent, by the rounding radius of the cutting edge. It was proved that the effect of margin width is linear, and the effect of radius R is nonlinear and nonmonotonic. The minimum cutting force was shown to be for the radius of rounded cutting edge of about 15–20 micrometres. The proposed model is the basis for further work on innovative cutter geometries for aluminium-finishing milling.
Creatine in Sustainable Fish Aquaculture

Abstract Creatine is a popular ergogenic sport supplement used to improve exercise performance and muscle growth in athletes. Further, studies suggest protective effects of creatine in neurodegenerative diseases, type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis, fibromyalgia, aging and fatty liver disease in humans. Similarly, the versatility of creatine, as a supplement or feed additive, has been evaluated in different animal production systems, including terrestrial livestock, poultry and aquaculture fish species. Some of the observed effects are increased antioxidant activity and flesh quality, improved lipid homeostasis as well as enhanced overall productive performance. Despite creatine being synthesized endogenously, this capacity might be insufficient to adequately cover the creatine needs in fish fed diets formulated with ingredients devoid of this nutrient, notably plant protein feedstuffs. As aquaculture industry moves toward sustainability, removal of creatine-rich dietary ingredients, such as fishmeal, in aquafeeds will likely further increase in coming decades. Thus, under this scenario it might be necessary for dietary supplementation of creatine to support optimal fish productive performance and product quality. This review describes the current knowledge of creatine physiology and metabolism in fish, and highlights possible parallels with metabolism in livestock species, mammalian models and human as well as the benefits obtained from creatine supplementation.
Consumer Views and Experiences of Secondary-Care Services Following REFOCUS-PULSAR Staff Recovery-Oriented Practices Training

Background: The use of recovery-oriented practice (ROP) can be challenging to implement in mental health services. This qualitative sub-study of the Principles Unite Local Services Assisting Recovery (PULSAR) project explored how consumers perceive their recovery following community mental health staff undertaking specific ROP training. Methods: Using a qualitative participatory methodology, 21 consumers (aged 18–63 years) participated in one-on-one interviews. A thematic analysis was applied. Results: Four main themes were extracted: (1) connection, (2) supportive relationships, (3) a better life, and (4) barriers. Connections to community and professional staff were important to support consumers in their recovery journey. Many consumers were seeking and striving towards a better life that was personal and individual to each of them, and how they made meaning around the idea of a better life. Barriers to recovery primarily focused on a lack of choice. A minor theme of ‘uncertainty’ suggested that consumers struggled to identify what their recovered future might entail. Conclusion: Despite staff undertaking the ROP training, all participants struggled to identify language and aspects of recovery in their interaction with the service, suggesting a need for staff to promote open, collaborative conversations around recovery. A specifically targeted recovery resource might facilitate such conversation.
STUDY ON PV-PQ BUS TYPE SWITCHING LOGIC IN POWER FLOW COMPUTATION

A comprehensive investigation on bus PV-PQ type switching logic in power flow computation is carried out in this paper. Besides the power mismatches blow up, the frequent switching of some bus type is another kind of divergence to suffer. To remove this type of oscillation occurring on some buses in a power flow calculation, several complementary logics were used in references, but this kind of method may sometimes make the power flow converging to an unstable solution. Researches done by this paper show that failure in bus type identification may result in a kind of voltage instability corresponding to the limit induced bifurcation. Some numerical simulations on IEEE 118 bus test system and a practical power system have been carried out and the results support to explain this phenomenon. Based on a theoretical analysis, a set of inequality constraints describing stability conditions are defined as the necessary condition for a stable power flow solution. This paper gives an example to show that some wrong stability margins are obtained when an incorrect bus PV-PQ type switching logic is used in Continuation Power Flow computation for static voltage stability assessment.
NDT‐6D for color registration in agri‐robotic applications

Registration of point cloud data containing both depth and color information is critical for a variety of applications, including in‐field robotic plant manipulation, crop growth modeling, and autonomous navigation. However, current state‐of‐the‐art registration methods often fail in challenging agricultural field conditions due to factors such as occlusions, plant density, and variable illumination. To address these issues, we propose the NDT‐6D registration method, which is a color‐based variation of the Normal Distribution Transform (NDT) registration approach for point clouds. Our method computes correspondences between pointclouds using both geometric and color information and minimizes the distance between these correspondences using only the three‐dimensional (3D) geometric dimensions. We evaluate the method using the GRAPES3D data set collected with a commercial‐grade RGB‐D sensor mounted on a mobile platform in a vineyard. Results show that registration methods that only rely on depth information fail to provide quality registration for the tested data set. The proposed color‐based variation outperforms state‐of‐the‐art methods with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.1–1.6 cm for NDT‐6D compared with 1.1–2.3 cm for other color‐information‐based methods and 1.2–13.7 cm for noncolor‐information‐based methods. The proposed method is shown to be robust against noises using the TUM RGBD data set by artificially adding noise present in an outdoor scenario. The relative pose error (RPE) increased ~ $\unicode{x0007E}$ 14% for our method compared to an increase of ~ $\unicode{x0007E}$ 75% for the best‐performing registration method. The obtained average accuracy suggests that the NDT‐6D registration methods can be used for in‐field precision agriculture applications, for example, crop detection, size‐based maturity estimation, and growth modeling.
Association between the Japanese Diet and Coronary Artery Disease in Patients Undergoing Coronary Angiography

Several cohort studies have reported that the Japanese diet is associated with reduced cardiovascular disease mortality. However, the results were not always consistent, and most of those studies conducted dietary surveys around 1990. We investigated the association between the Japanese diet and coronary artery disease (CAD) in 802 patients undergoing coronary angiography. The Japanese diet score was defined as the sum of scores of the intakes of fish, soy products, vegetables, seaweed, fruits, and green tea. CAD was found in 511 patients, of whom 173 had myocardial infarction (MI). Intakes of fish, soy products, vegetables, seaweed, fruits, and green tea were lower in patients with CAD, especially in those with MI, than in those without CAD. As a result, the Japanese diet score was significantly lower in patients with CAD than in those without CAD (p < 0.001). To clarify the association between the Japanese diet and CAD, the 802 study patients were divided into three tertiles by the Japanese diet score. The proportion of CAD decreased with the Japanese diet score, reaching 72% in patients at T1 (lowest score), 63% at T2, and 55% at T3 (highest) (p < 0.05). The proportion of MI also decreased with the Japanese diet score, reaching 25% at T1, 24% at T2, and 15% at T3 (p < 0.05). In a multivariate analysis, compared with T1, the adjusted odds ratios for CAD and MI were 0.41 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.26–0.63) and 0.61 (95% CI: 0.38–0.99) for T3, respectively. Thus, the Japanese diet was found to be inversely associated with CAD in Japanese patients undergoing coronary angiography.